Little Women

Four sisters get through a Massachusetts winter without much money and without their father, who is away serving as a Union Army chaplain. Meg is vain about her hands and her poverty, Jo wants to be a writer and is furious about being a girl, Beth is shy and stays home, Amy is vain about everything else. Next door is Laurie, the lonely grandson of a rich old man, who becomes something between a brother and a suitor to all four of them at once.

The book earns its two-volume length. Beth catches scarlet fever nursing a poor family the Marches help, survives the first bout, and never gets her strength back — years later the family simply accepts, without a crisis scene, that she is dying. Jo turns down Laurie's proposal because she has only ever loved him as a brother, sells pulpy stories to keep the family afloat, and marries Professor Bhaer, a poor, older German language teacher who talks her out of writing them. Amy burns Jo's manuscript in a fight and nearly drowns falling through river ice the next day; Laurie pulls her out while Jo runs for a rail, and it takes nearly losing her before Jo will forgive her.

It lands for anyone who wants a marriage plot with real housework and real money problems inside it — the domestic detail is not filler, it's the argument. The honest reservation is the two halves don't match: the first volume, published in 1868, is funnier and rougher than the second, which arrived about six months later already organized around getting everyone married off, and it can read as a different, more moralizing book from the one that opened it.