Little Women is a novel by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) written between 1868 and 1869 in Concord, Massachusetts and Boston. The novel follows the lives of four sisters - Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March - detailing their passage from childhood to womanhood, and is loosely based on the author and her three sisters. The first volume, Little Women, was an immediate commercial and critical success, prompting the composition of the book's second volume, entitled Good Wives, which was also successful. Both books were eventually united in a single volume entitled Little Women in 1880. Alcott followed Little Women with two sequels, also featuring the March sisters: Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Little Women was a fiction novel for girls that veered from the normal writings for children, especially girls, at the time. The novel had three major themes: " domesticity, work, and true love, all of them interdependent and each necessary to the achievement of its heroine's individual identity.