Case e stanze per scrivere. Da Louisa May Alcott a Jo March di Piccole donne

Throughout her life, Louisa May Alcott lived in many different places, moving between the family home in Concord (MA) and numerous rooms in boarding houses and hotels. Alcott's preference for temporary accommodations is representative of a new need for personal space that the Victorian home fails to satisfy, as emerges from a comparison with the working routine (and literary worlds) of other literary domestics of nineteenth-century America. This spatial relationship with privacy is exemplified by the writer's study, a physical and symbolic place – linked to her status in the literary field – which never truly materializes. In Little Women, Jo's desire for her own space takes shape in various rooms (attic, bedroom, boarding house's loft) where she pursues writing, before abandoning her artistic career for marriage (though not forever, as revealed by the ghostly appearance of the author's study in Jo's Boys).