‘We Really Lived Most of It’: The Trouble with Autobiography

The child in literature is often given value by an appeal to biography, or to a construction of the ‘real child’, that cannot be sustained. This chapter questions biographical readings of Alcott’s works on childhood, in which the experiences of Alcott and her sisters are invoked by critics to add value to her textual portrayals of children, primarily in Little Women. West analyzes the ongoing critical dialogue on this issue to see if and how these biographical readings have the potential to limit and/or damage readings of the child in Alcott’s further works. This chapter concludes by considering the child in the archive, looking at how an appeal to the claimed origin of the archives might inform, or trouble, a reading of Alcott’s texts.