Louisa May Alcott, Ethel Turner, and Some Little Women Down Under

Joel Myerson examines how Little Women influenced the late nineteenth-century Australian writer Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians. Little known to readers in the United States, Seven Little Australians, originally published in 1894, remains one of Australia’s most popular works, a novel that has sold over two million copies in the last 125 years. Myerson compares and contrasts Seven Little Australians and Little Women and the lives of Ethel Turner and Louisa May Alcott —"one a colonial writer confronting colonialism and the other a post-colonial writer reinforcing personal values after the Civil War.” In his examination, Myerson “suggest[s] reasons why the two authors ultimately had different approaches to their subjects.”