Thank goodness, however, that Alcott did not live in the Age of the Memoir, that she spared us the unburdening of her deepest feelings and ambivalences, leaving nothing to our imaginations. She lives fully in us precisely because she left out so much in her fiction. It is by working through her sketches, her novels, a biography, her letters, trying to find the real person, the true spirit beyond the sentiment and moralizing, that the reader is able to claim Alcott as his own. Perhaps this is what a reader wants for himself: a handful of best characters to people his heart and mind, someone who is created fully human and given away, a character with strength and wisdom and sufferings like our own, but a little larger than our own selves. Louisa May Alcott is her own great character -- her best gift to us.

Jane Hamilton on the creator of Little Women, in Salon