Little Men (1871) is the sequel to Little Women, and tells of Jo's life at Plumfield, where she runs a school for boys. Although the boys are often rowdy, Jo and her husband enjoy teaching them, along with their own two sons.

In Jo's Boys (1886), Alcott continues the adventures of the boys from Jo's school at Plumfield. Now that the boys have grown into men, they follow very different paths in life.

Nina Baym's Women's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (1978) provides a useful overview of trends in women's literature in the mid-nineteenth century. Baym considers 130 novels by forty-eight authors.

Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic The Secret Garden (1911) is the story of Mary, Colin, and Dickon, whose moody dispositions are lightened by the discovery of a secret garden that inspires their imaginations. As they restore the...