Little Women is a coming-of-age novel written by American novelist Louisa May Alcott, originally published in two volumes, in 1868 and 1869. The story follows the lives of the four March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—and details their passage from childhood to womanhood. Loosely based on the lives of the author and her three sisters, it is classified as an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical novel.

Little Women was an immediate commercial and critical success, and readers were eager for more about the characters. Alcott quickly completed a second volume (titled Good Wives in the United Kingdom, though the name originated with the publisher and not Alcott). It was also met with success. The two volumes were issued in 1880 as a single novel titled Little Women. Alcott subsequently wrote two sequels to her popular work, both also featuring the March sisters: Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886).

The novel has been said to address three major themes: "domesticity, work, and true love, all of them interdependent and each necessary to the achievement of its heroine's individual identity." According to Sarah Elbert, Alcott created a new form of literature, one that took elements from romantic children's fiction and combined it with others from sentimental novels, resulting in a totally new genre. Elbert argues that within Little Women can be found the first vision of the "All-American girl" and that her various aspects are embodied in the differing March sisters.

The book has been translated into numerous languages, frequently adapted for stage and screen.

In 1868, Alcott's publisher, Thomas Niles, recommended that she write a novel about girls that would have widespread appeal. Alcott resisted, preferring to publish a collection of short stories, instead. Niles pressed her to write the girls' book first, however, and he was aided by her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, who also urged her to do so. Louisa confided to a friend, "I could not write a girls' story knowing little about any but my sisters and always preferring boys".

In May 1868, Alcott wrote in her journal: "Niles, partner of Roberts, asked me to write a girl's book. I said I'd try." Alcott set her novel in an imaginary Orchard House modeled on her residence of the same name, where she wrote the novel. She, later, recalled that she did not think she could write a successful book for girls and did not enjoy writing it. "I plod away," she wrote in her diary, "although, I don't enjoy this sort of things."

By June, Alcott had sent the first dozen chapters to Niles, and both agreed that they were dull. But Niles's niece, Lillie Almy, read them and said she enjoyed them. The completed manuscript was shown to several girls who agreed it was "splendid." Alcott wrote, "they are the best critics, so, I should definitely be satisfied." She wrote Little Women "in record time for money", but the book's immediate success surprised both her and her publisher.

Little Women was a novel that took part in the realism literary movement of the mid to late 1800s. This movement focused on depicting everyday life in a natural way and is seen through Alcott’s portrayal of the real aspects of women’s lives through the ways the characters interact with one another, work, and play. Gregory Eiselein and Anne Phillips write, “Fresh, lively, and distinctly American, the novel offered singular depictions of young women and men playing, talking, squabbling, dreaming, creating, learning, and coming of age in ways that embodied and resisted its era and region and immediately generated passionate responses.” Readers are able to see and experience the joys and sorrows of the March family and come to understand what it meant to be a woman in the nineteenth century.