The novel follows the lives of four sisters-Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March-detailing their passage from childhood to womanhood, and is loosely based on the author and her three sisters. Little Women "has been read as a romance or as a quest, or both. It has been read as a family drama that validates virtue over wealth," but also "as a means of escaping that life by women who knew its gender constraints only too well." According to Sarah Elbert