Jo and Laurie were never written like a romance, yet when the proposal came, readers mourned the love story they suddenly realized they wanted. Jo March’s friendship with Laurie is one of the most beloved, and debated, dynamics in Little Women. With him, she is most herself: tumbling into mischief, staging attic plays, running wild. He is not a suitor but a co-conspirator, folded into the March household as both fifth sibling and confidant.
Alcott gives them no stolen glances, only the intimacy of companions of the mind and spirit. Laurie’s proposal arrives in Part Two, Chapter 35, “Heartache”, Laurie confesses with passion:
“I’ve loved you ever since I’ve known you, Jo. Couldn’t help it, you’ve been so good to me. I’ve tried to show it but you wouldn’t let me. Now, I am going to make you hear and give me an answer. I worked hard to please you and I gave up billiards and everything you didn’t like and waited and never complained for I hoped you would love me — though I am not half good for it.”
“Yes you are! You are a great deal too good for me and I am so grateful to you and so proud and fond of you. I don’t see why I can’t love you as you want me to — I’ve tried! But I can’t change the feeling and it would be a lie to say I do when I don’t.”
There is no hesitation. For Jo, friendship and love are not interchangeable, and she refuses to collapse them.
Why Not Laurie?
Laurie was the “right” match by every standard: wealthy, kind, adored by the family, and Jo’s dearest friend. But that was the point. Marriage in the 19th century wasn’t built solely on affection; it meant children, household labor, and the end of Jo’s self-determination.
In chapter 43, Jo tells Beth:
“An old maid — that’s what I’m meant to be. A literary spinster with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty years hence, a morsel of fame perhaps.
For Jo—and for Alcott—marriage required the absorption of a woman’s identity into her husband’s. What terrified Jo was not solitude but loss of self.
After Part One’s runaway success, readers begged Alcott for more. Many assumed “more” meant Jo and Laurie would marry and were stunned when Part Two revealed otherwise. Alcott herself wrote she was “beset” by letters, and her publisher insisted Jo must marry. Out of defiance, she paired her with Professor Bhaer: older, German, deliberately unconventional. “A funny match,” she called it.
Why not Laurie? Because Alcott refused to collapse Jo into a conventional romance arc. In a literary world where women were wives, widows, or spinsters, Jo becomes something else: a heroine whose fidelity is to herself. Elaine Showalter calls her “the first American tomboy heroine who grows into something more than a marriage plot” (A Jury of Her Peers, 2009).
Alcott’s narrative genius is that the refusal hurts. Readers mourn what might have been. Laurie and Jo were not set up as lovers, but once the possibility is raised, we want it, and Alcott denies it. This wound is why the story lingers. It denies tidy satisfaction in order to honor Jo’s truth. Alcott shows that a woman could be fulfilled not through romantic resolution but through selfhood, work, imagination, and integrity.
