“Somebody Else’s Universe”: Female Künstler Narratives in Alcott’s Little Women and Rowell’s Fangirl

Changing attitudes toward female artists and expanded access to publishing in the century and a half between Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl appear to position Rowell’s protagonist to avoid the fate of Alcott’s Jo, who gives up writing in favor of marriage. In fact, Rowell’s interweaving of literary apprenticeship and romance plot both reverses and replicates the structures that undermine Jo as an author. Focusing on the protagonists’ evolution from literary emulation to solo authorship, this article interrogates writing’s relationship to power in the contexts of education, family, and love.