Jo March and her professor husband run a school at Plumfield for a dozen boys and two girls, where the punishments are strange, the pillow-fights are lawful, and each child has a garden. Alcott wrote it in 1871 after her sister Anna's husband died and left two small nephews to be provided for. The chapter in which a boy is made to strike the teacher instead of being struck is the clearest statement of her method. Forty-one plates by painters including Albert Bierstadt and Winslow Homer, from campfire camps to boys fishing and homesteads, picture the outdoor world of Plumfield.
