Louisa May Alcott

Life

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1832, the second of four daughters of Bronson Alcott, a teacher and Transcendentalist philosopher, and Abigail May. The family moved to Massachusetts, where Bronson’s friends included Emerson and Thoreau, and lived in and around Concord for most of Louisa’s life. Bronson’s schools and projects, including a short-lived utopian farm community called Fruitlands, repeatedly failed, and the family was poor. Louisa and her sisters worked as teachers, seamstresses and domestic servants from an early age.

She began publishing poems and stories in her teens and in the 1860s wrote sensational thrillers under the name A. M. Barnard, which paid well and which she did not acknowledge. During the Civil War she served as a nurse at a Union hospital in Georgetown, contracted typhoid and was treated with a mercury compound that damaged her health permanently. Hospital Sketches, based on her letters home, was her first real success.

Little Women was written in 1868 at a publisher’s request and made her financially secure for the first time. She followed it with a series of novels for young readers and supported her parents and her sisters’ families. She was active in the women’s suffrage movement and was the first woman registered to vote in Concord in a school committee election. She died in Boston in March 1888, two days after her father.

Literary significance

Alcott is remembered chiefly for Little Women, which has remained in print since 1868 and has been read and adapted around the world. Its portrait of four sisters, and of Jo March in particular, has been a model for fiction about girls’ ambitions ever since. The book’s frank attention to money and work set it apart from the moral tales it was commissioned to resemble.

The rediscovery of her pseudonymous thrillers in the twentieth century, along with her letters and journals, has produced a more complicated picture: a professional writer with a wide range who regarded her famous children’s books as a job and who wrote, in other modes, about rage, addiction and power.

Where to start

Little Women is the one Alcott title currently in this library and the right place to begin.