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Girl readers—elementary and college age—formed "Little Women Clubs." Each club consisted of four girls who called themselves Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. (Delamar 226)

Louisa May Alcott is included as a character card in The Game of Authors. (Reisen 302)

Olive Leaf later changed to The Portfolio.

Eiselein and Phillips, p. 5

Lede

Louisa May Alcott (/ˈɔːlkət, -kɒt/; November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet best known for writing the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871), and Jo's Boys (1886). Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott, she grew up among many well-known intellectuals of the day, including Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Encouraged by her family, Alcott began writing from an early age.

Alcott's family suffered from financial difficulties, and while she took on various jobs to help support the family from an early age, she also sought to earn money by writing. She began to achieve critical success for her writing in the 1860s with the publication of Hospital Sketches, a book based on her service as a nurse in the American Civil War. Early in her career, she sometimes used pen names such as A. M. Barnard, under which she wrote lurid short stories and sensation novels for adults. Little Women was one of her first successful novels and has been adapted for film and television. It is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters, Abigail May Alcott Nieriker, Elizabeth Sewall Alcott, and Anna Alcott Pratt.

Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist and remained unmarried throughout her life. She also spent her life active in reform movements such as temperance and women's suffrage. During the last eight years of her life she raised the daughter of her deceased sister. She died from a stroke in Boston on March 6, 1888, two days after her father's death. Alcott has been the subject of numerous biographies, a documentary, and novels, and has influenced other writers and public figures.

Early life

Birth and early childhood--LIVE

Louisa May Alcott at age 20

Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832, in Germantown, now part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her parents were transcendentalist and educator Amos Bronson Alcott and social worker Abigail "Abba" May. She was the second of four daughters, with Anna as the oldest and Elizabeth and May as the youngest. Louisa May Alcott was named after Abba's sister, Louisa May Greele, who had died four years prior. After Alcott's birth, Bronson kept a record of her development, noting her strong will, which she inherited from her mother's May side of the family.

Alcott kept a journal at as early as six-years-old. Bronson and Abba often read it and left short messages for her on her pillow, encouraging her to be well-behaved. Alcott often felt like she was not a well-behaved child. Once when Alcott was playing near Frog Pond, she fell in and nearly drowned, but she was rescued by an eight-year-old African-American boy who lived nearby. As a child, Alcott was a tomboy who preferred boys' games. She wanted to play football with the boys at school but was not allowed to, and preferred to be friends with boys or other tomboys.

The family moved to Boston in September 1834, where Alcott's father established the experimental Temple School and met with other transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Bronson participated in child-care but often failed to provide income, creating conflict in the family. He taught morals and improvement at home and in the school, while Abba emphasized imagination and supported Alcott's writing at home. Bronson occasionally brought Alcott and her older sister Anna to the school and used them as examples in his moral lessons. Alcott was often tended by her father's friend Elizabeth Peabody.

Hosmer Cottage--LIVE

External videos
Tour of Orchard House, June 19, 2017, C-SPAN

In April of 1840, after several setbacks with Temple School and a brief stay in Scituate, Massachusetts, the Alcotts moved to Hosmer Cottage in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson, who had convinced Bronson to move his family to Concord, paid the Alcotts' rent. The family was often in need of financial help. While living there, Alcott and her sisters befriended the Hosmer, Emerson, and Channing children who lived nearby. The Hosmer and Alcott children put on plays of fairy tales and often included other children. Alcott and Anna attended the Concord Academy, a school run by John and Henry Thoreau.

In October 1842 Bronson brought a group of acquaintances from a five-month-long tour in England to live in Hosmer Cottage, among them Charles Lane. The children's education was undertaken by Lane, who implemented a schedule that allowed little time for play. Young Alcott disliked Lane, who tried to exact obedience from her, and found the new living arrangements difficult. Abba, who also struggled with the living arrangements, took Louisa as well as Lane's son, William, to Boston for a short stay.

Fruitlands--LIVE

In 1843 the Alcotts moved to Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts, a utopian community started by Alcott's father and Charles Lane. Alcott later described these early years in a satirical newspaper sketch entitled "Transcendental Wild Oats." (Doyle 10) The sketch was reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), which relates the family's experiment in "plain living and high thinking" at Fruitlands. During the months at Fruitlands, Alcott found happiness in writing poetry about her family, elves, and spirits. She enjoyed playing with William Lane and often put on fairy tale plays or performances of Dickens's stories. Alcott disliked school in the community. As the demise of Fruitlands approached, the Alcotts discussed whether or not the family should separate. Alcott recorded this in her journal and expressed her unhappiness should they separate. During Bronson's nervous breakdown following the collapse of Fruitlands, Alcott decided to support her mother financially and emotionally.

Hillside--LIVE

After the collapse of Fruitlands in early 1844, the family rented rooms in Still River, where Alcott attended public school and wrote and directed plays that her sisters and friends performed. In April 1845 the family used Abba's inheritance to buy a home in Concord they called Hillside. (Saxton 158) Here, Alcott and her sister Anna attended a school run by John Hosmer after a period of home education. The family lived close to the Emersons, and Alcott was granted open access to the Emerson library. In the summer of 1848 Alcott opened a school of twenty students in a barn near Hillside. Her students consisted of the Emerson, Channing, and Alcott children. (Delamar 31; Reisen 103-105; Stern 2000 32) Alcott and Anna continued acting in plays written by Alcott herself. While Anna preferred portraying calm characters, Louisa preferred the roles of villians, knights, and sorcerers. These plays later inspired Alcott's Comic Tragedies (1893). Alcott described the family's time at Concord as the "happiest of her life." The family struggled without income beyond the girls' sewing and teaching. Eventually, some friends arranged a job for Abba and three years after moving into Hillside, the family moved to Boston. Hillside was sold to Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1852.

Education

Alcott was primarily educated by her father, who established a strict schedule and believed in "the sweetness of self-denial." When Louisa was still too young to attend school, Bronson taught her the alphabet by forming the letter shapes with his body and having her repeat their names. For a time she was educated by Sophia Foord, whom she would later eulogize. She was also instructed in biology and Native American history by Thoreau, who was a naturalist, while Emerson mentored her in literature. Alcott had a particular fondness for Thoreau and Emerson; as a young girl, they were both "sources of romantic fantasies for her." Her favorite authors included Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sir Walter Scott, Fredericka Bremer, Thomas Carlyle, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Goethe, John Milton, Friedrich Schiller, and Germaine de Staele.

Teenage years--LIVE

When in 1848 the Alcott family moved to South End, Boston, (Reisen 108) poverty made it necessary for Alcott to go to work at an early age as a teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic helper, and laundress. ("Conversation"; Norwood; Delamar 37; Reisen 120; Doyle 11) Alcott disliked teaching. (Saxton 179, 182) Her sisters also supported the family by working as seamstresses, while their mother took on social work among the Irish immigrants. Only the youngest, Abigail, was able to attend public school. Due to all of these pressures, writing became a creative and emotional outlet for Alcott. In 1849 she created a family newspaper, the Olive Leaf, named after the local Olive Branch. Alcott's newspaper included stories, poems, articles, and housekeeping advice. (Reisen 111-112; Delamar 34) She also wrote her first novel, The Inheritance, which was published posthumously. (Shealy xx; Golden 8) Alcott, who was driven in life not to be poor, is quoted as saying, "I wish I was rich, I was good, and we were all a happy family this day." At one point, eighteen-year-old Alcott considered selling her hair for money. (Delamar 36)

Life in Dedham--LIVE

Tired of helping poor immigrants, Abba opened an "intelligence office" to help the destitute find employment. (Reisen 114-115; Doyle 10-11) When James Richardson came to Abba in the winter of 1851 seeking a companion for his frail sister who could also help out with some light housekeeping, Alcott volunteered to serve in the house filled with books, music, artwork, and good company on Highland Avenue. Alcott may have imagined the experience as something akin to being a heroine in a Gothic novel, as Richardson described their home in a letter as stately but decrepit.

Richardson's sister, Elizabeth, was 40 years old and suffered from neuralgia. She was shy and did not seem to have much use for Alcott. Instead, Richardson spent hours reading her poetry and treating her like his confidant and companion, sharing his personal thoughts and feelings with her. Alcott reminded Richardson that she was supposed to be Elizabeth's companion, not his, and she was tired of listening to his "philosophical, metaphysical, and sentimental rubbish." He responded by assigning her more laborious duties, including chopping wood, scrubbing the floors, shoveling snow, drawing water from the well, washing dishes, and blacking Richardson's boots. (Delamar 36; Stern 1988 255)

Alcott quit after seven weeks, when neither of the two girls her mother sent to replace her decided to take the job. As she walked from Richardson's home to Dedham station, she opened the envelope he handed her with her pay. According to Alcott family tradition, she was so unsatisfied with the four dollars she found inside that she mailed the money back to him in contempt. It is also thought that Bronson could have returned the money himself and rebuked Richardson. (Delamar 36) Alcott later wrote a slightly fictionalized account of her time in Dedham entitled How I went into service, which she submitted to Boston publisher James T. Fields. He rejected the piece, telling Alcott that she had no future as a writer.

Early adulthood--LIVE

The 1850s were hard times for the Alcotts. In September 1851 Alcott's poem "Sunlight" appeared in Peterson's Magazine, making it Alcott's first publication, though it appeared under the pen name Flora Fairchild. (Shealy xx; Golden 8) In 1854 Louisa found solace at The Boston Theatre, where she was given a pass to attend without pay. (Reisen 137) She published her first book, Flower Fables, in 1854; the book was a selection of stories originally written for Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Reisen 126) Lidian Emerson had read the stories and encouraged Alcott to publish them. (Stern 2000 32) Alcott hoped to eventually shift her writing "from fairies and fables to men and realities". (Delamar 41) Alcott also wrote The Rival Prima Donnas, a play adaptation of her story with the same title. (Reisen 136) She later burned the play due to a quarrel between the actresses over who would play what role. (HAVEN'T COME ACROSS THIS YET)

In 1855 the Alcotts moved to Walpole, New Hampshire, (Saxton 202) where Alcott and Anna participated in the Walpole Amateur Dramatic Company. Alcott was praised for her "superior histrionic ability". (Reisen 128) At the end of the theater season, Alcott, encouraged by the success of Flower Fables, began writing Christmas Elves, a collection of Christmas stories illustrated by May Alcott. In November Alcott traveled to Boston and attempted to publish the collection while living with a relative. November was too late in the year to publish Christmas books and Alcott was unable to publish The Christmas Elves. (Reisen 129; Delamar 42-43) She then wrote and published "The Sisters' Trial", a story about four women who were based on the Alcott sisters. It was published in The Saturday Evening Gazette under a pseudonym. (Delamar 42-43; Reisen 133)

Alcott returned to Walpole in mid-1856 to find her sister Elizabeth ill with scarlet fever. Louisa helped nurse Elizabeth, and when she was not nursing helped with the housekeeping and wrote. (Reisen 133-134; Saxton 208) Alcott prepared to publish Beach Bubbles that year, but the book was rejected. (Reisen 133) By the end of the year she was writing for the Olive Branch, the Ladies Enterprise, The Saturday Evening Gazette, and the Sunday News. (Reisen 134) Alcott again lived in Boston for a time, where she met Julia Ward Howe and Frank Sanborn. (Reisen 135) In the summer of 1857 Alcott and Anna rejoined the Walpole Amateur Dramatic Company and sought to entertain Elizabeth with stories about their acting. (Reisen 140) The family later visited Swampscott in an effort to improve Elizabeth's ill health, but it remained unchanged. (Reisen 140; Saxton 212)

The family moved back to Concord in September 1857, where the Alcotts rented and lived with friends while Bronson repaired Orchard House. (Reisen 145-146; Saxton 214) During that time, the two oldest Alcott sisters organized the Concord Dramatic Union. (Reisen 142) Elizabeth died on March 14, 1858, (Doyle 12--says 1858) and three weeks after her death Anna became engaged to John Pratt, a man she met in the Concord Dramatic Union. (Reisen 142, 144) Alcott experienced depression and considered Elizabeth's death and Anna's engagement catalysts to breaking up their sisterhood. (Saxton 217, 219) When the family moved into Orchard House in July 1858, Alcott again returned to Boston to find work. Unable to find work and filled with despair, Alcott contemplated suicide by drowning, but decided to "take Fate by the throat and shake a living out of her." (Reisen 147-149; Saxton 227) Alcott had read The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell the year before and found many parallels between Charlotte Brontë's life and her own, which inspired her. Alcott eventually received an offer to work as a governess for invalid Alice Lovering, which she accepted. (Reisen 149, Saxton 228)

Literary success

Hospital Sketches--LIVE

As an adult, Alcott was an abolitionist, temperance advocate, and feminist. In 1860, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly. When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, Alcott wanted to enlist in the Union army but could not because she was a woman. Instead, she sewed uniforms and waited until she reached the minimum age for army nurses at thirty years old. Soon after turning thirty in 1862, Alcott applied to the U. S. Sanitary Commission, run by Dorothea Dix, and on December 11 was assigned to work in the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, Washington, D. C. Conditions in the hospital were poor, with over-crowded and filthy quarters, bad meat for meals, and insufficient ventilation. Alcott's duties included cleaning wounds, feeding the men, assisting with amputations, and later assigning the men to their wards. She also entertained the wounded men by reading aloud and putting on skits. She served as a nurse for six weeks in 1862–1863. She intended to serve three months as a nurse, but contracted typhoid fever and became critically ill partway through her service. In late January Bronson traveled to the hospital and took Alcott to Concord to recover.

The letters Alcott wrote while serving as a nurse were revised and published in the Boston anti-slavery paper Commonwealth and collected as Hospital Sketches (1863, republished with additions in 1869). (Reisen 181; Stern 2000 32) Alcott wrote about the mismanagement of hospitals, the indifference and callousness of some of the surgeons she encountered, and her passion for seeing the war firsthand. Her main character, Tribulation Periwinkle, shows a passage from innocence to maturity and is a "serious and eloquent witness". The stories brought her first critical recognition for her observations and humor, and their popularity surprised Alcott. With the popularity of Hospital Sketches, Alcott began publishing versions of some of her letters from a trip she took the year before, but she felt ashamed of them and stopped. (Saxton 265)

Moods--LIVE

Soon after the success of Hospital Sketches, Alcott published her novel Moods (1864), based on her own experience with and stance on "woman's right to selfhood." Alcott struggled to find a publisher because the novel was long. After abridgments, Moods was published and popular, but not as much as Alcott had hoped for. The plot follows a young woman named Sylvia Yule who, through a misunderstanding, marries the friend of the man she loves. When she realizes she cannot offer love to both men, she leaves to live with her father and eventually dies as punishment for her hasty actions. Later, while Alcott was touring Europe in 1870, she was displeased to find out that her publisher released a new edition without her approval.

Little Women books

Little Women and Good Wives--LIVE

Alcott began editing the children's magazine Merry's Museum to help pay off family debts incurred while Alcott toured Europe as the companion of wealthy invalid Anna Weld in 1865-66. Though Alcott disliked editing the magazine, she became its main editor in 1867. Around the same time, Alcott's publisher, Thomas Niles, asked her to write a book especially for girls, though both predicted the book might not sell well. Alcott set to work on her semi-autobiographical novel Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868), completing it in two months after writing for several hours a day.

In Little Women, Alcott based the heroine Jo on herself. (Reisen 2, 4) Alcott developed a close relationship with the young Polish revolutionary Ladislas "Laddie" Wisniewski during her European tour with Weld. She detailed a romance between herself and Wisniewski in her journal but later took it out. Alcott identified Wisniewski as one of the models for the character Laurie in Little Women. Her other characters have parallels with people from Alcott's life—from Beth's death mirroring Elizabeth's to Jo's rivalry with Amy mirroring Alcott's own rivalry with her sister May.

Little Women was well-received, with critics and audiences finding it to be a fresh, natural representation of daily life suitable for many age groups. An Eclectic Magazine reviewer called it "the very best of books to reach the hearts of the young of any age from six to sixty". With the success of Little Women, Alcott shied away from public attention and would sometimes act as a servant when fans came to her house. Niles asked Alcott to write a second part. Also known as Good Wives (1869), it follows the March sisters into adulthood and marriage.

Little Men and Jo's Boys--LIVE

In 1870 Alcott joined May and a friend on a European tour. Alcott wrote little while in Europe, instead preferring to rest, and rumors began to spread that she had died from diphtheria. Later, Alcott began writing Little Men while in Europe after finding out that her brother-in-law, John Pratt, had died. Alcott was driven to write the book to provide financial support for Anna and her two sons, though Pratt left them money when he died. After she left Europe, the book was released the day she arrived in Bostone. Little Men details life at the Plumfield School that Jo and Professor Bhaer have opened, which is an idealized version of Fruitlands. Jo and Professor Bhaer offer discipline and kindness to the boys and girls at Plumfield. While the character Daisy is based on Anna, Dan and Nan have parallels with Alcott.

Alcott took seven years to complete Jo's Boys (1886), her sequel to Little Men. She began the book in 1879 but discontinued it after her sister May's death in December. Alcott resumed work on the novel in 1882 after Mary Mapes Dodge of St. Nicholas asked for a new serial. In the book, the children from Little Men are grown up and building their lives, while Jo reflects on her life choices. Alcott apologized in the preface for what she felt was low-quality writing, the result of multiple interruptions in its composition; some reviewers considered the plot "haphazard". Jo's Boys (1886) completed the "March Family Saga", Alcott's best-known books.

An Old-Fashioned Girl

Following the publication of Good Wives, Niles requested another book from Alcott, which she wrote while experiencing an episode of poor health. The novel follows fourteen-year-old Polly, who teaches her wealthy cousins how to work and live simply. (Reisen 223) An Old-Fashioned Girl (1869) nearly reached the same success rate as Little Women.

Work: A Story of Experience--LIVE

Alcott's novel Work: A Story of Experience (1873) is semi-autobiographical and Alcott's last adult novel. The novel's young heroine, Christie Devon, strikes out on her own and takes various jobs to support herself. She befriends a destitute woman, and they comfort each other in times of despair. Christie falls in love with a man who is based on Thoreau. Shortly after they marry, he dies in the American Civil War, and Christie is left to be a single mother. Though Work received positive contemporary reviews, Alcott felt unsatisfied with the finished product because she felt that interruptions during the writing process weakened its quality.

Later years

NOTABLE? Alcott's literary acquaintances included Mary Mapes Dodge, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Helen Hunt Jackson, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Celia Thaxter, and Maria Porter. (Delamar 119, 121)

Lulu Nieriker--LIVE

In 1877 Alcott nursed Abba, who was dying. Alcott also became ill and close to dying, so the two women moved in with Anna, who had recently purchased Thoreau's house with Alcott's financial support. After Abba's death in November, Alcott and Bronson permanently moved into Anna's house. Having had a strained relationship with her father in the past, Alcott found solace through their shared grief. Alcott's sister May was living in London at the time and married Ernest Nieriker a few months later. May became pregnant and was due to deliver her child near the end of 1879. Though Alcott wanted to travel to Paris to see May in time for the delivery, she decided against it because her health was poor. On December 29 May died from complications developed after childbirth, and in September 1880 Alcott assumed the care of her niece, Lulu, who was named after her. During the grief that followed May's death, Alcott and her father Bronson coped by writing poetry. Alcott sometimes hired a nanny when her poor health made it difficult to care for Lulu. While raising Lulu, Alcott published little. When Bronson suffered a stroke in 1882, Alcott became his caretaker. Overwhelmed with taking care of her father and her niece, she alternated between living in Concord and living in Boston. In June 1884 Alcott sold Orchard House, which the family was no longer living in.

Decline and death--LIVE

Alcott suffered from chronic health problems in her later years, including vertigo, dyspepsia, headaches, fatigue, and pain in the limbs, diagnosed as neuralgia in her lifetime. When conventional medicines did not alleviate her pain, she tried mind-cure treatments, homeopathy, hypnotism, and Christian Science. Her ill health has been attributed to mercury poisoning, morphine intake, intestinal cancer, or meningitis. Alcott herself cited mercury poisoning as the cause of her sickness. When she contracted typhoid fever during her American Civil War service, she was treated with calomel, which is a compound containing mercury. Dr. Norbert Hirschhorn and Dr. Ian Greaves suggest that Alcott's chronic health problems may have been associated with an autoimmune disease such as systemic lupus erythematosus, possibly because mercury exposure compromised her immune system. An 1870 portrait of Alcott shows her cheeks to be flushed, perhaps with the butterfly rash that is often characteristic of lupus. The suggested diagnosis, based on Alcott's journal entries, cannot be proved.

As Alcott's health declined, she often lived at Dunreath Place, a convalescent home run by Dr. Rhoda Lawrence for which Alcott had provided financial support in the past. Eventually a doctor advised Alcott to stop writing in order to preserve her health. In 1887 Alcott legally adopted Anna's son, John Pratt, as her heir, then created a will that left her money to her remaining family. Alcott visited Bronson at his deathbed on March 1, 1888, and expressed the wish that she could join him in death. On March 3, the day before her father died, she suffered a stroke and went unconscious, in which state she remained until her death on March 6, 1888. She was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, near Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, on a hillside now known as Authors' Ridge. Her niece Lulu was eight years old when Alcott died and was cared for by Anna Alcott Pratt before reuniting with her father in Europe.

Romantic life and spinsterhood (Adriana)

She explained her spinsterhood in an interview with Louise Chandler Moulton, saying "I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man's soul put by some freak of nature into a woman's body.... because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.”

Social efforts

Abolition--LIVE

When Alcott was young, her family served as station masters on the Underground Railroad and housed fugitive slaves. Alcott herself was unable to dictate when she first became an abolitionist, suggesting that she became an abolitionist either when William Lloyd Garrison was attacked or when an eight-year-old African-American boy saved her from drowning in Frog Pond. Both events occurred when Alcott was a child. Alcott formed her abolitionist ideas, in part, from listening to conversations between her father and uncle Sam May or between her father and Emerson. She was also inspired by the abolitionism of Rev. Theodore Parker, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, and William Lloyd Garrison, with whom she was acquainted while living in Boston as an adult. Alcott also knew Frederick Douglass in adulthood. When John Brown was executed on December 2, 1859, for his involvement in anti-slavery, Alcott described it as "the execution of Saint John the Just". Alcott attended several abolitionist rallies, including a rally at Tremont Temple that advocated for Thomas Simm's freedom. Alcott also believed in the full integration of African-Americans into society.

Women's rights--LIVE

In 1877, Alcott helped found the Women's Educational and Industrial Union in Boston. Alcott read and admired the Declaration of Sentiments published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights, advocated for women's suffrage, and became the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts in a school board election on March 9, 1879. (Delamar 125; Matteson in Eiselein and Phillips 35) As an adult she attended several suffragist conventions and worked to demonstrate "Women's Right to Labor". Alcott attended the Woman's Congress in 1875 and became a member of the National Congress of the Women of the United States. She gave speeches advocating women's rights and eventually convinced her publisher Thomas Niles to publish suffragist writings. Along with Elizabeth Stoddard, Rebecca Harding Davis, Anne Moncure Crane, and others, Alcott was part of a group of female authors during the Gilded Age who addressed women's issues in a modern and candid manner. Their works were, as one newspaper columnist of the period commented, "among the decided 'signs of the times'". Between 1874 and 1887 many of Alcott's works, published in the Woman's Journal, discussed women's suffrage. (Thomas in Eiselein and Phillips 42) Her essay "Happy Women" argued that women did not need to marry.

ADDED:

Stern 1978; Porter; Sneller

..., later recounting it in "My Girls". After Abba's death, Alcott committed to following her mother's example by actively advocating for women's suffrage. She encouraged other Concord women to vote and was disappointed when few followed her urging. Alcott's publications in the journal discussed education, attire, and behavior for females. She advocated for dress and diet reform as well as for women to receive college education. After her death, Alcott was memorialized during a suffragist meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio. Alcott also helped found Concord's first Temperance Society. She joined Sorosis, where members discussed health and dress reform for women. She often signed her letters with "Yours for reform of all kinds".

Genres and style

Sensation and adult fiction

Alcott preferred writing sensation stories and novels more than domestic fiction, confiding in her journal, "I fancy 'lurid' things". ("Alcott and Woolf") They were influenced by the works of other writers such as Goethe, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The stories follow themes of incest, murder, suicide, psychology, secret identities, and sensuality. Her characters are often involved in opium experimentation or mind control and sometimes experience insanity, with males and females contending for dominance. The female characters push back against the Cult of Domesticity and explore its counter ideals, Real Womanhood. Important to Alcott's income because they paid well, these sensation stories were published in The Flag of Our Union, Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner, and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.

Alcott's thrillers were usually published anonymously or with the psuedonym A. M. Barnard. J. R. Elliott of The Flag repeatedly asked Alcott to contribute pieces under her own name, but she continued using pseudonyms. Alcott scholar Leona Rostenberg suggests that Alcott published these stories under pseudonyms in order to preserve her reputation as an author of realistic and juvenile fiction. Researching for his dissertation in 2021, doctorate candidate Max Chapnick discovered a possible new pseudonym, E. H. Gould. (Mello-Klein; Chapnick; Creamer) Chapnick found a story referenced in Alcott's personal records in the Olive Branch, published under the name E.H. Gould. (Mello-Klein) While Chapnick is uncertain if the pseudonym conclusively belongs to Alcott, (Chapnick) other stories he found include references to people and places in Alcott's life. (Creamer)

American studies professor Catherine Ross Nickerson credits Alcott with creating one of the earliest works of detective fiction in American literature—preceded only by Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and his other Auguste Dupin stories—with her 1865 thriller "V.V., or Plots and Counterplots." The story, which Alcott published anonymously, concerns a Scottish aristocrat who tries to prove that a mysterious woman has killed his fiancée and cousin. The detective on the case, Antoine Dupres, is a parody of Poe's Dupin who is less concerned with solving the crime than in setting up a way to reveal the solution with a dramatic flourish. Alcott's gothic thrillers remained undiscovered until the 1940s and were not published in collections until the 1970s.

Alcott's adult novels were not as popular as she wished them to be. They lack the optimism of her juvenile fiction and explore difficult marriages, women's rights, and conflict between men and women.

Juvenile fiction

Alcott had little interest in writing for children, but saw it as a good financial opportunity. She felt that writing children's literature was tedious. Alcott biographer Ruth K. MacDonald suggests that Alcott's hesitance to write children's novels may have arisen from the societal perception that writing for children was a means by which poor women made money. Her juvenile fiction portrays both women who fit Victorian ideals of domesticity and women who have careers and decide to remain single. The child protagonists are often flawed, and the stories include didactics. Though her juvenile fiction is largely based on her childhood, she does not focus on poverty.

Style

Alcott's writing has been described as "episodic" because the narratives are broken into distinctive events. (Stern 2000 41; Stern 1998 122) Her early work is modeled after Charlotte Bronte's work. (University of Tennessee Press) The style and ideas that appear in her writing are also influenced by her transcendental upbringing, both promoting and satirizing transcendentalist ideals. (Eiselein and Phillips 7-8) As a realist writer, she explores social conflict; she also promotes advanced views on education. (MacDonald 1, 97) She incorporates slang into her characters' dialogue, (Eiselein and Phillips 8) which contemporaries criticized her for doing. (Clark xii)

Themes?

Alcott teaches morals in her writing, (Delamar 203) which possibly arises from habit. (Bradford 400)

Alcott's themes include domesticity, self-sacrifice, gender expectations, duty, and first-wave feminism. (Golden 9)

Legacy--LIVE

Biography and documentary

Before her death, Alcott asked her sister Anna Pratt to destroy her letters and journals; Anna did not destroy all of them and gave the rest to family friend Ednah Dow Cheney. In 1889 Cheney was the first person to undergo a deep study of Alcott's life, compiling the journals and letters to publish Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals. The compilation has been published multiple times since then. Cheney also published Louisa May Alcott: The Children's Friend, a version of the first compilation revised to focus on Alcott's appeal to children. Other various compilations of Alcott's letters were published in the following decades. In 1909 Belle Moses wrote Louisa May Alcott, Dreamer and Worker: A Study of Achievement, establishing itself as the "first major biography" about Alcott. Katharine S. Anthony's Louisa May Alcott, written in 1938, was the first biography to focus on the author's psychology. A comprehensive biography about Alcott was not written until Madeleine B. Stern's 1950 biography Louisa May Alcott. In the 1960s-1970s, feminist analysis of Alcott's fiction increased; analysis also focused on the contrast between her domestic and sensation fiction.

"Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind 'Little Women'" aired in 2009 as part of the American Masters biography series and was aired a second time on May 20, 2018. It was directed by Nancy Porter and written by Harriet Reisen, who wrote the script based on primary sources from Alcott's life. The documentary, which starred Elizabeth Marvel as Alcott, was shot onsite for the events it covered. It included interviews with Alcott scholars, including Sarah Elbert, Daniel Shealy, Madeleine Stern, Leona Rostenberg, and Geraldine Brooks.

Aclott homes

The Alcotts' Concord home, Orchard House, where the family lived for 25 years and where Little Women was written, is open to the public and pays homage to the Alcotts by focusing on public education and historic preservation. The Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association allows tourists to walk through the house and learn about Alcott. Her Boston home is featured on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.

Film and television

Little Women inspired film versions in 1933, 1949, 1994, 2018, and 2019. The novel also inspired television series in 1958, 1970, 1978, and 2017, anime versions in 1981 and 1987, and a 2005 musical. It also inspired a BBC Radio 4 version in 2017. Little Men inspired film versions in 1934, 1940, and 1998, and was the basis for a 1998 television series. Other films based on Alcott novels and stories are An Old-Fashioned Girl (1949), The Inheritance (1997), and An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving (2008).

Popular culture

Alcott appears as the protagonist in the Louisa May Alcott Mystery series, written by Jeanne Mackin under the pseudonym Anna Maclean. In book one, Louisa and the Missing Heiress, Alcott is living in Boston in 1854 and writing her sensation stories. She finds the dead body of a fictional friend who recently returned from a honeymoonand solves the mystery. Louisa and the Country Bachelor follows Alcott as she visits cousins in Walpole, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1855 and discovers the dead body of an immigrant bachelor. Alcott decides to solve what she suspects is a murder. In Louisa and the Crystal Gazer, the third and final book in the series, Alcott solves the murder of a divination woman in Boston in 1855.

The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott by Kelly O’Connor McNees takes place in Walpole in 1855 and follows Alcott as she pursues romance. Alcott falls in love with a fictional character named Joseph Singer but chooses to pursue a profession as a writer instead of continuing her relationship with Singer. In Only Gossip Prospers by Lorraine Tosiello, Alcott visits New York City shortly after publishing Little Women. During her trip, Alcott seeks to remain anonymous because of an unrevealed circumstance from her past. The Revelation of Louisa May Alcott by Michaela MacColl takes place in 1846; young Alcott solves the murder of a slave catcher. Patricia O'Brien's The Glory Cloak tells of a fictional friendship between Alcott and Clara Barton, Alcott's work in the Civil War, and her relationships with Thoreau and her father. The epistolary novel The Bee and the Fly: The Improbable Correspondence of Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson, by Lorraine Tosiello and Jane Cavolina, follows a fictional correspondence between Alcott and Dickinson. Dickinson initiates the correspondence in 1861 by asking Alcott for literary advice.

Influence

Various modern writers have been influenced and inspired by Alcott's work, particularly Little Women. As a child, Simone de Beauvior felt a connection to Jo and expressed, "Reading this novel gave me an exalted sense of myself. Cynthia Ozick calls herself a "Jo-of-the-future", and Patti Smith explains, "[I]t was Louisa May Alcott who provided me with a positive view of my female destiny." Writers influenced by Alcott include Ursula K. Le Guin, Barbara Kingsolver, Gail Mazur, Anna Quindlen, Anne Lamott, Sonia Sanchez, Ann Petry, Gertrude Stein, and J. K. Rowling. U. S. president Theodore Roosevelt said he "worshiped" Alcott's books. Other politicians who have been impacted by Alcott's books include Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Hillary Clinton, and Sandra Day O'Connor. Louisa May Alcott was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996.

REVISIONS

Civil War service

Louisa May Alcott

As an adult, Louisa was an abolitionist, temperance advocate, and feminist. In 1859, Louisa began writing for the Atlantic Monthly. When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, Louisa wanted to enlist in the Union army but could not because she was a woman. Instead, she sewed uniforms and waited until she reached the minimum age for army nurses at thirty years old. Soon after turning thirty in 1862, Louisa applied to the U. S. Sanitary Commission, run by Dorothea Dix, and on December 11 was assigned to work in the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, Washington, D. C. When she left, Bronson felt as if he was "sending [his] only son to the war". When she arrived she discovered that conditions in the hospital were poor, with over-crowded and filthy quarters, bad food, unstable beds, and insufficient ventilation. Diseases such as scarlet fever, chicken pox, measles, and typhus were rampant among the patients. Louisa's duties included cleaning wounds, feeding the men, assisting with amputations, dressing wounds, and later assigning patients to their wards. She also entertained patients by reading aloud and putting on skits. She served as a nurse for six weeks in 1862–1863. She intended to serve three months, but contracted typhoid fever and became critically ill partway through her service. In late January Bronson traveled to the hospital and took Louisa to Concord to recover.

Literary success--this could go after biography?

Encouraged by Sanborn and Moncure Conway, Louisa revised and published the letters she wrote while serving as a nurse in the Boston anti-slavery paper Commonwealth, later collecting them as Hospital Sketches (1863, republished with additions in 1869). With the popularity of Hospital Sketches, Louisa began publishing versions of some letters written during a trip she took the year before, but she was unsatisfied with them and canceled publication. She also planned to travel to South Carolina to teach freed slaves and write letters she could later publish, but she was too ill to travel and abandoned the plan. Soon after the success of Hospital Sketches, Louisa published her novel Moods (1864), based on her own experience with and stance on "woman's right to selfhood." Louisa struggled to find a publisher because the novel was long. After abridgments, Moods was published and popular, but not to the extent that Louisa had hoped for. In 1882 Louisa changed the end. While Louisa was touring Europe in 1870, she was displeased to find out that her publisher released a new edition without her approval.

Louisa began editing the children's magazine Merry's Museum to help pay off family debts incurred while Louisa toured Europe as the companion of wealthy invalid Anna Weld in 1865-66. Though Louisa disliked editing the magazine, she became its main editor in 1867. Around the same time, Louisa's publisher, Thomas Niles, asked her to write a book especially for girls. She was hesitant to write it because she felt she knew more about boys than she did about girls, but she eventually set to work on her semi-autobiographical novel Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868). Louisa developed a close relationship with the young Polish revolutionary Ladislas Wisniewski during her European tour with Weld. She met him in Vevey, where he taught her French and she taught him English. She detailed a romance between herself and Wisniewski but later took it out. Louisa identified Wisniewski as one of the models for the character Laurie in Little Women. Her other model for Laurie was fifteen-year-old Alfred Whitman, who she met shortly before the death of her sister Elizabeth and with whom she corresponded for several years afterward. Louisa based the heroine Jo on herself. The other characters have parallels with people from Louisa's life. Niles asked Louisa to write a second part. Also known as Good Wives (1869), it follows the March sisters into adulthood and marriage.

In 1870 Louisa joined May and a friend on a European tour. Though numerous publishers requested new stories, Louisa wrote little while in Europe, instead preferring to rest. Meanwhile, rumors began to spread that she had died from diphtheria. She eventually described their travels in "Shawl Straps" (1872). While in Europe, Louisa began writing Little Men after finding out that her brother-in-law, John Pratt, had died. She was driven to write the book to provide financial support for her sister Anna and her two sons, though Pratt left them money when he died. Louisa felt that she "must be a father now" to her nephews. After she left Europe, the book was released the day she arrived in Boston. Louisa took seven years to complete Jo's Boys (1886), her sequel to Little Men. She began the book in 1879 but discontinued it after her sister May's death in December. Louisa resumed work on the novel in 1882 after Mary Mapes Dodge of St. Nicholas asked for a new serial. Jo's Boys (1886) completed the "March Family Saga", Louisa's best-known books. The general popularity of her first few published works surprised Alcott. Throughout her career as a writer, she shied away from public attention, sometimes acting as a servant when fans came to her house.

Critical Reception

Before her death, Louisa asked her sister Anna Pratt to destroy her letters and journals; Anna did not destroy all of them and gave the rest to family friend Ednah Dow Cheney. In 1889 Cheney was the first person to undergo a deep study of Louisa's life, compiling the journals and letters to publish Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals. The compilation has been published multiple times since then. Cheney also published Louisa May Alcott: The Children's Friend, a version of the first compilation revised to focus on Alcott's appeal to children. Other various compilations of Louisa's letters were published in the following decades. In 1909 Belle Moses wrote Louisa May Alcott, Dreamer and Worker: A Study of Achievement, which established itself as the "first major biography" about Louisa. Katharine S. Anthony's Louisa May Alcott, written in 1938, was the first biography to focus on the author's psychology. A comprehensive biography about Louisa was not written until Madeleine B. Stern's 1950 biography Louisa May Alcott. In the 1960s-1970s, feminist analysis of Louisa's fiction increased; analysis also focused on the contrast between her domestic and sensation fiction. Martha Saxton's 1978 Louisa May: A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott depicts Alcott's life in a manner that Karen Halttunen, a professor of History and American Studies at the University of Southern California, calls "controversial". Alcott biographer Ruth K. MacDonald considers Saxton's biography to be excessively psychoanalytical, portraying Alcott as a victim to her family. MacDonald also praises Saxton's description of Alcott's acquaintance with several intellectuals of the time. Geraldine Brooks, author of March, considers Saxton's biography a victimization of Alcott in consideration of her relationship with her father.

NEW:

Ruth K. MacDonald praises Sarah Elbert's 1984 biography A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott and Little Women for its combination of Saxton's psychological perspective and Madelon Bedell's larger view of the Alcott family in The Alcotts: Biography of a Family. She also states that the biography could use more analysis of Alcott's works. Kate Beaird Meyers of the University of Tulsa feels that the 1987 version, entitled A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott's Place in American Culture, "is much more sophisticated" because Elbert draws upon other scholars and places Alcott in American literature. Alcott scholar Daniel Shealy compiled and edited Alcott in Her Own Time. Roberta Seelinger Trites calls it "fascinating and thorough" but says it could use more background information about the essayists, while fellow Alcott scholar Gregory Eiselein praised Shealy's use of original accounts. Trites calls Harriet Reisen's biography Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women a "far more balanced" biography "than some of her predecessors", comparing it favorably to John Matteson's Eden's Outcasts. Taylor Barnes of The Christian Science Monitor generally praises Reisen's biography but states that its "microscopic examination" of Alcott's life becomes confusing. Cornelia Meigs's 1934 biography Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women won the Newbery Medal. Critical Insights: Louisa May Alcott, edited by Gregory Eiselein and Anne K. Phillips, contains a series of essays discussing Alcott's life and literature.

NOT NEW:

"Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind 'Little Women'" aired in 2009 as part of the American Masters biography series and was aired a second time on May 20, 2018. It was directed by Nancy Porter and written by Harriet Reisen, who wrote the script based on primary sources from Louisa's life. The documentary, which starred Elizabeth Marvel as Louisa, was shot onsite for the events it covered. It included interviews with Louisa May Alcott scholars, including Sarah Elbert, Daniel Shealy, Madeleine Stern, Leona Rostenberg, and Geraldine Brooks

Works cited

• Alcott, Louisa May (November 2, 2015). The Annotated Little Women. Manhattan, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0393072198.
• Atlas, Nava (2017-09-02). "10 Writers Who Were Inspired by Jo March of Little Women". Literary Ladies Guide. Retrieved 2024-06-07.
• Gloria T. Delamar (1990). Louisa May Alcott and "Little Women": Biography, Critique, Publications, Poems, Songs and Contemporary Relevance. McFarland & Company. ISBN 0-8995-0421-3. Wikidata Q126509746.
• Eiselein, Gregory (2016). "Louisa May Alcott, Patti Smith, and Punk Aesethetics". In Eiselein, Gregory; Phillips, Anne K. (eds.). Critical Insights: Louisa May Alcott. Ipswich, MA, USA: Salem Press. pp. 221–236. ISBN 978-1-61925-521-0.
• Golden, Catherine J. (2003-12-30). "Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888)". In Knight, Denise (ed.). Writers of the American Renaissance: An A-to-Z Guide. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. ISBN 978-0-313-01707-0.
• Hischak, Thomas S. (2014-01-10). American Literature on Stage and Screen: 525 Works and Their Adaptations. McFarland. ISBN 978-0-7864-9279-4.
• Reisen, Harriet (2009). Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women. Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 978-0-8050-8299-9.
• Stern, Madeleine B., ed. (1998). Louisa May Alcott: From Blood & Thunder to Hearth & Home. Northeastern University Press. ISBN 1-55553-349-3.
• Scheib, Ronnie (2008-11-03). "An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving". Variety. Retrieved 2024-06-12.
• Scott, Tony (1997-04-04). "Louisa May Alcott's the Inheritance". Variety. Retrieved 2024-06-12.

Further reading

• Shealy, Daniel (1998). "Prospects for the Study of Louisa May Alcott". Resources for American Literary Study. 24 (2): 157–176. doi:10.5325/resoamerlitestud.24.2.0157 – via Scholarly Publishing Collective.
• Thompson, Terry Clothier (2008). Louisa May Alcott: Quilts of Her Life, Her Work, Her Heart. C & T Publishing. ISBN 978-1933466538.
• Noyes, Deborah (2020). A Hopeful Heart: Louisa May Alcott Before Little Women. Schwartz & Wade. ISBN 978-0525646235.