Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888), a beloved American novelist, best known for her classic work Little Women, which she wrote in 1868.
Childhood and Early Works
Louisa May Alcott was the second of four daughters born to Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May. From her father she gained her education and from her mother, affectionately known by all as Abba, she gained Christianity. Her sisters: Anna Alcott Pratt, Elizabeth Sewell Alcott, and May Alcott Nieriker are the inspirations for Louisa's most famous work, Little Women
Louisa was born in the Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 29, 1832. Bronson, an educator took his small family to where he established the Temple School. It was an experimental school where he could implement his novel and visionary methods. He believed that students should be involved in and enjoy the learning process. It was also at this time that he and his wife joined the Transcendentalist Movement. During childhood and adolescence Louisa and her family suffered from poverty and ridicule brought on by an inconsistent and innovative provider. At a very young age Louisa felt the need to do whatever jobs she could to help support her family.
In 1840 the school was closed and the Alcott family moved to a small cottage along the Concord River in Concord, Massachusetts. Here Louisa often enjoyed visits and nature walks with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other noted dignitaries of the time who were also Trancendentalists. It was the focused values and ideas about nature of the Trancendentalists that prompted the family to move to the experimental Utopian Fruitlands community for a brief interval in 1843-1844. The beliefs and actions of Bronson and Abba Alcott would cause several moves for their family over the next several years. After the Fruitlands failed, the Alcotts returned again to the city of Concord to rent out rooms at Hillside. Finally, with Abba's inheritance and financial help from Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Alcott's secured a permanent home at Orchard House.
Alcott's early education had included lessons from the naturalist Henry David Thoreau but had chiefly been in the hands of her father. She also received some instruction from writers and educators such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller, who were all family friends. She later described these early years in a newspaper sketch entitled "Transcendental Wild Oats", afterwards reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), which relates the experiences of her family during their experiment in "plain living and high thinking" at Fruitlands.
As she matured she developed as both an abolitionist and a feminist. In 1847 the family housed a fugitive slave for one week, and in 1848 Alcott read and admired the "Declaration of Sentiments" published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights. Due to the family's poverty, she began work at an early age as an occasional school teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic help, and writer — her first book was Flower Fables (1854), tales originally written for Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In 1860, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly, and she was a nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown, D.C., for six weeks in 1862-1863. Her letters home, revised and published in the Commonwealth and collected as Hospital Sketches (1863, republished with additions in 1869), garnered her first critical recognition for her observations and humor. Her novel Moods (1864), was also considered promising.
A lesser-known part of her work are the passionate, fiery novels and stories she wrote, usually under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. These works, such as A Long Fatal Love Chase and Pauline's Passion and Punishment, were known in the Victorian era as "potboilers" or "blood-and-thunder tales" and were later referred to as "dangerous for little minds" in Alcott's own novel Little Women. Her protagonists from this period are willful and relentless in their pursuit of their own aims, which often include revenge on those who have humiliated or thwarted them. These works achieved immediate commercial success and remain highly readable today.
In contrast, Alcott also produced moralistic and wholesome stories for children, and, with the exceptions of the semi-autobiographical tale Work (1873), and the anonymous novelette A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), which attracted suspicion that it was authored by Julian Hawthorne, she did not return to creating works for adults.
Literary Success and Later Life
Louisa May Alcott's overwhelming success dated from the appearance of the first part of Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, (1868) a semiautobiographical account of her childhood years along with her sisters in Concord, Massachusetts. A sequel, Good Wives, (1869) followed the March sisters into adulthood and their respective marriages. Little Men (1871) detailed the characters and ways of her nephews who lived with her at Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts. Jo's Boys (1886) completed the "March Family Saga." Most of her later volumes, An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag (6 vols., 1871–1879), Eight Cousins and its sequel Rose in Bloom (1876), and others, followed in the line of Little Women, remaining popular with her large and loyal public.
Although the Jo character in Little Women was based on Louisa May Alcott, Alcott, unlike Jo, never married. In 1879 her younger sister, May, died, and Louisa May took in May's daughter, Louisa May Nieriker ("Lulu"), who was two years old.
In her later life, Alcott became an advocate of women's suffrage, and was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts.
Despite worsening health, Alcott wrote through the rest of her life, finally succumbing to the after effects of mercury poisoning contracted during her American Civil War service (she had received calomel treatments for the effects of typhoid). She died in Boston on March 6, 1888, two days after visiting her father on his deathbed.
The story of her life and career was initially told in Ednah D. Cheney's Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters and Journals (Boston, 1889) and then in Madeleine B. Stern's seminal biography Louisa May Alcott (University of Oklahoma Press, 1950).
Selected works
- "Flower Fables," 1855
- "Hospital Sketches," 1863
- "The Rose Family: A Fairy Tale," 1864
- "Moods," 1865: rev. ed. 1882
- "Morning-Glories and Other Stories," 1867
- "The Mysterious Key and What It Opened," 1867
- "Three Proverb Stories (includes "Kitty's Class Day," "Aunt Kipp," and "Psyche's Art"), 1868
- "Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy," 1868
- "Good Wives," 1869
- "An Old Fashioned Girl," 1870
- "Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boys," 1871
- "Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag," 1872-1882
- "Work: A Story of Experience," 1873
- "Beginning Again, Being a Continuation of Work," 1875
- "Eight Cousins; or, The Aunt-Hill," 1875
- "Silver Pitchers, and Independence: A Centennial Love Story," 1876
- "Rose in Bloom: A Sequel to "Eight Cousins," 1876
- "A Modern Mephistopheles," 1877
- "Under the Lilacs," 1877
- "Jack and Jill: A Village Story," 1880
- "Jo's Boys and How They Turned Out: A Sequel to 'Little Men'," 1886
- "Lulu's Library," 1886-1889
- "A Garland for Girls," 1888
- "Comic Tragedies Written by Jo and Meg and Acted by the 'Little Women'," 1893
Reference
- Shealy, Daniel, Editor. "Alcott in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends and Associates." University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, Iowa, 2005. ISBN 0-87745-938-X.
See also
- Orchard House, where Alcott lived when writing Little Women
External links
- Works by Louisa May Alcott. Project Gutenberg
- biographical information
- E-books by Louisa May Alcott at Classici Stranieri
- [1] (extensive bibliography including primary works and information on secondary literature - critical essays, theses and dissertations)
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