best biography louisa may alcott

Louisa May Alcott

Famed author Louisa May Alcott created colorful relatable characters in 19 th century novels. Her work introduced readers to educated strong female heroines. As a result, her writing style greatly impacted American literature.

Alcott was born on November 29, 1832 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Alcott’s parents were a part of the 19 th century transcendentalist movement, a popular religious movement. Their religious and political beliefs deeply inspired Alcott as child. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a popular educator who believed that children should enjoy learning. Therefore, at an early age, Alcott took to reading and writing. While most of her schooling came from her parents she also studied under famed philosopher Henry David Thoreau and popular authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathanial Hawthorne. Much like her novel Little Women , Alcott was one of four daughters and she remained close with her sisters throughout her life. Many times, Alcott’s family suffered from financial woes, forcing her to attend school irregularly. She took many jobs to help alleviate financial struggles, working as teacher and washing laundry. She turned to writing for both emotional and financial support.

Her first poem, “Sunlight,” was published in a magazine under a pseudonym. Her first book, a compilation of short stories, was published in 1854.  When the Civil War started in 1861, Alcott served as a nurse in a Union hospital. Unfortunately, in the middle of her assignment she contracted typhoid fever. Her experience in the hospital as a patient and a nurse, inspired the novel Hospital Sketches . After the war, Alcott published several other works and gained a following. Her audience included both adults and children. She also released many of her earlier works under the name, A.M. Barnard.

During this time, one of Alcott’s publishers asked her to write a novel for young women. To do so, she simply reflected back on to her childhood with her sisters. In 1868, Alcott published her most popular work , Little Women . The novel was published in a series of short stories, but was eventually compiled into one book. Little Women was an instant success and the book cemented Alcott as one of the foremost novelist of the 19 th and early 20 th century. In 1870, with one successful book, Alcott moved to Europe with her sister May. There she published, another classic Little Men . She also joined the women’s suffrage movement. Throughout her life, she would contribute to several publications which promoted women’s rights. She was also the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Connecticut.

Alcott never married nor had any children, however, when her sister died, she adopted her niece. Afterwards she moved to Boston, Massachusetts and continued publishing more works that followed the characters from Little Women . Alcott suffered from bouts of illness throughout her life. She attributed her poor health to mercury poisoning which she believed she contracted while she worked as a nurse during the Civil War. In 1888, she died at the age of 56 in Boston, Massachusetts. Today, readers continue to enjoy Alcott’s writings and her novels still appear on bestseller list throughout the world.

• Payne, Alma J. “Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888).” American Literary Realism , Vol 6, No. 1 (Winter, 1973) 26-43.
• Reisen, Harriet. Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women. New York: Picador, 2010.
• Stern, Madeline. Louisa May Alcott :A Biography . Boston: Northeastern University, 1999.
• IMAGE: Library of Congress

MLA – Norwood, Arlisha. "Louisa Alcott." National Women's History Museum. National Women's History Museum, 2017. Date accessed.

Chicago- Norwood, Arlisha. "Louisa Alcott." National Women's History Museum. 2017. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/lousia-alcott.

• LaPlante, Eve. Marmee & Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother . New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.
• Matteson, John. Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. New York: W&W Norton & Company, 2008.
• Shealy,Daniel. Alcott in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollection, Interviews and Memoirs by Family, Friends and Associates. Boise: University of Iowa Press, 2005.
• “Little Women by Louisa May Alcott” Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: Primary Source Set. Accessed 30 March 2017, https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/sets/little-women-by-louisa-may-alcott/ .

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Biography of Louisa May Alcott, American Writer

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Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American writer. A vocal North American 19-century anti-enslavement activist and feminist, she is notable for the moral tales she wrote for a young audience. Her work imbued the cares and internal lives of girls with worth and literary attention.

Fast Facts: Louisa May Alcott

• Known For: Writing Little Women and several novels about the March family
• Also Known As: She used the noms de plume A.M. Barnard and Flora Fairfield
• Born: November 29, 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania
• Parents: Amos Bronson and Abigail May Alcott
• Died: March 6, 1888 in Boston, Massachusetts
• Education: none
• Select Published Works: Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men, Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag, Jo’s Boys
• Awards and Honors: none
• Spouse: none
• Children: Lulu Nieriker (adopted)
• Notable Quote: “ I’ve had lots of troubles, so I write jolly tales.”

Early Life and Family

Louisa May Alcott was born the second daughter to Abigail and Amos Bronson Alcott in Germantown, Pennsylvania. She had an older sister, Anna (later the inspiration for Meg March), who was described as a gentle sweet child, while Louisa was described as “vivid, energetic” and “fit for the scuffle of things.” 

While the family had noble ancestry, poverty would dog them throughout Louisa’s childhood. Abigail, or Abba as Louisa called her, was descended from the Quincy, Sewell, and “Fighting May” families, all prominent American families since the American Revolution . However, much of the family’s earlier wealth was diminished by Abigail’s father, so while some of their relatives were wealthy, the Alcotts themselves were relatively poor. 

In 1834, Bronson’s unorthodox teaching in Philadelphia led to the dissolution of his school, and the Alcott family moved to Boston so that Bronson could run Elizabeth Peabody’s co-ed Temple School. An anti-enslavement activist, radical educational reformer, and Transcendentalist, he educated all his daughters, which helped expose Louisa to great writers and thinkers at an early age. He was great friends with contemporary intellectuals including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne .

In 1835, Abigail gave birth to Lizzie Alcott (the model for Beth March) and in 1840 she gave birth to Abigail May Alcott (the model for Amy March). To help combat postpartum depression, Abigal began working as one of the first social workers in Boston, which put the family in contact with many immigrant families who were even worse off than the impoverished Alcotts, which contributed to Louisa’s focus on charity and her commitment to providing for her own family.

In 1843, the Alcotts moved with the Lane and Wright families to establish Fruitlands, a utopian commune in Harvard, Massachusetts . While there, the family sought ways to subjugate their bodies and soul based on Bronson’s teachings. They wore only linen, as it wasn’t tainted by enslaved labor the way cotton was, and consumed fruit and water. They did not use any animal labor to farm the land and took cold baths. Louisa did not enjoy this forced restraint, writing in her diary that “I wish I was rich, I was good, and we were all a happy family.”

After the dissolution of the unsustainable Fruitlands in 1845, the Alcott family relocated to Concord, Massachusetts, at the request of Emerson to join his new agrarian community center of intellectual and literary thought. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau also moved to Concord around this time, and their words and ideas helped expand Louisa’s early education. However, the Alcotts were remarkably poor; their only source of income was the small salary Bronson earned by lecturing with Horace Mann and Emerson. Late in 1845, Louisa joined a school in Concord taught by John Hosmer, an aged revolutionary, but her formal education was sporadic. She grew to be very close friends with a roughhousing boy named Frank. Early in 1848, Louisa wrote her first story, “The Rival Painters. A Tale of Rome.”

In 1851, Louisa published the poem “Sunlight” in Peterson’s Magazine under the nom de plume Flora Fairfield, and on May 8, 1852, “The Rival Painters” was published in the Olive Branch . Thus, Louisa began her career as a published (and paid) writer.

That fall, Nathaniel Hawthorne bought “Hillside” from the Alcotts, who then moved back to Boston with the funds. Anna and Louisa ran a school in their parlor. In 1853, Anna took a teaching job in Syracuse, but Louisa continued running schools and tutoring seasonally through 1857, working in Walpole, New Hampshire, during the summers to help direct the productions of the Walpole Amateur Dramatic Company. She wrote several plays throughout her life, and tried to become an actress herself, with much less success than her literary creations. 

Early Work and Little Women (1854-69)

• Flower Fables (1854)
• Hospital Sketches (1863)
• Little Women (1868)
• Good Wives (Little Women Part II) (1869)

In 1854, Alcott published Flower Fables based on nursery stories she’d been told by Thoreau. Her advance—$300 from a friend of the Emersons—was her first substantial income from her writing. The book was a success and earned out, which Louisa viewed with great pride even when she was making much greater sums later in life.

Abby and Lizzie contracted scarlet fever in the summer of 1856, and their health prompted the family to relocate back to Concord in 1857, when they moved into Orchard House. However, the country air was not enough and Lizzie died of congestive heart failure on March 14, 1858. Two weeks later, Anna announced her engagement to John Pratt. The pair weren't married until 1860.

In 1862, Louisa decided that she wanted to contribute more formally to the anti-enslavement cause and signed on to work as a nurse for the Union Army; she was stationed at Georgetown Hospital. She wrote letters and observations back to her family, which were first serialized in the Boston Commonwealth and were then compiled into Hospital Sketches . She stayed at the hospital until she contracted typhoid fever, and her poor health forced her to return to Boston. While there, she made money writing thrillers under the nom de plume A.M. Barnard, even as her own literary fame was on the rise.

After the war, Louisa traveled around Europe for a year with her sister, Abigail May. While there, May fell in love and settled down with Ernest Nieriker in Paris. For her part, Louisa flirted with a younger Polish man named Laddie, who is often considered the basis for Laurie. Yet she was determined to remain unmarried, so she left Europe without an engagement.

In May 1868, Alcott’s publisher Niles famously asked Alcott to write a “girls’ story” and so she began rapid work on what would become Little Women . However, she was not convinced at first of the worthiness of the endeavor. She wrote in her diary that “Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.” The book contained many autobiographical elements, and each key character had their real-life foil. 

When Little Women was published in September 1868, it had a first printing of two thousand copies, which sold out in two weeks. On this success, Louisa was granted a contract for a second part, Good Wives. She intentionally gave her heroine, Jo, a peculiar husband in the sequel, to spite readers who want to know “who the little women marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life.” Little Women has never been out of print since its publication, and since Louisa held her copyright, it brought her fortune as well as fame.

Later Work (1870-87)

• Little Men (1871)
• Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag (1872, 73, 77, 79, 82)
• Jo’s Boys (1886)

While the Little Women trilogy was never officially marked as such, (with Little Women and Good Wives reprinted as a contiguous book under the heading Little Women ), Little Men is widely considered the sequel to Little Women , as it follows Jo’s school for boys at Plumfield. Even though Louisa began to tire of writing tales for children, readers eagerly purchased more stories about the Marches and in 1871, the Alcott family needed the money. 

Alcott wrote six volumes of short magical stories under the heading Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag , which were widely popular. While they were not about the March family, the clever marketing ensured that fans of Little Women would purchase the stories.

Abba died in 1877, which was a grave blow to Louisa. In 1879, May died following complications relating to childbirth, and her daughter, Lulu, was sent to live with Louisa as her surrogate mother. While Alcott never gave birth to children of her own, she considered Lulu her true daughter and raised her as such.

In October 1882, Alcott began work on Jo’s Boys . While she’d written her previous novels very rapidly, she now faced family responsibilities, which slowed progress. She felt that she could not write about the characters of Amy or Marmee “since the original[s] of [those] character[s] died, it has been impossible for me to write of [them] as when [they were] here.” Instead, she focused on Jo as a literary mentor and theatrical director and followed the jovial youthful antics of one of her charges, Dan.

Bronson suffered a stroke in late 1882 and became paralyzed, after which Louisa worked even more diligently to care for him. Starting in 1885, Alcott experienced frequent cases of vertigo and nervous breaks, which impacted her writing and adherence to publishing deadlines for Jo’s Boys . Her doctor, Dr. Conrad Wesselhoeft, forbade her to write for six months, but eventually, she allowed herself to write for up to two hours a day. After completing the book in 1886, Alcott dedicated it to Wesselhoeft. Like the previous March novels, Jo’s Boys was a wild publishing success. Over time, her maladies shifted and broadened to include insomnia, anxiety, and lethargy. 

Literary Style and Themes

Alcott read a wide range of material, from political treatises to plays to novels, and was especially influenced by the work of Charlotte Brontë and George Sand . Alcott’s writing was canny, candid, and humorous. While her voice matured and tempered through war reporting and crushing family deaths, her work sustained a conviction in the ultimate joy to be found in love and God’s grace, despite affliction and poverty. Little Women and its sequels are beloved for their charming and realistic portrayal of the lives and inner thoughts of American girls, an anomaly in the publishing landscape of Louisa’s time. Alcott wrote about women’s work and creative potential and some critics consider her a proto-feminist; scholars Alberghene and Clark say “To engage with Little Women is to engage with the feminist imagination.”

Alcott also incorporated radical morality and intellectual instruction into fabulistic anecdotes, often in line with the teachings of Transcendentalists such as Bronson. Yet she always managed to stay true-to-life, never straying too far into the symbolism common in Romantic writers of the period.

As her health declined, Alcott legally adopted her nephew John Pratt, and transferred all the Little Women copyrights to him, stipulating that he would share the royalties with his brother, Lulu, and mother. Shortly thereafter, Alcott left the responsibilities of Boston behind to retreat with her friend Dr. Rhoda Lawrence in Roxbury, Massachusetts for the winter of 1887. When she returned to Boston to visit her ailing father on March 1, 1888 she caught a cold. By March 3, it had developed into spinal meningitis. On March 4, Bronson Alcott died, and on March 6, Louisa died. Since Louisa was very close to her father, the press applied much symbolism to their linked deaths; her New York Times obituary spent several inches describing Bronson’s funeral. 

Alcott’s work is widely read by students across the country and the world, and none of her eight young adult novels have ever been out of print. Little Women remains Alcott’s most impactful work, as it brought her to acclaim. In 1927, a scandalous study suggested that Little Women had more influence on American high schoolers than the Bible. The text is regularly adapted for the stage, television, and screen.

Writers and thinkers around the world have been influenced by Little Women , including Margaret Atwood , Jane Addams , Simone de Beauvoir , A. S. Byatt, Theodore Roosevelt , Elena Ferrante, Nora Ephron, Barbara Kingsolver, Jhumpa Lahiri, Cynthia Ozick, Gloria Steinem , and Jane Smiley. Ursula Le Guin credits Jo March as a model that showed her that even girls can write.

There have been six feature film adaptations of Little Women , (two of which were silent films) often starring big celebrities like Katherine Hepburn and Winona Ryder. Greta Gerwig’s 2019 adaptation is notable for diverging from the book to include elements of Alcott’s life and highlight the autobiographical nature of the book.

Little Men has also been adapted as a movie four times, in America in 1934 and 1940, in Japan as an anime in 1993, and in Canada as a family drama in 1998. 

• Acocella, Joan. “How ‘Little Women’ Got Big.” The New Yorker, 17 Oct. 2019, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/how-little-women-got-big.
• Alberghene, Janice M., and Beverly Lyon Clark, editors. Little Women and the Feminist Imagination: Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays. Garland, 2014.
• Alcott, Louisa May. “Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag.” The Project Gutenberg EBook of Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag, by Louisa M. Alcott., www.gutenberg.org/files/26041/26041-h/26041-h.htm.
• Alcott, Louisa May. The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott. Edited by Joel Myerson, Univ. of Georgia Press, 2010.
• Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. Golgotha Press, 2011.
• “All the Little Women: A List of Little Women Adaptations.” PBS, www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/specialfeatures/little-women-adaptations/.
• Brockell, Gillian. “Girls Adored 'Little Women.' Louisa May Alcott Did Not.” The Washington Post, 25 Dec. 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/12/25/girls-adored-little-women-louisa-may-alcott-did-not/.
• Little Women II: Jo's Boys, Nippon Animation, web.archive.org/web/20030630182452/www.nipponanimation.com/catalogue/080/index.html.
• “Little Women Leads Poll; Novel Rated Ahead of Bible for Influence on High School Pupils.” The New York Times, 22 Mar. 1927.
• “Louisa M. Alcott Dead.” The New York Times, 7 Mar. 1888.
• Reisen, Harriet. Louisa May Alcott: the Woman behind: Little Women. Picador, 2010.
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Louisa May Alcott

My book [ Flower Fables , December 1854] came out; and people began to think that topsy-turvy Louisa would amount to something after all, since she could do so well as housemaid, teacher, seamstress, and story-teller.  Perhaps she may.

~Louisa May Alcott, April 1855 Journal

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 29, 1832.  She and her three sisters -- Anna, Elizabeth, and [Abba] May -- were primarily educated by their father, teacher/philosopher A. Bronson Alcott, and raised on the practical Christianity of their mother, Abigail May.

Louisa spent her childhood in Boston and in Concord, Massachusetts, where her days were enlightened by visits to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s library, excursions into nature with Henry David Thoreau, and theatricals in the barn at "Hillside" (now "The Wayside").  Like the character of "Jo March" in Little Women, young Louisa was a tomboy.  "No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race," she claimed, "and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences . . ."

For Louisa, writing was an early passion.  She had a rich imagination and her stories often became the basis of melodramas she and her sisters would act out for friends.  Louisa preferred to play the "lurid" parts in these plays -- "the villains, ghosts, bandits, and disdainful queens," as she put it.

At age 15, troubled by the poverty plaguing her family, she vowed, "I will do something by and by.  Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!"  Confronting a society that offered little opportunity to women seeking employment, Louisa nonetheless persisted:  ". . . I will make a battering-ram of my head and make my way through this rough and tumble world."  Whether as a teacher, seamstress, governess, or household servant, for many years Louisa did any work she could find.

Louisa’s career as an author began at the age of eight with poetry, and later short stories that appeared in popular magazines.  In 1854, when she was 22, her first book, Flower Fables , was published.  A major critical milestone along her literary path was Hospital Sketches (1863), a truthful and poignant account of her service as a Civil War nurse in Washington, DC inspired by the letters she wrote home to her family in Concord.

In 1868, when Louisa was 35 years old, her publisher, Thomas Niles, asked her to write "a girls' story."  The 492 pages of Little Women, Part I were dashed off within three months at the desk Louisa's father built for her in her Orchard House bedchamber.  The novel is largely based on the coming of age stories of Louisa and her sisters, with many of the domestic experiences inspired by events that actually took place at Orchard House.

Virtually overnight, Little Women was a phenomenal success, primarily due to its timeless storytelling about the first American juvenile heroine, "Jo March," who acted from her own individuality -- a free-thinking, flawed person, rather than the idealized stereotype of feminine perfection then prevalent in children’s fiction.

In all, Louisa published over 30 books and collections of short stories and poems.  She died on 6 March 1888, only two days after her father, and is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.

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Louisa May Alcott

Despite being one of the most influential American authors of the 20th century, Louisa May Alcott’s resume goes well beyond her published works. 

Born on November 29, 1832, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, Louisa May Alcott was the daughter of Bronson Alcott and Abigail May. Louisa’s parents were her greatest influences, for both parents took active roles in the Transcendentalist Movement— a 19th-century movement emphasizing the perception of the individual through religious practices. Additionally, Bronson Alcott was a teacher with a firm belief that children ought to learn and enjoy reading and writing.  Consequently, Louisa developed a passion for writing at a young age. Despite her schooling coming primarily from her parents, Louisa had the opportunity to study under prominent individuals such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

Early in her writing career, Louisa May Alcott relied on writing as a means to cope with personal and environmental stressors. As a consequence, Louisa’s education was disrupted, for she had to prioritize her family needs over her passion for writing. Specifically, Louisa’s family was burdened with financial woes. In order to alleviate this burden, Louisa worked numerous jobs such as teaching, cleaning, and washing laundry. It was during this time that Louisa became a published author, her poem “Sunlight” was published in a magazine in 1851. Although very little money was made off of the publishing of her poem, it certified her love for writing at a professional level.    During the Civil War, Alcott shifted her talents from writing to nursing from the war’s onset in 1861.  Initially, Alcott completed simple tasks such as sewing Union uniforms and tending to minor soldier needs. The next year, Alcott officially enlisted as a nurse at a makeshift hospital in Washington, D.C, where she was tasked with comforting dying soldiers and assisting doctors performing in amputations. In the winter of 1863, Alcott began advocating for the abolition of slavery in addition to her efforts as a nurse, but these efforts were cut short by her contracting of typhoid fever. Despite being relieved of her nursing duties, Alcott made light of her brief nursing stint in her publishing of Hospital Sketches in 1863. This novel detailed a fictionalized twist on Alcott’s experiences as a wartime nurse, and its publishing jumpstarted the young Louisa May Alcott’s writing career.

Alcott returned to Boston after accepting an editorship of a children’s magazine known as Merry’s Museum. Thomas Niles, the magazine’s editor, tasked Alcott with writing a book catered towards young women. In order to complete this task, Alcott simply reflected on her childhood, specifically emphasizing her relationship with her three sisters. The novel’s initial form was a series of short stories, but the novel was later synthesized into one book known as Little Women. Alcott’s novel immediately became a bestseller. 

In addition to her efforts as a nurse and author, Louisa May Alcott devoted much of her time to reformation movements including, but not limited to, the women’s rights and temperance movements. In the 1870s, Alcott went door-to-door campaigning for women’s suffrage in Massachusetts. Additionally, Alcott attended the Women’s Congress of 1875 in Syracuse, New York. Louisa May Alcott devoted much of the 1870s towards writing for women’s rights periodicals such as Lucy Stone’s Woman’s Journal. By the decade’s end, Alcott became the first woman registered to vote in Concord. 

Unfortunately, Alcott’s bouts of illnesses caught up with her in 1888, for she died at the age of 56 in Boston, Massachusetts. It is speculated that the cause of her death was mercury poisoning which she contracted during her time as a Union nurse. Nonetheless, Alcott’s extraordinary efforts and writings live on to this day.   

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Literary Ladies Guide

An archive dedicated to classic women authors and their work, louisa may alcott, author of little women, by nava atlas | on april 1, 2018 | updated september 12, 2023 | comments (0).

Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) is best known as the author of Little Women and its sequels, including Jo’s Boys and Little Men, though the scope of her work goes far beyond these beloved books.

She also wrote essays, poems, and pseudonymous thrillers. Alcott’s most beloved heroine, the complicated and talented Jo March , was an idealized version of herself.

She did grow up in a family much like the one she presented in Little Women — once again, idealized and a bit altered — with practical and wise Marmee, a dreamer of a father, and three sisters, May (“Amy”), Anna (“Meg”), and Elizabeth (“Beth”).

Louisa May Alcott biography highlights

• Louisa started her writing career by producing gothic tales and thrillers under pseudonyms.
• She was part of a progressive family that promoted abolition of slavery, women’s rights and suffrage, and other social justice causes.
• Louisa wasn’t shy about her ambition to become a writer and to get properly paid for her efforts. Poor for most of her life, and having had to provide for her parents and sisters from the time she was a teen, she eventually earned a great deal of money.
• Her best-known novel, Little Women , was semi-autobiographical, though offered an idealized view of the Alcotts. Louisa is most identified with the character of Jo, who in turn inspired numerous women writers.
• Louisa briefly served as a Union nurse during the Civil War, but had to cut her service short due to serious illness.
• Louisa never married nor had any of her own children, but helped raise her sister’s daughter after her sister’s death.
• Her body of work includes more than 10 novels and numerous short stories (both written under pseudonyms and her own name).
• Little Women continues to be a beloved classic and has been filmed for television and movies many times. It has also been adapted to the stage.

Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts . Like Louisa, Jo March was the aspiring writer among the sisters of Little Women .

What’s less well-known is that Alcott produced a large body of thrillers (otherwise known as gothic or sensational tales) under various pseudonyms, allowing her to support her family while searching for her literary voice.

Contrary as they seemed to her own life and values, she seemed to take some perverse pleasure in dark themes, returning to them even after financial need no longer compelled her to do this sort of formula writing.

10 Women Writers Who Were Inspired by Jo March . . . . . . . . . .

Determined to make a living as a writer

Alcott conducted her career as a professional determined to profit from her pen. Financial need stoked her drive as she became the primary breadwinner in her family at a young age.

Inspiration was all around her, as she grew up in the midst of the Transcendentalists. A philosophical, literary, and political movement that began to flower in the late 1820, some of its members included her father, Amos Bronson Alcott , Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. Bronson Alcott was one of its most passionate and radical proponents. He was a brilliant social theorist, but a poor provider, causing continuous financial stress for the family.

Louisa admired Charlotte Brontë and longed to gain recognition for her work, much as Brontë had. Though Louisa claimed that her greatest reward was the esteem of the “young folks” who were her readers, she was never modest in her demands to be paid what she felt she was worth, and lived to see her work earn a fortune. Most important to her was to make her family, especially her Marmee, comfortable.

A brief stint as Civil War nurse

During the Civil War, Louisa would have surely taken up arms if women had been allowed to serve as soldiers. But the only way women could serve was to volunteer as nurses, and that’s just what she did.

After the crushing defeat of Union forces in Fredericksburg, December 1862, Louisa began her duties as a nurse at the Union Hotel in Georgetown, Washington D.C.

Disease was nearly as much a threat as wounds from the battlefield — not only to the soldiers themselves, but to those who cared for them. Not even a month into her service, Louisa came down with typhoid pneumonia, complete with a horrendous cough and a high fever.

Her father came to fetch her and take her home, and she was in a delirium for some time after. More about this in her own civil war journals .

. . . . . . . . . .

• Little Women

Though Alcott had already produced the well-received Moods (the first novel under her real name), Work: A Story of Experience , Hospital Sketches , and countless small pieces under her own name, it was Little Women that really put her on the map. In 1868, her publisher asked that her to try writing a “girls’ story” for their list.

Thinking little of the request, she cranked it out in two and a half months, though her heart wasn’t in it. Neither she nor her publisher thought it was in any way remarkable.

Still, the proof of the entire book was ready in a month or so after the author turned in the manuscript, and once it came out, it was an immediate success, so much so, that sequels quickly followed.

A staunch feminist and abolitionist

She promoted women’s rights and campaigning for women’s suffrage. Her views were espoused by her lead characters, strong young women who wanted more from life than to get married and have babies.

Alcott herself never married nor had children. She and her family were always ardent abolitionists, a view that was not as widely popular in relatively liberal Massachusetts as one would think.

Despite all that she’d seen in life, Alcott was alarmingly naïve about the nature of her sexuality. She confessed in an 1883 interview: “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 in my life with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.”

Perhaps unknowingly, the repressed nature of her sexuality helped her avoid the circumscribed path of marriage and motherhood, and allowed her to view the institution dispassionately.

A brief experience with motherhood

May Alcott Niereker , the youngest Alcott sister, trained as an artist in Europe (subsidized by Alcott’s earnings). There she met a man, married, and had a daughter. She died within a year of giving birth. Alcott wanted to raise the child, and earned the father’s family’s consent do so.

Adopted at the age of two, the little girl was her Aunt Louisa’s namesake (and nicknamed Lulu); from all accounts, the nine years they spent together before Alcott’s death were happy ones.

Chronic illness and death

Louisa May Alcott was 55 years old when she died of a stroke in Boston in 1888 . Her death came just two days after her father’s.

She had long suffered from chronic illness, long thought to have been caused by the mercury-laced medicine she took as a cure for the typhoid fever she suffered while serving as a nurse during the civil war. However, modern scholars believe that she may have had an autoimmune disease, perhaps lupus.

• 10 Life Lessons from Louisa May Alcott

More about Louisa May Alcott

On this site

• 10 Women Writers Who Were Inspired by Jo March
• Louisa May Alcott quotes
• How Louisa May Alcott’s Feminism Explains Her Timelessness
• How Alcott Came to Write Little Women
• A Visit to the Alcott’s Orchard House
• Sweet Success at Last for Louisa May Alcott
• A Feminist Manifesto — Work: A Story of Experience
• A Posthumous Interview with Louisa May Alcott
• Madeleine B. Stern’s Brilliant analysis of Little Women
• When You Don’t Have Enough Time to Write
• The Boundless Hearts of Mothers
• Comfort and Guidance in Little Women
• My Head is My Study
• “March” by Geraldine Brooks: A Review
• Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott
• Louisa May Alcott’s Obituary, March 1888
• May Alcott Nierker: Thoroughly Modern Woman
• Sketch of Childhood
• LMA as Civil War Nurse
• LMA’s Civil War journals
• The 1994 Film Adaptation of Little Women
• Classic Quotes from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• Diana and Persis : LMA’s Unfinished Novel
• Did Little Women ‘s Jo March Become a Writer?
• Dear Literary Ladies: Any Quick Tips for Plot and Character Development?
• Dear Literary Ladies: How Can a Writer Improve Her Craft?
• Dear Literary Ladies: Isn’t There an Easy Road to Writing Success?

Major Works

• Rose in Bloom
• Eight Cousins
• Hospital Sketches
• An Old-Fashioned Girl
• Under the Lilacs
• Work: A Story of Experience
• Transcendental Wild Oats (full text)
• A Long Fatal Love Chase

Biographies About Louisa May Alcott

• Louisa May Alcott: A Biography by Madeline B. Stern
• The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen
• Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson
• Louisa: The Life of Louisa May Alcott by Yonda Zeldis McDonough
• Marmee and Louis a by Eve La Plante

More Information

• Reader discussion on Louisa May Alcott’s books on Goodreads

Read and listen online

• LMA’s books on Project Gutenberg
• Audio readings of LMA’s books on Librivox

Film and TV adaptations of Louisa May Alcott Works

• Little Women (1933)
• Little Women (1949)
• Little Women (1994)
• Little Men (1935)
• Little Men (1941)
• Little Men (1998)
• The Inheritance (1997)
• The Inheritance (2003)
• An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving (2008)

Visit Louisa May Alcott’s Home

• Orchard House – Concord, MA

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Louisa May Alcott summary

Study the life of louise may alcott and how she achieved fame as a writer, educator and abolitionist.

Louisa May Alcott , (born Nov. 29, 1832, Germantown, Pa., U.S.—died March 6, 1888, Boston, Mass.), U.S. author. Daughter of the reformer Bronson Alcott, she grew up in Transcendentalist circles in Boston and Concord, Mass. She began writing to help support her mother and sisters. An ardent abolitionist, she volunteered as a nurse during the American Civil War, where she contracted the typhoid that damaged her health the rest of her life; her letters, published as Hospital Sketches (1863), first brought her fame. With the huge success of the autobiographical Little Women (1868–69), she finally escaped debt. An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Little Men (1871), and Jo’s Boys (1886) also drew on her experiences as an educator.

Louisa May Alcott: The Free-Thinking Abolitionist Who Overcame Poverty And Depression To Write ‘Little Women’

Louisa may alcott infused little women with her personal trials and tribulations of growing up in an impoverished and unconventional family..

Louisa May Alcott’s most famous work follows the tale of four young women trying to make their way in the world. Her complex, realistic characters — sisters Meg, Beth, Jo, And Amy — were actually derived from Alcott’s own experiences with her own three sisters.

Alcott endured all the tribulations of a progressive 19th-century woman, but she managed to transform these struggles into something lovely: the captivating and enduring story of Little Women .

Too bad she hated it.

Louisa May Alcott’s Unusual Childhood

Wikimedia Commons Though money poor, the Alcott family was not impoverished in spirit and tolerance as their home was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Before she became one of the most prominent female American writers of the 19th century, Louisa May Alcott was the daughter of a progressive but poor family.

Her mother, Abigail “Abba” May, came from a line of distinguished war heroes. Her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was the son of a farmer yet he was very well-read and became a self-taught educator.

Louisa May Alcott was born on Nov. 29, 1832, in Germantown, Pennsylvania but she grew up in Concord, Massachusetts most of her life. Even as a toddler, Louisa May Alcott was described as strong-willed and stubborn, traits she inherited from her mother, to whom she looked up and with whom she was close.

Wikimedia Commons Her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was a progressive educator and member of the transcendentalism movement.

Alcott was the second-born of four daughters. She was incredibly close with her sisters: Anna (the eldest), Lizzie, and May (the youngest). While Alcott’s bonds with the women in her family were unwavering, her relationship with her father, Amos, was complicated.

Amos was a transcendentalist, a philosophy that encouraged self-reliance, imagination, and creativity, yet he was also a stickler for denial and control. He employed his experimental methods in childcare onto his own daughters, putting them on strict hourly schedules and depriving them of adolescent indulgences like sitting on their mother’s lap or sleeping with the light on. Alcott herself was often forced to give up her sweet treats to other children as a way of practicing the “sweetness of self-denial.”

“Wonder if I shall ever be famous enough for people to care to read my story and struggles. I can’t be a [Charlotte Brontë], but I may do a little something yet.” Louisa May Alcott

Her father’s involvement in the transcendentalist movement distracted him from providing for his family, so the women — including Alcott herself — were forced to take on the roles of breadwinners. The family’s financial woes caused Alcott to miss school regularly and take on odd jobs to make ends meet. The only solace she found during these hardships was in writing.

Library of Congress When she was two, the family relocated to Boston, Massachusetts, where Louisa May Alcott spent most of her life.

In 1843, when Alcott was 11, Amos moved the family into an experimental community with other transcendentalists. The members inhabited a plot of land they bought dubbed Fruitlands, which was meant as a self-sustaining Utopian society. Members committed themselves to a vegetarian diet and manual labor without enslaved animals.

It was a peculiar setting for a teenage girl to grow up in but her father’s radical philosophies also put her in close circles with the greatest minds of the time. She received excellent tutelage from her father’s like-minded colleagues like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne , Margaret Fuller, and Julia Ward Howe.

The social experiment of Fruitlands failed but it at least gave Louisa May Alcott fodder for her writing. One of her earlier works, entitled Transcendental Wild Oats , was a satirical comedy based on her time living among the transcendentalists.

It would be one of the many stories she wrote based on the peculiar happenings in her own life.

In 1850, the Alcotts opened their home up to fugitive slaves as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Her father founded an abolitionist society in their hometown that year and instilled his abolitionist views in his daughters.

Louise May Alcott herself would grow up to be a progressive patriot, joining the Civil War effort for the Union as a nurse. “My greatest pride,” Alcott wrote of her role in the Civil War, “is that I lived to know the brave men and women who did so much for the cause and that I had a very small share in the war which put an end to a great wrong.”

Louisa May Alcott’s Written Works

Wikimedia Commons An illustrated page from her most popular book Little Women.

Poverty weighed heavily on the young writer during her teenage years, perhaps more so as she was one of the elder daughters. According to Elaine Showalter in the introduction to Alternative Alcott , a collection of Alcott’s “sensation tales,” Alcott vowed to bring her family out of poverty:

“I will do something by-and-by. Don’t care what, teach sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!”

Alcott stuck to her word. At 16 she became a teacher — like her father — to make more money. But she did not care for scholarship; her true passion lay in writing. Yet an abundance of house chores and a day job left the budding writer little time to read or write.

Wikimedia Commons Louisa May Alcott shared many similarities with her literary idol, Charlotte Brontë, including the unfortunate fate of a difficult upbringing.

Alcott finally managed to publish her own collection of short fairytales titled Flower Fables in 1854. Alcott had a great admiration for Emerson, whose daughter, Ellen, she dedicated the book to. Despite her literary accomplishment, life was otherwise so difficult for the 24-year-old that she had even contemplated committing suicide.

Alcott had walked to the Charles River and considered throwing herself into it, but she decided that she would instead “take Fate by the throat and shake a living out of her.”

Alcott deeply admired Charlotte Brontë, another prolific female writer from the early 19th century. She found renewed strength in the writer’s biography which featured struggles so closely reminiscent of her own that by 1860, Alcott began contributing regularly to the Atlantic Monthly for payment.

Most of this earlier writing was published under the gender-ambiguous pseudonym A.M. Barnard as publishers and readers still harbored unfair bias against female writers.

Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House Portrait of Elizabeth Sewall Alcott, or “Lizzie” as Louisa May called her, who died of scarlet fever.

She naturally found regular material for her writing from her own messy life. In her essay, How I Went Out Of Service which was published in The Independent , Alcott recounted her denigrating job as a domestic servant in which her employer made romantic advances towards her and bogged her in the dirtiest chores when she rejected him.

Her novel Hospital Sketches was inspired by her time as a Union hospital nurse during which she contracted typhoid fever and health problems that plagued her for the rest of her life.

Even in her most-read work, Little Women , painful remnants of Alcott’s past are scattered throughout.

The True Story Behind Little Women

Wikimedia Commons An original copy of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women which is now over a century old.

Alcott’s atypical upbringing and tight-knit relationships with her sisters later inspired her most recognized work, Little Women , which follows the story of the four March sisters — Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy.

The parallels between Alcott’s family of vibrant women and the March sisters aren’t uncanny, they’re intentional. The eldest sister in the book, Meg, was modeled on Alcott’s own oldest sister, Anna; Beth was based off her real sister Lizzie; Amy was the caricature of her youngest sister, May; and Jo was modeled after herself.

“I don’t miss [Lizzie] as I expected to do, for she seems nearer and dearer than before; and I am glad to know she is safe from pain and age in some world where her innocent soul must be happy.” Louisa May Alcott

It seems the book may also have been a sort of catharsis for Alcott, considering she wrote the whole manuscript in less than three months and featured real-life traumas in the book, like the death of her sister Lizzie by scarlet fever. Alcott also honestly portrayed her sibling rivalry between her youngest sister, May, through the rivalry between characters Jo and Amy.

Little Women was initially published as a short story series and became an instant hit among young female readers after its first installment in 1868. The story was later published in the form of a novel and its popularity cemented Alcott as a bonafide author. More importantly, the profits helped her to provide for her family.

“Money is the end and aim of my mercenary existence,” she once wrote to a friend.

Indeed, Alcott wrote the female-focused story at the behest of her publishers, but Alcott herself was never interested in writing a book for girls. “I don’t enjoy this sort of thing,” Alcott admitted in her diary. “Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.”

She thought this kind of writing for girls to be “moral pap for the young.”

IMDB Little Women has been adapted for film and television various times. The original book was released in shorts as a part of a larger series.

In her journals and her letters to friends, Alcott wrote plainly about her resentment for the popularity of Little Women . She especially disliked the demand from its young female fans who wanted Jo’s character to marry Laurie, the March sisters’ handsome and rich next-door neighbor.

For Louisa May Alcott, who watched her mother endure a poor marriage, eternal singledom or “spinsterhood” was a far better fate than becoming a wife.

“Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that were the only end and aim to a woman’s life,” she wrote in her journal while finishing the second half of Little Women . “I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone.”

She felt the same about herself. Alcott never did wed or have any children. “I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe,” she wrote.

The New York Public Library A newsprint covering 100 years since Louisa May Alcott’s writing was published.

Still, Alcott did not want to disappoint her readers who had obviously become overly invested in her characters. As a cheeky compromise, in the Little Women sequel titled Good Wives , the author married Jo off but to someone else other than Laurie.

The story of Jo March and her sisters was so embraced by readers that Alcott was compelled to write more installments to the series. She published Little Men (1871), which detailed Jo March’s life at the Plumfield School that she founded with her husband Professor Bhaer, and Jo’s Boys (1886) which was the final chapter to the March family saga.

A Tale That Endures

Louisa May Alcott was also a progressive feminist. She was in many ways ahead of her time. She possessed an independence and sense of freedom which she felt belonged to all women. In 1879, she became the first woman registered to vote in Concord, Massachusetts.

In 1888, after years of struggling with illness, Louisa May Alcott took her last breath at 56. But Little Women didn’t die with its author.

Wilson Webb/CTMG/IMDB Greta Gerwig directed the 2019 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s enduring story.

In 1912, Marian de Forest adapted Little Women for Broadway. It was adapted into a silent film a few years later. There were also, of course, multiple big-screen productions of Little Women in color, including the 1994 adaptation starring A-listers Kirsten Dunst as Amy March and Winona Ryder as Jo.

Producer Denise Di Novi, who was behind the 1994 production, teamed up with actor-turned-director Greta Gerwig of Ladybird in the newest take of the classic story set to premiere Christmas 2019.

The March girls were “four really talented weirdo girls who were ambitious and funny and competitive and kind of crazy,” said Gerwig in a New York Times interview . It is perhaps why the story still resonates with women to this day.

Gerwig added that Alcott made “all of these inappropriate emotions for young women to have” so relatable and real that the story has remained relevant even today. The warmth and honesty between the March sisters and their disparate, independent characters are perhaps the reason why Little Women has been retold so many times since it was first published over a century ago.

Now that you’ve learned about Louisa May Alcott, the brilliant mind behind ‘Little Women,’ meet Emma Lazarus , the courageous Jewish poet behind the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. Then, read about the little-known life of Ada Lovelace , the female engineer who created the first computer code.

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The Alcotts

Louisa May Alcott was the second of four daughters of Abigail May Alcott, the product of a distinguished Boston family, and philosopher Bronson Alcott, a self-educated farmer’s son. The Alcotts were the inner circle of the Transcendentalist movement; Bronson Alcotts closest friends were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The two great thinkers would be the objects of teenage Louisa’s intense romantic yearnings. Her childhood would be peopled with the most important activists of the abolition movement as well as the era’s leading intellectuals.

Bronson Alcott worked hard, but never with the mundane objective of earning a living, and brought his young family to the verge of homelessness and starvation. Alcott’s childhood poverty was tempered by family unity and intellectual riches. Under some 30 temporary Alcott roofs, she was taught to cultivate an open mind and a social conscience, and to revere nature as God’s best work. From the age of eight she would keep a journal, recording her passions, her moods, and her difficulty controlling her temper, and would continue to express her feelings throughout her lifetime in hundreds of works in a wide variety of literary forms.

When Louisa was 10, Bronson enlisted the family in an experiment in communal living on a tract he named Fruitlands in honor of its wizened orchard. Six months of Transcendental agriculture left the Alcotts destitute, Bronson suicidal, and the Alcott marriage on the verge of dissolution. A distressed Louisa reported it all in her childhood diary. The Fruitlands fiasco fueled Louisa’s fierce ambition to make the family rich. She wanted to be famous, too.

Her first and favorite plan was to attain wealth and renown by becoming a great actress. From her teenage years she wrote, costumed, produced, directed, and starred in plays. Off the stage, her life was not without drama. The Alcotts were staunch abolitionists, supporting complete racial equality, including intermarriage. As part of the Underground Railroad, they risked their own freedom hiding fugitive slaves. (Seven year-old Louisa once opened an unused oven to discover a frightened fugitive inside. She taught him to write letters.) As an adult she would know the orator Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Editor of The Liberator, the fiery antislavery newspaper; Mrs. John Brown, widow of the hanged leader of the raid on Harper’s Ferry; Julia Ward Howe, who wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, and Reverend Theodore Parker. In Boston and Concord, the Alcotts were intimates of the great transcendentalist thinkers and writers of the day. Emerson encouraged Louisa to spend hours in his library. On excursions at Walden Pond, she studied botany with Thoreau. The Hawthornes lived next door.

Young Louisa tried her hand at poetry as well as drama, and at the age of 17 wrote her first novel, The Inheritance, heavily influenced by Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. (The manuscript would languish for 130 years before it was discovered and published.)

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Louisa May Alcott

Alcott was born on November 29, 1832, in Germantown at Pine Place, 5425 Germantown Avenue, to Amos Bronson and Abigail May Alcott. Louisa served as a nurse in Union hospital at Georgetown during the Civil War. Later in 1863 Hospital Sketches was published from the letters she wrote during this period. In 1867 she edited a children's magazine called Merry's Museum .

Alcott found her greatest success with Little Women , published in 1898. She released a second volume the next year. Her other works include An Old Fashioned Girl (1870), Little Men (1871), Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag (6 vols., 1872-82), and Jo's Boys (1886).

Louisa May Alcott

Short stories.

On November 29, 1832, Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was born the second daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail "Abba" May in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Her father, Bronson Alcott was a teacher that believed children should enjoy learning, a controversial notion for the time and he moved the family to Boston, Massachusetts in 1844 where he established the Temple School and joined the Transcendental Club with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau . Alcott's upbringing was greatly influenced by the Transcendentalist Movement , which strongly impacted her writing.

In 1862 Louisa headed to Washington, DC to serve as a Civil War nurse. During this time she contracted Typhoid fever and was treated with calomel, a mercury-laden drug used to treat the disease at the time. As a consequence, she suffered the effects of mercury poisoning for the remainder of her life. Her experiences as a nurse inspired her to write Hospital Sketches (1863). In 1864 she followed it with Moods. At this point in time, her publisher requested a "girl's story" and in two and a half months Alcott produced Little Women, a book that was largely based on her own experiences growing up with her tree sisters. Little Women, her most beloved work, was an instant success and the public demanded a second volume. The financial woes that had troubled the Alcott family were finally over as Little Women launched the author as a literary star.

Additional Biographical Sketch of Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott , author, b. in Germantown, Pa., 29 Nov., 1832; d. in Boston, Mass., 6 March, 1888. When she was about two years of age her parents removed to Boston, and in her eighth year to Concord, Mass. At the age of eleven she was brought under the influence of the community that endeavored to establish itself near Harvard, in Worcester co. Henry David Thoreau was for a time her teacher; but she was instructed mainly by her father. She began to write for publication at the age of sixteen, but with no marked success for fifteen years . During that time she devoted ten years to teaching. In 1862 she went to Washington as a volunteer nurse, and for many months labored in the military hospitals. At this time she wrote to her mother and sisters letters containing sketches of hospital life and experience, which on her return were revised and published in book form (Boston, 1863), and attracted much attention. In 1866 she went to Europe to recuperate her health, which had been seriously impaired by her hospital work, and on her return in 1867 she wrote “Little Women,” which was published the following year, and made her famous. The sales in less than three years amounted to 87,000 copies. Her characters were drawn from life, and are full of the buoyant, free, hopeful New England spirit which marked her own enthusiastic love for nature, freedom, and life. Her other stories were conceived in the same vein, and have been almost equally popular. They are: “Flower Fables or Fairy Tales” (Boston, 1855); “Hospital Sketches,” her first book, now out of print, reissued with other stories (1869); “An Old-Fashioned Girl” (1869); “Little Men” (1871); a series called “Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag” (1871-'82), containing “My Boys,” “Shawl Straps,” “Cupid and Chow-Chow” , “My Girls,” “Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore,” and “An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving” ; “Work, A Story of Experience” (1873); “Eight Cousins” (1874); “Rose in Bloom” (1876); “Silver Pitchers” (1876); “Under the Lilacs” (1878); “Jack and Jill” (1880); “Moods” (1864), reissued in a revised edition (1881); “Proverb Stories” (1882); “Spinning-Wheel Stories” (1884); “Lulu's Library,” the first of a new series (1885). Ednah D. Cheney wrote her life (Boston, 1889). — Another daughter, May, artist (Mrs. Ernest Nieriker ), b. in Concord, Mass., in 1840; d. in December, 1879. At the school of design in Boston, and in the studios of Krug, Rimmer, Hunt, Vautier, Johnston, and Müller she received the best attainable instruction, and subsequently divided her time between Boston, London, and Paris. After her marriage she lived mainly in Paris. Her strength was as a copyist and as a painter of still life, either in oils or water-colors. Her success as a copyist of Turner was such as to command the praise of Mr. Ruskin, and secure the adoption of some of her work for the pupils to copy at the South Kensington schools in London. In these branches of work she had few equals. She published “Concord Sketches,” with a preface by her sister (Boston, 1869).

-- Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography

Visit American Literature's American History in Literature , Civil War Stories , Transcendentalism - Study Guide , and our African American Library for other important writings and figures which helped shape America.

11 Facts About Louisa May Alcott, the Author of Little Women

Turns out she didn't want to write her most beloved book.

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• Little Women is based on Alcott's childhood experiences—but there's a lot she left out. Some interesting facts about her? Alcott was once a servant, wrote fiction under a pseudonym, and didn't want to write Little Women to begin with.
• Now, you can watch Greta Gerwig's movie adaptation of Little Women on Christmas.

"I will do something, by and by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t," Louisa May Alcott vowed as a child.

Born in 1832 to a principled and intellectual New England family, Alcott never let go of her childhood ambitions . In fact, her vivid imagination is what allowed her to surmount the expectations of life for a woman in the conservative Victorian era. Bucking the norm, Alcott never married or had children. Instead, she had a flourishing and successful career as an author –just as she had envisioned as a girl.

Little Women , Alcott's beloved and bestselling novel , is intrinsically wrapped up with those childhood dreams. Alcott based the 600-page novel on her experiences growing up with three sisters in Concord, MA. The March sisters, proxies for the Alcotts, grapple with the transition from girlhood to adulthood, and the dreams lost along the way.

With Greta Gerwig's latest (and definitive) adaptation of Little Women premiering December 25, we're looking back on the fascinating life of its creator, a woman ahead of her time.

Louisa May Alcott grew up among the country's most renowned thinkers.

For a girl with literary ambitions, the Alcott house was the ideal cocoon. Alcott's father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was a thinker, poet, educator, philosopher, and member of the Transcendentalist inner circle.

The Alcott sisters' childhood teacher was 23-year-old Henry David Thoreau , who taught them lessons in the woods near Walden Pond or on his boat, the Musketaquid . As a teenager, Alcott picked books from the shelves of Ralph Waldo Emerson's gigantic library. Allegedly, she had crushes on them both .

The Alcotts were extremely poor.

Amos Bronson Alcott was a great thinker—and a terrible provider. Alcott said he would " starve or freeze before he will sacrifice principle to comfort ." While working as an educator in New England, Alcott's innovative teaching methods often got him kicked out of schools. The Alcott family reportedly moved 20 times over the course of 30 years , including a stint at a utopian commune called Fruitlands .

Simply put, they were destitute, and very often starving. Alcott was determined to help her family out of poverty. Eventually, she did.

The Alcotts lived in the same house as Nathaniel Hawthorn.

But not at the same time. The Alcotts lived in Hillside from 1845 to 1852 , when much of the action depicted in Little Women took place. The Wayside was a stop on the Underground Railroad , and the Alcotts—fervent Abolitionists—likely harbored fugitive slaves.

When the Alcotts moved to nearby Orchard house in 1852, Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter , bought their house and renamed it "Wayside."

Alcott worked as a servant.

By the time she was 18, Alcott had already held a variety of jobs: She was a kindergarten teacher, a seamstress, and a short story writer. Next, she decided to become a household servant as an "experiment," according to a story she wrote about the experience later on.

By working as a servant, Alcott was breaking with expectations. "Teaching a private school was the proper thing for an indigent gentlewoman," Alcott wrote.

Her time as a servant was harrowing. Not only was the work itself extremely difficult—she was sexually harassed by her employer. “I was to serve his needs, soothe his sufferings, and sympathize with his sorrows—be a galley slave, in fact,” Alcott wrote. She quit the job soon after.

Alcott gained a lifelong empathy for women in the domestic sphere. Hannah, the March's servant in Little Women , is a three-dimensional figure and part of the family.

She witnessed the horrors of the Civil War firsthand.

Hospital sketches (annotated).

In 1861, Alcott volunteered to be a nurse at a Union hospital in Washington, D.C. "As I can't fight, I will content myself with working with those who can," she wrote to her friend, Alf Whitman (an inspiration for Laurie), per Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women .

But Alcott only lasted at the hospital for six weeks. The tireless 12-hour shifts, the terrifying sights, and the difficult living conditions proved to be an insurmountable combination. Two months after arriving, in January 1862, Alcott came down with typhoid pneumonia and was treated with calomel, a poisonous mercury.

Though she recovered, she was weakened permanently. Alcott died of a stroke at the young age of 55.

In 1863, Alcott published her recollections of those six weeks in a book for children called Hospital Sketches.

Alcott wrote racy fiction under a pen name.

Alcott couldn't resist a nom de plume . Her first-ever published work, a poem, was published under the pseudonym Flora Fairfield . In 1854, when she was 22, Alcott published a collection of fairy tales worthy of her real name.

Before writing Little Women , Alcott published racy (and lucrative) Gothic thrillers under the name A.M. Bernard. According to the Los Angeles Times , the "blood and thunder" stories were characterized by "hashish, transvestitism, sadomasochism, violence and feminism." This darker side to Alcott's literary career was only discovered in 1942, when scholar Leona Rostenberg unearthed letters from a Harvard library with mention of the name.

She didn't want to write Little Women .

Alcott had a busy career as A.M. Bernard when her publisher, Thomas Niles, suggested she write a book for girls.

Originally, Alcott wasn't interested in the idea. However, Niles would only publish her father's philosophy book if Alcott would write a book, too. She wrote Little Women to help her father.

Alcott wrote Little Women in a 10-week flurry, drawing from her childhood experiences. Little Women was published in 1868; the March sisters' stories concluded with Good Wives in 1869.

Alcott wanted Jo to be a "literary spinster."

If Alcott had had her way, then Jo, the heroine of Little Women , would have remained unmarried, but she knew fans of the massively popular novel wouldn't stand for that kind of unconventional ending.

“I didn’t dare to refuse and out of perversity went and made a funny match for her,” Alcott wrote to a friend . She had a scheme for the book's second half, published in 1869.

Purposefully disappointing fans who hoped Jo would marry her childhood friend, Theodore Laurence, Alcott had Jo marry a much older German professor. Jo abandons her literary pursuits (at least for a while) and becomes domestic. Super domestic, actually—she has two biological children and adopts 18 !

She financed her sister's trips to Europe.

Like Amy in Little Women , Alcott's youngest sister Abigail May was a painter. But "Aunt March" didn't fund her three long trips to Europe—Alcott did.

As opposed to Alcott, Abigail May tried to have a career and a family. In Paris, she was a well-respected artist and travel writer . However, tragedy struck when she died seven weeks after giving birth to a baby girl, Louisa. May was 39 years old.

Alcott never married, but she raised her niece.

After Abigail May died in 1879, her daughter Louisa (called Lulu) was sent to Boston to live with her wealthy aunt. Alcott published a story called "Lu Sing" for her beloved niece.

When Alcott died in 1888, Lulu's father brought her to Switzerland. She remained in Europe until her death in 1975 at the age of 95. As Alcott predicted in "Lu Sing," Lulu really did live happily ever after, despite a tumultuous childhood.

Alcott was the first woman registered to vote in Concord, MA.

In 1879, the state of Massachusetts granted women the right to vote—but with limits. They were allowed to vote in towns, only on issues regarding school committees . Continuing her mother's work as a Suffragette, Alcott was proudly the first of 20 women to vote that day in Concord.

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Elena Nicolaou is the former culture editor at Oprah Daily. 

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Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography Paperback – November 8, 2011

• Print length 298 pages
• Language English
• Publication date November 8, 2011
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.44 inches
• ISBN-10 1416569928
• ISBN-13 978-1416569923
• See all details

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About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (November 8, 2011)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 298 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1416569928
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1416569923
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.44 inches
• #5,667 in Author Biographies
• #11,380 in Women's Biographies
• #16,484 in Historical Biographies (Books)

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Susan cheever.

I was born in New York City and have lived here on and off my entire life--in fact I went to nursery school a few blocks from where I write this. It took me a long time to admit I was a writer--I had a career as a teacher and I loved it. When I was married I couldn't get a teaching job so by an amazing stroke of luck I went to work for my local small town newspaper. After a long time as a newspaper and magazine journalist, I took off to write a novel when I was 35 and I haven't looked back.

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Boston Women’s Heritage Trail

Boston Women Making History

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa may alcott (1832-88).

Although author Louisa May Alcott (1832-88) is best known for her book, Little Women, describing her family life in Concord, Massachusetts, she had several homes in Boston where she was better able to earn money to support her family. When her writing began to sell, living in Boston kept her close to her publisher, Roberts Brothers, and to other reformers and literary figures.

Louisa was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1832 to Bronson Alcott and Abigail May. Louisa’s mother was a member of the prominent May family of Boston where they attended King’s Chapel. Louisa’s father, Bronson Alcott, was a teacher who would become one of America’s most influential reformers of education. He was also part of the Transcendentalist movement, which encouraged the perfection of the individual. As an educator, Bronson Alcott stressed the intellectual, physical, and emotional development of each child on his or her own terms, through dialogue between teacher and child. Louisa’s older sister, Anna, had already been born. Two more sisters, Elizabeth and Abby May would succeed.

In 1834, Bronson Alcott moved his family to Boston where he opened his progressive and controversial Temple School in the Tremont Temple on Tremont Street. To assist him with teaching, he relied on two of the brightest women in Boston—Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller, who were also Transcendentalists. Their work produced Alcott’s book Conversations with Children (1836), which shocked Bostonians when they learned he was teaching children a more “personalized” view of Jesus. When Bronson Alcott enrolled a young African American girl in his school, insisting on a school policy of color blindness, parents withdrew their children and the school closed by 1840. Alcott nearly went bankrupt.

Meanwhile, his family was living in Concord in one of several houses they would occupy and Louisa was being educated at home. Louisa once wrote, “I never went to school except to my father or such governesses as from time to time came into the family … so we had lessons each morning in the study. And very happy hours they were to us, for my father taught in the wise way which unfolds what lies in the child’s nature as a flower blooms, rather than crammed in, like a Strasburg goose, with more than it could digest.” However, the Alcott family struggled financially and always would. Bronson Alcott was a brilliant philosopher and educator, but a dismal provider.

The Alcotts lived near fellow Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau whose counsel Bronson Alcott sought for new projects and guidance. In 1834, he moved his family to Harvard, Massachusetts, where he hoped to establish a model community called Fruitlands. As the historian Joan Goodwin described the project, “Fruitland [made] use of no animal products or labor, except, as Abigail Alcott observed, for that of women. She and her small daughters struggled to keep household and farm going while the men went about the countryside philosophizing.”

The harsh reality of winter brought an end to Fruitlands, and the Alcotts returned to Concord where they took another house near Emerson called Hillside. Louisa was allowed to use the great man’s impressive library, and she began to read works of great literature and history that sparked her imagination. In her teenaged years she began to write thrillers, which she hoped to sell and provide income for, as she put it, her “pathetic family.” She wrote her first such story in 1848, although it was not published until four years later in the Olive Branch. Meanwhile, Louisa and her older sister took teaching positions to earn money. A brief stint as a governess in Dedham led to her essay “How I Went Out to Service.” Publisher James T. Fields rejected her work and advised her, “Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can’t write.”

Louisa was now living in Boston, taking in sewing, serving as a governess, reading, and working to improve her writing. What money she made, she sent home to Concord. In Boston, Louisa also encountered some of the greatest reformers of the nineteenth century, including Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, John Turner Sargent, and William Lloyd Garrison. She enjoyed the Boston theater and had one of her plays accepted but not performed. Between 1855 and 1857, while summering in Walpole, New Hampshire, she organized the Walpole Amateur Dramatic Company. In 1857, back in Concord, she formed the Concord Dramatic Union.

Still writing, tutoring, and supporting her family from Boston, Louisa’s stories were finally beginning to sell. In 1863, “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” written under the pen name A. M. Barnard, appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newsletter. For her effort, she won $100. Louisa was also writing two serious novels that would be published a number of years later: Moods and Work.

During the winter of 1862-3, Louisa worked as a nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, Virginia, wanting to contribute what she could to the end of slavery which she, her father, and so many of their friends had been advocating for years. Unfortunately, she contracted typhoid pneumonia and had to return home. (It is likely that the mercurous chloride with which she was treated contributed to her early death.)

Louisa May Alcott’s brief service as a Civil War nurse inspired her to write “Hospital Sketches” which appeared in the Boston Commonwealth as a series and as a book in 1863. Hospital Sketches was enormously popular, and her work was now in demand. After the war, Louisa traveled to Europe as the companion of Anna Weld for a short visit to see the sites she had read about as a girl. When she returned to Boston, she accepted the editorship of Merry’s Museum, a children’s magazine. She also became its major contributor. In 1867, the magazine’s editor, Thomas Niles, asked her to write a book especially for girls. The result was part one of Little Women. The book was a best seller, and readers clamored for more. Part two appeared the following spring.

As Joan Goodwin explains, “from this point on Louisa May Alcott was a victim of her own success. Though she yearned to do more serious fiction, children’s books flowed from her pen for the rest of her life because their sales supported her family. Louisa herself wrote, “Twenty years ago, I resolved to make the family independent if I could. At forty that is done. Debts all paid, even the outlawed ones, and we have enough to be comfortable. It has cost me my health, perhaps; but as I still live, there is more for me to do, I suppose.”

Goodwin goes on to write that now “Alcott gave her energy to practical reforms, women’s rights and temperance. She attended the Women’s Congress of 1875 in Syracuse, New York, where she was introduced by Mary Livermore. She contributed to Lucy Stone’s Woman’s Journal while organizing Concord women to vote in the school election. ‘Was the first woman to register my name as a voter,’ she wrote. ‘Drove about and drummed up women to my suffrage meeting. So hard to move people out of the old ruts.’ And again, ‘Helped start a temperance society much needed in C[oncord]. I was secretary, and wrote records, letters, and sent pledges, etc.’”

Louisa continued to publish children’s books, and in 1880, after the death of her sister, May, shortly after childbirth, she welcomed May’s infant daughter who was named for Louisa but called “Lulu.” She published the stories she told the little girl as Lulu’s Library. In 1882, after her father suffered a stroke, Louisa settled the remaining members of her family at 10 Louisburg Square. Her own health was failing, and she moved “from place to place in search of health and peace to write, settling at last in a Roxbury nursing home,” according to Joan Goodwin.

Bronson Alcott died on March 4, 1888; Louisa died two days later at the age of fifty-six. By then, knowing her death was not far off despite her young age, she had legally adopted her widowed sister Anna’s son John Pratt to whom she willed her copyrights. Any income would be shared by Anna, Lulu, John, and Anna’s other son Fred.

Louisa May Alcott was buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord on “Author’s Ridge” near Thoreau and Emerson. A Civil War veteran’s marker graces her gravestone. During her lifetime, she produced almost three hundred literary works.

– Bonnie Hurd Smith

• Orchard House (Concord MA)
• E-text version of Little Women
• The woman behind Little Women
• The Web of American Transcendentalism
• Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott

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Nonfiction That Rivals Little Women : The Forgotten Essays of Louisa May Alcott

Liz rosenberg on the literary marvels of alcott's memoirs.

Louisa May Alcott is best known for Little Women , of course, her classic American novel for young readers—but she earned her first taste of celebrity as an essayist. That should surprise no one. Her writing genius defied genre. In many ways, her finest essays are even more brilliant—more consistently brilliant—than her novels and stories. Three of her non-fiction pieces alone—”Going Out to Service”; “Transcendental Wild Oats”; and “Hospital Sketches”—are, as they used to say in Charles II’s day, worth the price of admission to all the rest. Anyone who has read and loved her novels will recognize her characteristic style, energy and wit.

Louisa May Alcott was born to a family of high idealists—lovers of equality, ideas, and books. Her first playthings as a toddler were her father’s volumes from his private library. She learned to express herself and share her observations of the world in the childhood journals her parents required her to write. These provided a habit of writing, and also fodder for novels, stories and non-fiction to follow in time.

In her earliest writings  she identifies and scorns hypocrisy—especially when it harms the poor, the helpless, and the young. By her teens, she exercises the eagle eye of a reporter. For instance, she describes the highly-respected Julia Ward Howe, author of the American anthem, “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as a “straw colored supercilious lady with pale eyes & a green gown in which she looked like a faded lettuce.” Her Boston relations would have been appalled had they read her notes.

Louisa sharpened her literary tools in those diaries and letters—and by the time she was writing essays she’d begun to truly hone her craft. One of her literary idols was Charles Dickens. She modeled the family “newspaper” on his Pickwick Papers , shared his empathy for the downtrodden, and learned from him to pay close attention to and bring readers to love even her most minor characters.

Alcott played a supporting role in her own family, shaped in the shadow of her eccentric philosopher father. Bronson Alcott stood tall among the founders of American Transcendentalism and Louisa’s first teachers and adult friends included great figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. No one could have had a more exalted education. Emerson loaned her books from his library and Thoreau became her first natural science teacher, escorting the four Alcott sisters on walks and canoe rides, pointing out the flora and fauna (and more fancifully, the fairies) of New England.

Alcott began to write seriously in early childhood. She composed her first poem, “To the First  Robin” when she was eight. By the time she was fourteen, she was given the great gift of her own room and desk. As a teenager she wrote anything and everything—stories, romances, news articles for the family paper, comedies, melodramas, poetry and plays.

Her earliest “real book,” as she called it, was Flower Fables published in December, 1854; a collection of fairy tales written for her pupil Ellen Emerson, the daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Inscribing the very first copy to her mother, Louisa made an apology and a promise: “I hope to pass in time from flowers and fables to men and realities.” One of the ways she kept her promise  was by writing autobiographical essays about even the grittiest “realities.”

In one of her earliest essays, “Going Out to Service,” Alcott records her labors as a young, naïve and  over-worked domestic servant. When Alcott was about fifteen, her mother began an informal employment agency geared to help the poor. Louisa became one of her early “clients,” going out to keep house for a miserly lawyer in Dedham. Alcott’s sympathies always lay with under-appreciated and underpaid female workers, and the roots of her sympathy may have begun with her own difficult  experiences “in service,” shoveling snow, cooking, cleaning, hauling water and chopping wood. There is nothing glamorous about her character in the piece. Most authors would hesitate to show themselves in such a humble and humbled light.

Yet the piece is as deft as anything she ever wrote. Alcott’s  sanctimonious minister-employer  proves to be a liar, glutton,  and predator with designs on the poor young author. “[H]e presented me with an overblown rose, which fell to pieces before I got out of the room, pressed my hand, and dismissed me with a fervent “God bless you, child. Don’t forget the dropped eggs for breakfast.” Part of the tragicomedy is that the innocent narrator doesn’t see his misbehavior coming—but the reader does.

The narrator seems to leap right out of a Jane Austen novel. She sees but does not understand  what lies ahead. “He possessed an impressive nose, a fine flow of language, and a pair of large hands, encased in black kid gloves.” Those large hands “encased” in black kid gloves are also the stuff of gothic horror—at which Alcott also excelled.

An aspiring, unknown Louisa Alcott presented “Going Out to Service” in 1861  to Boston’s most distinguished publisher, James Field of newly-created Atlantic Monthly .  He glanced through the piece and  dismissed her with a condescending “Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can’t write.” To add insult to injury, her offered her forty dollars as a loan to start her own school. Luckily for us all, a quiet young editor named Thomas Niles sat beside Fields during this interview, listening in. Years later, he commissioned, edited, and published her novel Little Women .

Her first taste of significant success came from a book-length memoir about her time as a Union war nurse. Alcott’s autobiographical “Hospital Sketches” captured  the attention of a reading public hungry for news of the American Civil War. But it was not written with an eye toward fame. Culled from letters home and journal notes, Alcott thought it a hodge-podge of sketches, unlikely to interest anyone.

She was more shocked than anyone when it became a popular sensation. First published  in serial form and later  as a book, (1863) “Hospital Sketches” provided rare on-the-ground reportage of the long, bloody conflict from a war nurse’s perspective—a thing  unheard of at the time. Her non-fiction was sometimes severe, and always strived to be real—even when she included elements obviously invented.

“Hospital Sketches,” this longest and most memorable work of non-fiction, features a Civil War narrator named “Nurse Periwinkle.” Nearly everything else in it derives from her actual personal history: Louisa did nurse sick and dying Union soldiers; she witnessed their arrival from the catastrophic battle at Fredericksburg. She served as head of the night ward after only two weeks on the job. In the Hurly Burly House hospital (again, only the name is changed) she came down with typhoid pneumonia that nearly killed her, and was heavily dosed with the wonder drug calomel, the mercury poison that likely did.

Grateful nineteenth century readers found in “Hospital Sketches” their first real-life account of the solders’ experiences of the Civil War. Hers was new journalism before the phrase was ever invented—and readers embraced it. War news traveled northward slowly and unreliably. “Hospital Sketches” filled the gap for anxious Yankee families and friends. But Louisa expressed amazement at the book’s success. “I cannot see why people like a few extracts from topsey turvey letters written on inverted tea kettles,” she marveled. Only later did she admit that these autobiographical and realistic essays “pointed the way” toward her true writing material and style.

Among her best essays, one of the last written  is Alcott’s autobiographical piece on her unhappy early childhood experience at a communal farm. Written in 1873, “Transcendental Wild Oats” alternates broad comedy with tragedy. It records in detail the near-dissolution of the Alcott family. They nearly froze, nearly starved. The commune even at its most populous was too small to succeed, and it housed eccentrics and bonafide lunatics equally. The utopian experiment was a dismal failure, for the commune and for the Alcotts personally, and at the end of it all Bronson suffered a breakdown.

Surely these events were traumatic for a ten year old child, and this may partly explain why she waited so long to write about it, but in “Transcendental Wild Oats Alcott” never lingers on the psychological devastation. Instead of dwelling in the self-reflection more typical of memoir, she focuses on the characters around her and records the homely details of daily life—”unleavened bread, porridge, and water for breakfast; bread, vegetables, and water for dinner; bread, fruit, and water for supper”—leaving little room for disbelief.

It must all be true, because it sounds true. Indeed that is part of her genius as an essayist and memoirist. She is as succinct as a newspaper reporter. Her prose canters along. She covers great distances in the fewest words.  There is no dilly-dallying. Alcott once advised an aspiring writer, “The strongest, simplest words are best.”

On more than one occasion she halted publication of her nonfiction because she felt it was not true, not deep enough. This happened with a linked series of European travel essays, written for a projected book called Shawl-Straps . Instead, the pieces appeared later in miscellaneous books like Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag , where the spare parts could find a place. The popularity of her “Hospital Sketches” had led to invitations for similar works of nonfiction. One collection intended as a travelogue of American places she cut short close to its start, fearing that writing superficially might become a bad habit. She refused to become an imitation of herself.

Nor was she ever willing (or perhaps even able)  in her nonfiction to keep a straight face throughout, no matter how somber the subject matter. In her lighter tone—her tone, throughout all of her essays, is flexible—she captures, for example, the comic anxiety of the amateur traveler desperate not to lose important papers: “put my tickets in every conceivable place…and finish by losing them entirely. Suffer agonies till a compassionate neighbour pokes them out of a crack with his pen-knife.”

Her essays are rich with unerasable moments, and as in her greatest works of fiction, they strike the intersecting point between tragedy and comedy. If she tugs on heart-strings in her essays—and most assuredly she does—she also demonstrates a clear awareness of the funny side of life.

Alcott understood that habitual use of humor and exaggeration might incline readers to doubt the veracity of her non-fiction.  At the end of Hospital Sketches she urges the reader to believe what is only partly true: “such a being as Nurse Periwinkle does exist, that she really did go to Washington, and…these Sketches are not romance.” Her fiction found its roots in real-life experiences and her non-fiction always contained kernels of invention.  She largely shrugged off strict distinctions between fact and fiction.

In her non-fiction Alcott spoke her mind, politically and otherwise, and incorporated into her writing her beliefs in abolition, suffrage and equal rights. She also wrote dozens of civic-minded minded letters, both privately and publicly, on issues important to her day. Newspapers provided a handy platform. One of her shortest pieces, “Happy Women,” published in a “Column of Advice to Young Women” on—of all days—Valentine’s Day, defends women’s inalienable right to remain single.

Alcott herself, though she later became an adoptive mother to a niece and a nephew, never married. Her mother Abigail May Alcott had labored in Boston’s worst slums, campaigning tirelessly for healthier, safer working conditions for women, fair pay, equal opportunity. Louisa was an outspoken defender of the rights of women to vote, early and late. (She was also the first woman ever to cast a vote in her home town of Concord, Ma.) She shared her mother’s dedication to feminist causes and social justice.

In her fiction for young readers she had become known as “The Children’s Friend.” Such accolades were both enriching (financially and otherwise) and limiting. Essay writing allowed her to say openly what her children’s stories could only suggest.  She had tried bringing her social conscience and philosophical beliefs into her adult fiction, only to find herself roundly condemned for thinking as she did—perhaps indeed for thinking at all.

Fortunately for her future young readers, her “serious” literary fiction—which she’d believed was her destined format—was a commercial failure, coming into print only on the heels of the far more successful Hospital Sketches. That essay’s success was the main reason her literary novels were published at all.  Suddenly, Alcott became a viable commodity. Her first serious novel, Moods , published in 1864, earned tepid reviews at best and poor sales; her second, Work , published nine years later, fared no better.

Even her more daring, gothic novels appeared only under a series of pseudonyms. Had any of these fully succeeded, we might never have had Little Women, nor any of its successors. As it was,  Alcott tumbled into children’s literature—or was pushed into it, by Thomas Niles, the young editorial assistant who had seen her early essay “Going Out to Service” rejected out of hand.

In the 1860s and 70s a new pseudonymous “Oliver Optic” series of books for boys flooded a new market and Niles wanted to test the publishing waters for girls, believing there was a vacuum waiting to be filled. He used a blend of charm, encouragement and family pressure to persuade Louisa to try her hand at a girl’s novel. Privately she noted in her journal, “I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.” The one saving grace, she believed,  was the story’s reality: “we lived it.”

Autobiographical essays such as “How I Went Out to Service,” “Hospital Sketches” and “Transcendental Wild Oats” are closer in tone, style, voice and subject matter to Little Women than any of her early fiction, including her many gothic romances and the two serious novels. If one wants to see the author of the March family chronicles in the making, one need look no further than into those three exceptional essays. The published thrillers such as A Long Fatal Love Chase sound nothing like the author beloved in young people’s books like Little Women , Little Men , and Jo’s Boys .

But the essays certainly do. Even if they were not the literary jewels they are, they would be worthy of attention. It’s not often that we get to see a great author coming into her own before our eyes. The essays also give further proof of her indefatigable energy. Nothing but death and dying could slow her down.

As a young woman Alcott wrote for ten and twelve hours a day, in addition to her other labors. Later, after her stint as a war nurse,  she wrote with an aching arm, or painfully swollen leg propped up on a stool. Mercury poisoning from the “miracle cure”  calomel she’d been given, slow and insidious, had begun to take effect. The writing “machine,” as she called herself, labored to keep producing. She published not only to express herself, but to earn money to keep “The Pathetic Family,” (her private name for the Alcotts) afloat. She could not afford to sentimentalize or write lengthy and rambling descriptions; or to hold forth like  her father. She knew she must “please the public or starve.”

As a woman and as an author, Alcott was a force of nature. She worked incredibly long hours for years—scrubbed and sewed through the night, cleaned and cooked, taught school, walked miles to get where she needed to go—while also writing her own material in every possible genre  hours a day. None of non-fiction was ever intended to be her “real” work—that ambition she reserved for her unsuccessful literary adult novels.

But the warm reception of her essay “Hospital Sketches” gave her confidence to trust her own voice and material. Without that “hint,” as she called it,  she never could have written Little Women .  It proved to her that people love truth as well as invention. Under the most challenging circumstances, she kept on writing, celebrating the good and calling out the bad. She rejected sentimentality and self-pity in an era that encouraged both, especially for women who were expected to faint away at the first obstacle. That was not Louisa’s way. “I was there to work, not to wonder or weep….”

______________________________

A Strange Life: Selected Essays of Louisa May Alcott   is available via Notting Hill Editions .

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How Louisa May Alcott's Real-Life Family Inspired 'Little Women'

The writer didn't have to look far to pen the now-classic American novel.

Her latest book, Little Women , was a runaway bestseller — and the constant barrage of fan mail, the visits and the demands on her time had wrecked her already delicate health. “Don’t send me any more letters from so cracked girls,” she begged her mother in a letter from Switzerland in 1870. “The rampant infants must wait.”

The “infants” were Louisa’s fans, and ever since the publication of Little Women , they had bombarded her with letters asking for a sequel and demanding to know how much of the book was autobiographical — a question readers still pose today. Louisa had captured the world’s imagination with her tale of the brave, beloved March family, and Little Women — a book about the Civil War –era lives of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March, four sisters who struggle with life, love and friendship — has never been out of print. But Louisa’s real-life family, upon whom the book was partly based, was infinitely more complicated — and even more interesting.

Louisa's father was a transcendentalist

Born in Pennsylvania in 1832, Louisa was one of four sisters, the daughters of Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail “Abba” Alcott. Bronson, a self-educated Romantic, left his Connecticut home as a teenager to become a Yankee peddler , a type of traveling salesman. Life on the road suited the idealistic, optimistic Bronson, but he was a bad salesman and soon found himself in debt. This began a pattern of financial mismanagement and poverty that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Even though Bronson couldn’t handle money, he was passionate and idealistic — high-minded ideals attracted the young Abba. Born into relative wealth and social prestige as the daughter of a prominent New England family, Abba was drawn to Bronson’s love of education and social justice. The couple married in 1830.

Where Bronson was absent-minded, Abba was practical. When her husband’s schools failed because of his controversial, student-focused teaching methods, she lent him moral support. When he infuriated parents by admitting an African American student to his Boston school, she stood by him. And when he immersed himself in Transcendentalism — a new progressive philosophical movement that emphasized self-reliance, imagination and creativity — she went right along with him.

He began a utopian commune which served as inspiration one of Louisa's satires

Bronson was always in search of ways to put his ideals into action, and in 1843 he picked up his family and began a utopian commune called Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts. It was an unmitigated disaster. Though it was supposed to be a communal farm, Bronson knew nothing about farming and refused to use animals to work the land. The family kept to a vegetarian diet and eschewed all products derived from enslaved people labor. The land was hard to farm and the family nearly starved. Eventually, the experiment strained Abba and Bronson’s marriage nearly to a breaking point. Fruitlands failed in 1844 after just eight months.

Louisa would later write a satirical account of her family’s time at Fruitlands, called Transcendental Wild Oats . In it, she represents her father as a doomed dreamer whose philosophies are unsuited to the harsh world. “The world was not ready for Utopia yet,” she wrote, “and those who attempted to found it only got laughed at for her pains.” Privately, though, Louisa was much more negative about Bronson’s inability to support his family.

Louisa had three sisters who mirrored the March sisters

Even after moving back to Concord, Massachusetts, the family struggled with money. Bronson, consumed with causes linked to Transcendentalism and abolitionism, rarely worked, so Abba had to pick up the slack. She became one of America’s first professional social workers, and her daughters, Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth and Abigail May, worked as governesses, domestic servants and teachers to help support the family.

Oldest sister Anna, on whom domestic, marriage-minded Meg March of Little Women was based, was a talented actor, but felt her only option was to marry to escape her family’s poverty. “I have a foolish wish to be something great and I shall probably spend my life in a kitchen and die in the poor-house,” she wrote in her diaries.

Little is known about the inner life of Elizabeth, the third Alcott daughter, who was called “Lizzie” by her family. Her death at age 22 of scarlet fever devastated the Alcotts, and the angelic character of Beth March in Little Women , who, like Lizzie, contracts a fatal illness after helping a poor family, is Louisa’s tribute to her sister.

Abigail, better known as May, was the youngest Alcott sister, and she had big ambitions. With the financial assistance of Louisa, who had found success as a writer of short stories, poems and essays, May trained as an artist in Boston and Europe, gaining recognition as a painter and rubbing shoulders with figures like the Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt. In 1877, one of her paintings was displayed in the Paris Salon, and, as one of the few professional women artists of her age, she fought discrimination in her profession and struggled to help other poor women pursue art. Amy March, a self-centered artist who finds love with the family’s next-door neighbor in the novel, is based on May.

Though Louisa was just as independent and talented as Jo March, her literary counterpart, her life was marked by struggle and sorrow. During her bout as a Civil War nurse, she was treated with mercury for typhoid. Modern doctors believe she likely suffered from an autoimmune disorder such as lupus , based on photographs that show a rash on her face. Regardless of any health issues, Louisa worked herself to exhaustion trying to provide for her family.

Louisa was skeptical about 'Little Women'

In 1868, Louisa’s publisher asked her to write a book for girls. At first, she protested, but her need for money drove her to comply. In a matter of weeks, she dashed off the first volume of Little Women . “I plod away although I don’t enjoy this sort of thing,” she wrote in her journal at the time. “Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.”

Louisa’s skepticism was unfounded: Little Women was a smash hit. Soon, readers demanded a sequel. Louisa continued the story of Jo and her sisters with a second volume of Little Women that followed the girls into adulthood and marriage. She went on to publish multiple novels for girls, but felt hemmed in by her public image as the beloved author of children’s stories. Her adult fiction, which explored quandaries of love, feminism and philosophy, failed to gain a footing, while her health was irrevocably damaged by poverty and the grind of her work life. “Anyone who dreams of wealth and fame might be warned by this story of a woman who struggled so hard to make money that by the time she reached her goal she could not longer appreciate its benefits,” writes Louisa’s biographer, Susan Cheever writes.

Louisa never regained her health after the success of Little Women , but her later years weren’t as dismal as it may seem. When her sister May died in Europe in 1879, Louisa helped raise her daughter, Louisa May Nieriker. Louisa’s hard work and passion lived on in her niece — and in the books that survived her. Without her unusual family, there would have been no Louisa May Alcott — an author whose work sprang from an extraordinary life.

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Entertainment | A scholar discovers stories and poems possibly…

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Entertainment, entertainment | a scholar discovers stories and poems possibly written by louisa may alcott under a pseudonym, the author of “little women” may have been even more productive than previously thought.

Max Chapnick, a postdoctoral teaching associate at Northeastern University, believes he found about 20 stories and poems written by Louisa May Alcott under her own name as well as pseudonyms for local newspapers in Massachusetts in the late 1850s and early 1860s.

One of the pseudonyms is believed to be E. H. Gould, including a story about her house in Concord, Massachusetts , and a ghost story along the lines of the Charles Dickens classic “A Christmas Carol.” He also found four poems written by Flora Fairfield, a known pseudonym of Alcott’s. One of the stories written under her own name was about a young painter.

“It’s saying she’s really like … she’s hustling, right? She’s publishing a lot,” Chapnick said on a visit to the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, a national research library of pre-20th century American history and culture that has some of the stories Chapnick discovered in its collection as well as a first edition of “Little Women.”

Alcott remains best known for “Little Women,” published in two installments in 1868-69. Her classic coming-of-age novel about the four March sisters — Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy — has been adapted several times into feature films, most recently by Greta Gerwig in 2019 .

Chapnick discovered Alcott’s other stories as part of his research into spiritualism and mesmerism. As he scrolled through digitized newspapers from the American Antiquarian Society, he found a story titled “The Phantom.” After seeing the name Gould at the end of the story, he initially dismissed it as Alcott’s story.

But then he read the story again.

Chapnick found the name Alcott in the story — a possible clue — and saw that it was written about the time she would have been publishing similar stories. The story was also in the Olive Branch, a newspaper that had previously published her work.

As Chapnick searched through newspapers at the society and the Boston Public Library, he found more written by Gould — though he admits definitive proof they were written by Alcott’s has proven elusive.

“There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence to indicate that this is probably her,” said Chapnick, who last year published a paper on his discoveries in J19, the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. “I don’t think that there’s definitive evidence either way yet. I’m interested in gathering more of it.”

When first contacted by Chapnick about the writings, Gregory Eiselein, president of the Louisa May Alcott Society, said he was curious but skeptical.

“Over my more than thirty-year career as a literary scholar, I’ve received a variety of inquiries, emails, and manuscripts that propose the discovery of a new story by Louisa Alcott,” Eiselein, also a professor at Kansas State University, said in an email interview. “Typically, they turn out to be a known, though not famous, text, or a story re-printed under a new title for a different newspaper or magazine.”

But he has come to believe that Chapnick has found new stories, many of which shed light on Alcott’s early career.

“What stands out to me is the impressive range and variety of styles in Alcott’s early published works,” he said. “She writes sentimental poetry, thrilling supernatural stories, reform-minded non-fiction, work for children, work for adults, and more. It’s also fascinating to see how Alcott uses, experiments with, and transforms the literary formulas popular in the 1850s.”

Another Alcott scholar at Kansas State, Anne Phillips, said she was “excited” by Chapnick’s scholarship and said his paper makes a “compelling case” that these were her writings.

“Alcott scholars have had decades to compare her work in different genres, and that background is going to help us evaluate these new findings,” she said in an email interview.

“She reworked and reused names and situations and details and expressions, and we have a good, broad base from which to begin considering these new discoveries,” she said. ”There’s also something distinctive about her writing voice, across genres.”

This isn’t the first time that scholars have found stories written by Alcott under a pseudonym.

In the 1940s, Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern found thrillers written under the name A. M. Barnard was an Alcott pseudonym. She also wrote nonfiction stories, including about the Civil War where she served as a nurse, under the pseudonym Tribulation Periwinkle.

It wasn’t unusual for female writers, especially during this period, to use a pseudonym. In the case of Alcott, she may have wanted to protect her family’s reputation, since her family who though poor had wealthy connections that dated back to the American Revolutionary War.

“She might not have wanted them to know she was writing trashy stories about sex and ghosts and whatever,” Chapnick said.

“I think she was canny,” he continued. “She had an inkling that she would be a famous writer and she was trying to experiment and she didn’t want her experimentation to get in the way of her future career. So she was writing under a pseudonym to sort of like protect her future reputation.”

At the American Antiquarian Society, a researcher eagerly awaited the arrival of Chapnick earlier this month. For them, this find is validation that their collection of nearly 4 million books, newspapers, periodicals, manuscripts and pamphlets is a boon to researchers studying early American history. Many of their holdings are salvaged from attics, antique shops, book fairs, garage sales.

“We’re keeping these things for a reason. We’re not just keeping them to hoard them and pile them up,” Elizabeth Pope, the curator of books and digitized collections at the society. “We’re thrilled when people can find stories in them.”

For Chapnick, the collections offer the possibility of finding additional Alcott stories — including those written under other pseudonyms.

“The detective work is fun. The not knowing is kind of fun. I both wish and don’t wish that there would be a smoking gun, if that makes sense,” he said. “It would be great to find out one way or the other, but not knowing is also very interesting.”

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The US surgeon general wants a warning label on social media. Here’s why this may not work, according to Northeastern experts

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Applied psychology professor Rachel Rodgers did research that found warning labels on digitally altered photos are “ineffective.” Would a warning label on social media sites be effective?

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On Monday, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said he wants Congress to allow for warning labels to be placed on social media sites advising of the negative effects the platforms could have on adolescents’ mental health.

The warning labels would be like ones on tobacco and alcohol products, warning that “social media has not been proven safe,” Murthy wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times . He said some research shows that teens spending more than three hours a day on social media have a higher risk of mental health problems.

But the efficacy of such a label — and whether it’d even be allowed — is up for debate, according to Northeastern University experts.

“Warning labels on media images that have been digitally modified are ineffective in preventing the negative effects of media images on body image at best,” said Rachel Rodgers , an associate professor of applied psychology at Northeastern. “At worst they actually exacerbate these effects.”

Rodgers, who specializes in body image , did a meta-analysis of the experimental literature on this topic and found that there is no benefit to body image when it comes to labels on altered photos.

“Moreover, from a systemic perspective, using warning labels allows harmful industry practices to continue rather than leveraging systemic change, and places the burden on the user to protect themselves from something harmful,” Rodgers said. “When the user is a vulnerable young person, this is not an ethical stance.”

The use of such a label would have to be passed by Congress, but it’s also unclear if it would be upheld by the Supreme Court if it were challenged in court. And many such health labels have faced legal challenges. 

Claudia Haupt , a professor of law and political science at Northeastern, said that the Supreme Court has been “aggressive” in enforcing the First Amendment and using it as an argument against warning labels.

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There’s been litigation over warning labels in the past, Haupt said, with companies arguing against putting graphic labels on cigarette cartons and signs at crisis pregnancy centers stating they’re not health care providers.

“The big problem with compelled disclosures is basically you’re telling the company to tell the consumer that their own product is dangerous,” Haupt said. “They don’t particularly like that because who wants to say, ‘The thing I’m trying to sell you might actually cause you harm.’”

She added that it’s likely social media companies would push back on a warning, if one were passed, claiming it’s infringing on their First Amendment rights. 

In the past, she said, the Supreme Court has sided with companies on this. Haupt, along with Wendy Parmet, director of Northeastern’s Center for Health Policy and Law, published research on this , looking into the court’s history when it comes to health warnings.

“Over time, the balance has shifted,” Haupt said of the pair’s findings. “When public health would win in the past, free speech would be more likely to win. That would be relevant for all kinds of contexts where speech is used to inform the public about a public health danger. … The First Amendment gets more and more leeway in the courts so it becomes more and more difficult to actually compel companies to warn about their products.”

Haupt said Murthy’s push for a label that specifically targets young people might be better received, but ultimately it will come down to the precedent set in the crisis pregnancy center case that said disclosures have to be “purely factual and uncontroversial.”

“The First Amendment itself doesn’t say anything about this,” Haupt said. “It’s just the court’s interpretation. … You can debate what’s purely factual, what’s uncontroversial. And then we get back to what kinds of harm does social media consumption potentially cause and is that worth limiting speech? That’s the ultimate question. It’s really hard to predict what the court will do with this.”

What could be a more effective approach to combating the negative effects of social media, Rodgers said, is including social media literacy education in youth programming and developing policies and practices to focus on risk protection while also teaching youths to use social media in a positive way. The former could involve guidance from adults, including parents who can monitor children’s use.

“I think social media use, when thoughtful, can bring a number of benefits,” Rodgers said. “This is not the same as being ‘safe.’ I do believe there are ways of using social media in which the benefits largely outweigh any detrimental effects. However, this would be a very careful, deliberate, in some ways limited and controlled use of social media, informed by strong media literacy, and strategically implementing and leveraging the affordances of platforms to tailor one’s online experience.”

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