Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6,
1888) was an American
novelist.
She is
best known for the novel Little
Women, set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House
in Concord, Massachusetts and published in
1868. This novel is loosely based on her childhood
experiences with her three sisters.
Childhood and early work
Alcott was the daughter of noted
transcendentalist and
educator Amos
Bronson Alcott and
Abigail May Alcott.
She shared a birthday with her father on November 29. In a letter
to his brother-in-law,
Samuel Joseph
May, a noted
abolitionist, her
father wrote: "It is with great pleasure that I announce to you the
birth of my second daughter...born about half-past 12 this morning,
on my [33rd] birthday."
Though of New England
heritage, she was born in Germantown
, which is currently part of Philadelphia
, Pennsylvania
. She was the second of four daughters;
Anna Bronson Alcott was the
eldest,
Elizabeth Sewall
Alcott and
Abigail May
Alcott were the two youngest.
The family moved to Boston
in 1834, After the family moved to Massachusetts,
her father established an experimental school and joined the
Transcendental Club with
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
In 1840,
after several setbacks with the school, the Alcott family moved to
a cottage on of land, situated along the Sudbury River in Concord,
Massachusetts
. The Alcott family moved to the Utopian Fruitlands
community for a brief interval in 1843-1844 and
then, after its collapse, to rented rooms and finally to a house in
Concord purchased with her mother's inheritance and financial help
from Emerson. They moved into the home they named "Hillside
" on April 1, 1845.
Alcott's early education included lessons from the naturalist
Henry David Thoreau. She
received the majority of her schooling from her father. She also
received some instruction from writers and educators such as
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, and
Margaret Fuller, who were all family
friends. She later described these early years in a newspaper
sketch entitled "Transcendental Wild Oats." The sketch was
reprinted in the volume
Silver Pitchers (1876), which
relates the family's experiment in "plain living and high thinking"
at Fruitlands.
As an adult, Alcott was an
abolitionist
and a
feminist. In 1847, the family housed
a fugitive slave for one week. In 1848 Alcott read and admired the
"Declaration of Sentiments" published by the
Seneca Falls Convention on women's
rights.
Poverty made it necessary for Alcott to go to work at an early age
as an occasional
teacher,
seamstress,
governess,
domestic helper, and
writer. Her first book
was
Flower Fables (1855), a selection of tales originally
written for Ellen Emerson, daughter of
Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1860, Alcott
began writing for the
Atlantic
Monthly.
When the American Civil War broke out, she served
as a nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown, D.C.
for six weeks in 1862-1863. Her letters
home, revised and published in the
Commonwealth and
collected as
Hospital Sketches (1863, republished with
additions in 1869), garnered her first critical recognition for her
observations and humor. Her novel
Moods (1864), based on
her own experience, was also promising.
She also wrote passionate, fiery novels and sensation stories under
the nom de plume
A. M.
Barnard. Among these are
A Long Fatal Love Chase and
Pauline's Passion and Punishment. Her
protagonists for these tales are willful and
relentless in their pursuit of their own aims, which often include
revenge on those who have humiliated or thwarted them. Following a
style which was wildly popular at the time, these works achieved
immediate commercial success.
Alcott also produced wholesome stories for children, and after
their positive reception, she did not generally return to creating
works for adults. Adult oriented exceptions include the anonymous
novelette
A Modern Mephistopheles (1875), which attracted
suspicion that it was written by
Julian
Hawthorne, and the semi-autobiographical tale
Work
(1873).
Literary success and later life
Louisa May Alcott
Alcott's literary success arrived with the publication of the first
part of
Little Women: or Meg, Jo,
Beth and Amy, (1868) a semi-autobiographical account of her
childhood with her sisters in Concord, Massachusetts. Part two, or
Part Second, also known as
Good
Wives, (1869) followed the March sisters into adulthood
and their respective marriages.
Little
Men (1871) detailed Jo's life at the Plumfield School that
she founded with her husband Professor Bhaer at the conclusion of
Part Two of
Little Women. Jo's
Boys (1886) completed the "March Family Saga."
Most of her later volumes,
An
Old Fashioned Girl (1870),
Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag (6
vols., 1871–1879),
Eight
Cousins and its sequel
Rose
in Bloom (1876), and others, followed in the line of
Little Women.
Alcott based her heroine "Jo" on herself in "Little Women." But
whereas Jo marries at the end of the story, Alcott remained single
throughout her life. She explained her "spinsterhood" in an
interview with
Louise Chandler
Moulton, "... because I have fallen in love with so many pretty
girls and never once the least bit with any man."'
In 1879 her younger sister, May, died. Alcott took in May's
daughter, Louisa May Nieriker ("Lulu"), who was two years old. The
baby had been named after her aunt, and was given the same
nickname.
In her
later life, Alcott became an advocate of women's suffrage and was the first woman to
register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts in a school board election.
, along with
Elizabeth Stoddard,
Rebecca Harding Davis, Anne Moncure
Crane, and others, were part of a group of female authors during
the
Gilded Age to address women’s issues
in a modern and candid manner. Their works were, as one newspaper
columnist of the period commented, "among the decided 'signs of the
times'" (“Review 2 – No Title” from
The Radical, May 1868,
see References below).
Alcott continued to write until her death. Alcott suffered chronic
health problems in her later years. Alcott and her earlier
biographers attributed her illness and death to
mercury poisoning: During her
American Civil War service, Alcott
contracted
typhoid fever and was treated
with
calomel, a compound containing mercury.
Recent analysis of Alcott's illness suggests that mercury poisoning
was not the culprit. Alcott's chronic health problems are
associated with autoimmune disease, not acute mercury exposure.
Moreover, a late portrait of Alcott shows rashes on her cheeks
characteristic of
lupus.
Alcott died in
Boston on March 6, 1888 at age 55, two days after visiting
her father on his deathbed. Her last words were "Is it not
meningitis?"
The story of her life and career was initially told in Ednah D.
Cheney's
Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters and Journals
(Boston, 1889) and then in Madeleine B. Stern's seminal
biography Louisa May Alcott (
University of Oklahoma Press,
1950).
Selected works
As A. M. Barnard
- Behind a Mask, or a Woman's Power (1866)
- The Abbot's Ghost, or Maurice Treherne's Temptation
(1867)
- A Long Fatal Love
Chase (1866 - first published 1995)
First published anonymously
- A Modern Mephistopheles (1877)
Published as
- Little Women, Little Men, Jo's Boys (Elaine Showalter,
ed.) (Library of America, 2005)
ISBN 978-1-93108273-0
See also
- Orchard House, where Alcott lived when writing Little
Women
- Walpole, New Hampshire
, where the abundant lilacs in the town inspired
Alcott to write the book Under the Lilacs
- Greenwich Village
, New York City, where Alcott lived for a time while
she was writing "Little Women"
Footnotes
References
- Shealy, Daniel, Editor. "Alcott in Her Own Time: A
Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections,
Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends and Associates."
University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, Iowa, 2005. ISBN
0-87745-938-X.
- “Review 2 – No Title” from The Radical (1865 - 1872). May 1868.
American Periodical Series 1740 - 1900.[2612] (link is password only) (29 January
2007).
Further reading
External links
Sources
- Bibliography (including primary works and
information on secondary literature - critical essays, theses and
dissertations)
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