Alcott, Louisa May

Alcott, Louisa May (1832–88), a daughter of Bronson Alcott, was born in Pennsylvania, spent most of her early years in Boston and Concord, and was educated by her father, receiving instruction and guidance also from such friends as Thoreau, Emerson, and Theodore Parker. She worked at various tasks to help support her family, and at the age of 16 wrote a book, Flower Fables (1854). Her ambition for a time was to be an actress, and she wrote several unproduced melodramas, as well as poems and short stories, some of which were published in the Atlantic Monthly. She was a nurse in a Union hospital during the Civil War until her health failed: her letters of this period were published as Hospital Sketches (1863). She issued her first novel, Moods, in 1865, and toured Europe as a lady's companion the same year. Between 1863 and 1869 she published anonymous and pseudonymous Gothic romances and thrilling tales, like Pauline's Passion and Punishment, in popular journals. These were discovered and collected by Madeleine B. Stern in Behind a Mask (1975) and Plots and Counterplots (1976), which also included, among other anonymously issued fiction, A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), a Faustian work much affected by Goethe, first reissued posthumously with her name (1889) and then by Stern in 1987. In 1867 she became editor of a juvenile magazine, Merry's Museum. Little Women (1868–69), her charming and immensely popular story for children, presents a cheerful account of her own early life in New England; in it she portrays herself as Jo, and her sisters May, Elizabeth, and Anna respectively as Amy, Beth, and Meg. This work brought the financial security she had been trying to achieve for her family, and she continued to write in the same vein in An Old‐Fashioned Girl (1870). Little Men (1871), and Work (1873), a more feminist text. She revisited Europe (1870–71), returning to Boston to continue her participation in such reform movements as temperance and woman suffrage and her writing of moralistic fiction for children. Her later works include Eight Cousins (1875); Rose in Bloom (1876); Silver Pitchers and Independence (1876), containing Transcendental Wild Oats, about her father's experiments at Fruitlands; Under the Lilacs (1878); Jack and Jill (1880); Aunt Jo's Scrap‐Bag (6 vols., 1872–82); Proverb Stories (1882); Spinning‐Wheel Stories (1884); Lulu's Library (3 vols., 1886–89); Jo's Boys (1886); and A Garland for Girls (1888). Recent publications of her writing include Selected Letters (1987) and Journals (1989). In late 1994 plans were announced for publication of a newly found manuscript of a romantic novel with the title A Long Fatal Love Chase.