Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott 1832-88, American author, b. Germantown, Pa.; daughter of Bronson Alcott . Mostly educated by her father, she was a friend of Emerson and Thoreau , and her first book, Flower Fables (1854), was a collection of tales originally created to amuse Emerson's daughter. Alcott was determined to contribute to the small family income and worked as a servant and a seamstress before she made her fortune as a writer. Her letters written to her family when she was a Civil War nurse were published as Hospital Sketches (1863); her first published novel, Moods, followed in 1864. She first achieved wide fame and wealth with Little Women (1868), one of the most popular children's books ever written. The novel, which recounts the adolescent adventures of the four March sisters, is largely autobiographical, the author herself being represented by the spirited Jo March. Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871), and Jo's Boys (1886) are sequels.

Alcott's other novels for young readers include An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Eight Cousins (1875), and Under the Lilacs (1879). They all picture family life in Victorian America with warmth and perception. She also wrote novels for adults, including Work (1873), which is grounded in Alcott's experiences as a breadwinner for her family, and the unfinished Diana and Persis, an examination of the relationship between two women artists. Another adult volume, the novel A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866), which was originally rejected by her publisher as too sensational, was discovered in manuscript in the early 1990s and finally published in 1995. In 1996 yet another manuscript was unearthed; it contained Alcott's very first novel, written for young people, entitled The Inheritance and composed in 1849 when the author was 18.

Bibliography: See her letters and journal, ed. by E. D. Cheney (1889, repr. 1966); Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, ed. by J. Myerson et al. (1987), Journals of Louisa May Alcott, ed. by J. Myerson et al. (1989); biographies by K. S. Anthony (1938, repr. 1977) and S. Elbert (1984); studies by R. L. MacDonald (1983) and C. Strickland (1985).

Alcott, Louisa May (1832–1888), author.Alcott grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, where her parents, Bronson and Abigail May Alcott, championed transcendentalism, abolitionism, women's rights, and educational reform. The family lived in poverty as the impecunious Bronson Alcott pursued a series of reform activities, including a short‐lived Utopian experiment in 1843. Louisa worked as a seamstress, servant, and governess, and in the 1850s published, often anonymously or pseudonymously, more than thirty thrillers in weekly story papers. Briefly a Civil War nurse, she wrote her experiences into Hospital Sketches (1863) and published several abolitionist interracial romances as war stories.

In 1868–1869 Alcott published as a two‐part serial the novel that would make her famous, Little Women, based on her own family and her Concord circle, including the Emerson and Thoreau families. Little Women and its sequels, Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886), popularized various reform causes while offering toasty, tragic‐comic domestic dramas. Alcott never married and like her heroine, Jo March, the endearing militant sister of Little Women, struggled against the constraints of poverty and Victorian ideas of womanhood. Her biographer Madeleine B. Stern, in documenting Alcott's “double literary life,” has suggested that the Civil War romances connect the thrillers and the later domestic fictions and uncover radical subtexts in Little Women. Stern also argues that the success of Little Women may have constricted the range of Alcott's later fiction. Alcott's Work: A Story of Experience (1873), her 1864 novel Moods, and her letters and journals were published or reissued in the 1990s, part of a renewed interest in her life and work.
See also Antislavery; Emerson, Ralph Waldo; Literature: Civil War to World War I; Literature, Popular; Thoreau, Henry David; Utopian and Communitarian Movements.

Bibliography

Madeleine B. Stern , Louisa May Alcott, 1985.
Sarah Elbert , A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott's Place in American Culture, 1987.
Madeleine B. Stern, ed., Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers, 1995.
Sarah Elbert, ed., Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex and Slavery, 1997.

Sarah Elbert