Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) is one of America's best-known writers of juvenile fiction. She was also a reformer, working in the causes of temperance and woman's suffrage.

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pa., in 1832. She was the daughter of Bronson Alcott, the Concord transcendentalist philosopher and educator. She and her three sisters spent their childhood in poverty. However, they had as friends, and even as tutors, some of the most brilliant and famous men and women of the day, such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker. This combination of intellectual plenty and physical want endowed Alcott with an ironical sense of humor. She soon realized that, if she or her sisters did not find ways to bring money into the home, the family would be doomed to permanent poverty.

In her early years Alcott worked at a variety of menial tasks to help financially. At 16 she wrote a book, Flower Fables (not published for 6 years), and she wrote a number of plays that were never produced. By 1860 she was publishing stories and poems in the Atlantic Monthly. During the Civil War she served as a nurse until her health failed, and her Hospital Sketches (1863) brought the first taste of widespread public attention.

The attention seemed to die out, however, when she published her first novel, Moods, in 1865, and she was glad to accept in 1867 the editorship of the juvenile magazine Merry's Museum. The next year she produced the first volume of Little Women, a cheerful and attractive account of her childhood, portraying herself as Jo and her sisters as Amy, Beth, and Meg. The book was an instant success, so in 1869 she produced the second volume. The resulting sales accomplished the goal she had worked toward for 25 years: the Alcott family was financially secure.

Little Women had set the direction, and Alcott continued a heavy literary production in the same vein. She wrote An Old-fashioned Girl (1870), Little Men (1871), and Work (1873), an account of her early efforts to help support the family. During this time she was active in the causes of temperance and woman's suffrage, and she also toured Europe. In 1876 she produced Silver Pitchers, a collection containing "Transcendental Wild Oats," an account of her father's disastrous attempts to found a communal group at Fruitlands, Mass. In later life she produced a book almost every year and never wanted for an audience.

Alcott died on March 6, 1888, in Boston. She seems never to have become bitter about her early years or her dreamy, improvident father, but she did go so far as to say that a philosopher was like a man up in a balloon: he was safe as long as three women held the ropes on the ground.

Further Reading

Ednah Cheney, ed., Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals (1889), is an early biography. Also of interest are Katharine S. Anthony, Louisa May Alcott (1938), and Marjorie M. Worthington, Miss Alcott of Concord (1958). A documented, full-length study of Miss Alcott's works is Madeleine B. Stern, Louisa May Alcott (1950). □

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

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 (1832–88) US writer, daughter of Bronson Alcott. Her first book, Flower Fables (1854), helped ease the family's financial troubles. Hospital Sketches (1863) is an account of her experiences as a nurse in the Civil War. Little Women (1868), one of the most successful children's books ever written, was the first of a semi-autobiographical series of novels, which includes Good Wives (1869), An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Little Men (1871), and Jo's Boys (1886).