Alcott, Louisa May, 1832-1888

Variant names
Dates:
Birth 1832-11-29
Death 1888-03-06
Gender:
Female
Americans
English

Biographical notes:

Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet best known as the for her novel Little Women (1868) and the sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886).

Born in Germantown (Philadelphia), Pennsylvania, Louisa May Alcott was the daughter of transcendentalist and educator Amos Bronson Alcott and social worker Abby May. Like her famous literary counterpart, Jo March, she was the second of four daughters. The eldest, Anna Bronson (Alcott) Pratt was the counterpart of Meg, while Elizabeth Sewall Alcott became Beth in Little Women. Youngest sister Abigail May "May" (Alcott) Nieriker was the baby. As a child, Alcott was a tomboy who preferred running and playing boys’ games. "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 . . ."

In 1834, the Alcotts moved to Boston, where Louisa's father, Bronson, started an experimental school and joined the Transcendental Club with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. In Boston, Bronson Alcott's unorthodox beliefs in education, particularly in his police of allowing all races and genders to attend his school, later influenced his daughter.

Financial struggles in Boston forced the Alcotts to relocate to Concord, Massachusetts where they rented cottage on 2 acres of land, situated along the Sudbury River. Alcott considered the three years they spent at Hosmer Cottage as idyllic. She received informal education from her father's famous friends, including nature lessons from the Henry David Thoreau who inspired her to write the poem Thoreau's Flute based on her time at Walden Pond. She also received some instruction from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and Julia Ward Howe. Most of Alcott's early education came from her father.

The family moved again by 1843 to the Utopian Fruitlands community with six other members of the Consociate Family where they practiced a form of veganism and refused to support slave labor or animal cruelty. She later described these early years in a newspaper sketch "Transcendental Wild Oats." Watching her family struggle, particularly her mother, as the only adult woman, made Louisa determined to do something, anything to help her family.

After the collapse of the Utopian Fruitlands, the family purchased a homestead in Concord they named "Hillside" on April 1, 1845. At this time, Alcott finally received a room of her own where she could write undisturbed. Her early passion for writing fueled poetry, plays, and melodramatic stories Louisa and her sisters would act out for family and friends. It was these teenage experiences Alcott worked into Little Women and continue to delight her readers.

Moving 22 times in 30 years, the Alcotts returned to Concord once again in 1857 and moved into Orchard House, a two-story clapboard farmhouse, in the spring of 1858. Alcott's young adult years were difficult but creative ones. She worked as a teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic helper, and writer. Her older sister Anna and middle sister Elizabeth also supported the family, working as seamstresses, while their mother took on social work among the Irish immigrants. Only the youngest, Abby May, had the opportunity to attend public school. A brief job as a governess in Dedham, Massachusetts led to pen an essay “How I Went Out to Service.” Publisher James T. Fields rejected her work thinking Alcott was not very talented. Living in Boston, Alcott worked at menial jobs to send money home to her family and also worked hard to improve her writing. In Boston, she had the opportunity to be among the greatest reformers of the nineteenth century, such as Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, John Turner Sargent, and William Lloyd Garrison.

Alcott’s stories finally began to sell. Her first, in 1863, “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” written under the pen name A. M. Barnard, appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newsletter. She earned $100 for her effort. Alcott also worked on two serious novels that would be published years later: Moods and Work. Her first book, Flower Fables appeared in print for the first time in 1849. A selection of moral fables, it was originally written for Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The 1850s proved to be a difficult period for Alcott and her family. In 1854 Alcott enjoyed the theater in Boston and penned a play, The Rival Prima Donnas, which she later burned due to a quarrel between the actresses on who would play what role. In 1857 Alcott was unable to find work and became filled with such despair, she contemplated taking her own life. At that time, she read Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë and found many parallels to her own life. Then, in 1858, her younger sister Elizabeth died, and her older sister Anna married a neighbor from Concord, John Pratt. Alcott felt betrayed, their sisterhood was broken up.

As Alcott entered adulthood, she became interested in reforms of all kind. In 1847, she and her family served as station masters on the Underground Railroad, housing a fugitive slave for one week and had discussions with Frederick Douglass. Alcott read and admired the "Declaration of Sentiments", published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights, advocating for women's suffrage and became the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts in a school board election.

The 1860s proved to be a turning point for Alcott, personally and professionally. In 1860, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly. When the Civil War broke out, she wished to fight but as women were not allowed and to disguise herself as a man would shame her family, Alcott had to be content to serve as a nurse in the Union Hospital in Georgetown, DC, for six weeks in 1862–1863. Her nursing career was cut short when she contracted typhoid and became deathly ill and had to return home. Alcott revised and published her letters home in the Boston anti-slavery paper Commonwealth, later collected as Hospital Sketches published 1863 and republished with additions in 1869. This book brought her first critical recognition for her observations and humor.

Although a semi-successful author, Alcott felt driven to make money and continued to write "gothic thrillers" for popular magazines and papers. Between 1863 and 1872, Alcott anonymously published at least thirty-three such stories. By the mid-1860s she turned her pen to writing passionate, fiery novels and sensational stories similar to popular English authors Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon under the nom de plume A. M. Barnard. Her heroines in these novels are strong, smart, and determined. These stories were only discovered in 1975 long after her death. Alcott continued to write moral stories for children, and after they became popular she never returned to her adult fiction.

Following her return to Boston after the Civil War, Alcott became the editor of and a major contributor to Merry’s Museum, a children’s magazine. The year 1868 changed Alcott's life when the magazine's publisher, Thomas Niles, asked her to write "a girls' story." Reluctantly, as Alcott preferred boys, she penned a story inspired by her childhood growing up with three sisters. Part I was written within three months at the desk Louisa's father built for her in her Orchard House bedchamber. The book became an instant success with many girls demanding to know what happened next to the March sisters. As Alcott was a spinster herself, she would have preferred to keep her literary counterpart Jo unmarried. She wrote in her journal, “Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only aim and end of a woman’s life. I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone." However, she yielded to the pressure from her editor and fans and had Jo marry in Part II, but was determined to have control over her story. In a letter to a friend, she explained, "Jo should have remained a literary spinster but so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didnt dare to refuse and out of perversity went and made a funny match for her. I expect vials of wrath to be poured out upon my head, but rather enjoy the prospect." The decision remains controversial with fans. Part II, or Part Second, also known as Good Wives was published in 1869. Little Men, hastily written in Rome to support her newly widowed sister's children, followed 1871. Jo's Boys (1886) completes the story of the March family.

Alcott's later life was dedicated to women's rights. She attended the Women’s Congress of 1875 in Syracuse, New York, contributed to Lucy Stone’s Woman’s Journal and organized Concord women to vote in the school election. Temperance, also a women's issue, was another cause Alcott chose to support, starting a temperance society in Concord. In 1877, Alcott was one of the founders of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union in Boston.

Alcott remained unmarried but became a mother to her niece and namesake, Louisa May "Lulu" Nieriker following the death of her youngest sister May. Alcott continued to tell stories and published the stories she shared with her niece in a volume titled Lulu's Library.

Alcott moved once again in 1882. Alcott, her father, who had suffered a stroke, her elder sister, niece and nephews settled at 10 Louisburg Square, Boston. With her own health failing, Alcott moved “from around searching for a place to recover her health and write. When Bronson Alcott died on March 4, 1888, his famous daughter was lying ill in Boston. Two days later at the age of fifty-six, Louisa May Alcott breathed her last. Prior to her death, she had adopted her widowed sister Anna’s son John Pratt to whom she willed her copyrights. Alcott dictated that any income from her writings would be shared by Anna, Lulu, John, and Anna’s other son Fred.

Louisa May Alcott was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. Her grave lies near other famous writers she once knew, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, in a section known as "author's ridge."

Orchard House, the Alcott's family home in Concord, Massachusetts, was designated a historic house museum in 1912. The museum offers living history programs, guided tours, educational workshops and preserves the legacy of the home and the Alcotts.

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