Alcott, Louisa May, 1832-1888

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"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. . . ";

The year 1868 changed Alcott's life when the magazine's publisher, Thomas Niles, asked her to write "a girls' story.";

Part I was written within three months at the desk Louisa's father built for her in her Orchard House bedchamber.

Louisa May Alcott's Orchard House, viewed Aug. 25, 2021

https://louisamayalcott.org/louisa-may-alcott

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"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 Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott

https://ugapress.org/book/9780820317403/the-selected-letters-of-louisa-may-alcott/

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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.;

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 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.

Boston Women's Heritage Trail entry on Louisa May Alcott, Accessed Aug. 25, 2021

https://bwht.org/louisa-may-alcott/

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

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.

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."

After the collapse of the Utopian Fruitlands, the family purchased a homestead in Concord they named "Hillside" on April 1, 1845.

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.

Her first book, Flower Fables appeared in print for the first time in 1849.

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.

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

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.

In 1860, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly

Alcott had to be content to serve as a nurse in the Union Hospital in Georgetown, DC, for six weeks in 1862–1863.

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.

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.

Part II, or Part Second, also known as Good Wives was published in 1869.

Little Men... 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

Orchard House, the Alcott's family home in Concord, Massachusetts, was designated a historic house museum in 1912

Wikipedia.org article for Louisa May Alcott, viewed Aug. 25, 2021

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisa_May_Alcott

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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."

New York Public Library, "Louisa May Alcott, In Her Own Words", Accessed August 25, 2021

https://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/09/28/louisa-may-alcott-own-words

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