Louisa May Alcott | Encyclopedia.com

Born November 29, 1832
Germantown, Pennsylvania

Died March 6, 1888
Roxbury, Massachusetts

Writer and editor

“Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.”

Louisa May Alcott is most famous as the author of Little Women (1868) and the seven novels that followed in the “Little Women” series. The novels are realistic and entertaining accounts of the March family, and show children developing as independent and thoughtful individuals, facing and learning from conflicts, and sharing a warm and loving family life. Alcott enjoyed widespread popularity in her lifetime as a children’s author. Meanwhile, she was secretly successful as a magazine writer of sensational fiction about crime, revenge, and romance. Alcott was not revealed as the writer of those stories until more than fifty years after her death.

Keeping a journal

Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832, in Germantown, Pennsylvania. She was the second of four daughters of Amos Bronson Alcott, a noted philosopher and educator, and Abigail May, a descendant of one of Boston’s more prominent families. The family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1834 when Alcott’s father founded a school
based on some of his principles of education. Bronson Alcott believed that education should emphasize play and the imagination as activities through which children learn and develop physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. His educational system was too different from conventional educational practices of the time to become firmly established. The family was often in need of money, and they moved several times between Boston and Concord, Massachusetts.

Alcott and her sisters were taught at home by their father, who brought them into contact with some of America’s greatest writers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), and Margaret Fuller (1810–1850). The Alcott girls were required to keep journals, and together they wrote a family newspaper and plays in which they performed. Their education also included domestic skills, from housekeeping to sewing and clothes-making.

About the time Alcott turned eleven in 1843, the family joined a communal living experiment at Fruitlands, a farm in Harvard, Massachusetts. (Communal living involves several people or families who live together as a group—sharing work, expenses, and the fruits of their labor). Alcott wrote about the experiences in her journal, which were later published, in 1889, in Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals. She described life at Fruitlands as a kind of vacation, but later she would note the experiment failed because the adults were not prepared for the demands of farming.

The family moved back to Concord and lived there from 1845 to 1850. Beginning in her mid-teens, Alcott worked at such jobs as seamstress, governess, teacher, and servant. In 1848, at age sixteen, she taught neighborhood children in a school in Concord. Many of her lessons were conveyed as fairy tales. One of the students, Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, loved the tales, so Alcott wrote them down for her in a notebook. Ellen’s mother, Lidian Emerson, read them and recommended that Alcott try to publish the stories.

Writing career begins

In 1848, the family moved back to Boston, where Alcott’s mother founded an employment service. While Alcott
worked as a teacher and seamstress, she continued writing and was published before she turned twenty. Her poem “Sunlight” appeared in Peterson’s Magazine in September 1851 under the pseudonym Flora Fairfield. (A pseudonym is a fictitious name a writer sometimes uses to conceal his or her identity, especially if the writer is involved in different styles of writing.) Alcott published her first story, “The Rival Painters,” in the May 1852 issue of the Olive Branch, another leading magazine of the time. While these pieces were tame and sentimental, Alcott realized she could make money regularly to help support the family by submitting stories for magazines. Magazines wanted sensational (curious, unusual, emotional) stories, and Alcott began writing and submitting them under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard.

Alcott’s first book, Flower Fables, was published when she was twenty-three. The book collected stories she used when teaching and had written down for Ellen Emerson. Among other activities during this time, Alcott performed as an actress in free theater productions. She also wrote two plays during the mid-1850s. Nat Batchelor’s Pleasure Trip was accepted in 1855 and performed later at Harvard University in 1860. The Rival Prima Donnas, which she adapted from one of her short stories, was accepted by the Boston Theater in 1856 but never performed.

The late 1850s proved a harrowing time for Alcott. Violence had erupted in the United States over slavery and Alcott’s strongly abolitionist (antislavery) family helped provide refuge for runaway slaves. Meanwhile, Alcott provided care for her sister, Elizabeth, who died in 1858 after a long illness.

Famous Rejection Letter

After submitting her story “How I Went Out to Service” to publisher James T. Fields in 1874, Louisa May Alcott received a reply from him: “Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can’t write.”

When the American Civil War (1861–65) began in 1861, Alcott became determined to help the Union cause. The Civil War was a conflict that took place between the Northern states (Union) and the Southern seceded states (Confederacy). Alcott began working as a nurse in December 1862 at the Union Hotel Hospital in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. However, six weeks later, she contracted typhoid fever (a bacterial disease that causes fever, headaches, and intestinal problems) and had to stay at home. She suffered
there for three months before she could leave her room. Treatment for her illness left her with bouts of headaches for the rest of her life.

Upon regaining her health, Alcott quickly returned to writing. Letters she wrote to her family while serving as a nurse were published in 1863 as Hospital Sketches. Rich with detail and related by a witty narrator named Tribulation Periwinkle, Hospital Sketches relates the experiences of an idealistic young woman working as a nurse in a war hospital. She becomes more mature after viewing the horrors of war, but gains an important sense of balance between her imagination and the reality around her.

Hospital Sketches was well-received, providing Alcott with some clout with publishers and confidence as a writer. The following year, she published Moods, a novel she had completed in 1860. She trimmed back the original manuscript, and while some critics found the story uneven, the book was immediately popular and provided enough money for Alcott to travel to Europe. (Moods was later republished with both the original, complete text and the cut version.)

When Alcott returned from Europe in the summer of 1866, her family was in need of money. Alcott returned to writing anonymous stories for magazines. These stories, which often featured crimes and romantic entanglements, were never attributed to Alcott during her lifetime. Not until a 1943 article by Leona Rostenberg, “Some Anonymous and Pseudonymous Thrillers of Louisa M. Alcott,” was published in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, was Alcott revealed to have made money and written in the popular sentimental and sensational style. Most of the stories Alcott published anonymously or under the pseudonym of A. M. Barnard were documented and collected in publications after 1970.

Big success with Little Women

In 1867, Alcott became editor of Merry’s Museum, a leading children’s monthly magazine. During that year, she was approached by Thomas Niles, an editor at Roberts Brothers, the firm that published Alcott’s books. He suggested that Alcott write a novel for girls. Drawing on her own family and their experiences, including those of her sisters Anna, Elizabeth,
and May, Alcott produced the manuscript for Little Women within two months. Niles and Alcott were unsure about whether the book would sell, but their doubts were eased when Niles’s young niece read the book with delight, then immediately began rereading it. Little Women was published in October 1868 and became an immediate sensation.

Book reviewers praised the novel’s refreshing approach. Children’s literature of the time typically presented youngsters as merely cute and precious, with simple conflicts; the approach of Little Women, however, was more realistic, showing children as unique individuals with ranges of emotion, who learn from their experiences. Subsequent critics have shown how the novels demonstrate Alcott’s values: the characters learn the limits of equating happiness with money and possessions; the importance of coeducation (where boys and girls are educated equally and together) and other theories of education held by her father are shown; and the girls grow into independent young women who pursue their own paths in life, not merely what society expects of them. Little Women relates the adventures of the four March sisters as they strive to improve themselves and become “good girls” on their own terms. The
children in Little Women are imperfect, and many readers found traits in one of the sisters that they could see in themselves.

When hundreds of letters poured into the publisher from fans asking for more stories about the March sisters, Alcott quickly wrote a sequel in 1869 published as Little Women or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, Part Second, which was another big seller. In all, Alcott would produce eight novels grouped as the “Little Women” series. After the first two volumes, Alcott wrote An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Little Men (1871), Eight Cousins (1875), Rose in Bloom (1876), Under the Lilacs (1878), Jack and Jill (1880), and Jo’s Boys and How They Turned Out (1886). These novels follow the lives of the March sisters and their families as they grow older while evoking the local color of the New England towns where they lived. All of the books remained immensely popular. During the twentieth century, the books were adapted to major motion pictures in 1933, 1949, and 1994 and as a television movie in 1978.

An Excerpt from Little Women

Margaret, the eldest of the four, was sixteen, and very pretty, being plump and fair, with large eyes, plenty of soft brown hair, a sweet mouth, and white hands, of which she was rather vain. Fifteen-year-old Jo was very tall, thin, and brown, and reminded one of a colt, for she never seemed to know what to do with her long limbs, which were very much in her way. She had a decided mouth, a comical nose, and sharp, gray eyes, which appeared to see everything, and were by turns fierce, funny, or thoughtful. Her long, thick hair was her one beauty, but it was usually bundled into a net, to be out of her way. Round shoulders had Jo, big hands and feet, a fly-away look to her clothes, and the uncomfortable appearance of a girl who was rapidly shooting up into a woman and didn’t like it. Elizabeth, or Beth, as everyone called her, was a rosy, smooth-haired, bright-eyed girl of thirteen, with a shy manner, a timid voice, and a peaceful expression which was seldom disturbed. Her father called her “Little Miss Tranquillity,” and the name suited her excellently, for she seemed to live in a happy world of her own, only venturing out to meet the few whom she trusted and loved. Amy, though the youngest, was a most important person, in her own opinion at least. A regular snow maiden, with blue eyes, and yellow hair curling on her shoulders, pale and slender, and always carrying herself like a young lady mindful of her manners. What the characters of the four sisters were we will leave to be found out.

Prolific writer

With the financial success of Little Women, Alcott took another trip to Europe. She returned to Boston during
the summer of 1871 after receiving news of the death of her brother-in-law. While she was in Europe, the editor of Merry’s Museum published Will’s Wonder-Book, a collection of eight stories by Alcott that were published when she worked for the magazine. The stories are based on animals and show the value of kindness and friendliness. Alcott was also active in the women’s suffrage (women’s right to vote) movement, writing for the Woman’s Journal, a women’s activist magazine. In 1879, she became the first woman in Concord to register to vote in the village’s school committee election.

Alcott turned forty in 1871 and spent what would be the last fifteen years of her life writing books and caring for her mother and father in their old age, as well as for other members of her family. She served as legal guardian of her sister May’s daughter and later adopted her sister Anna’s son. Alcott had a novel, A Modern Mephistopheles, published anonymously in 1877. The tale tells of a man who sells his soul to the devil. In 1887, a year before her death, Alcott gave permission for her publisher to reprint A Modern Mephistopheles under her name, along with “A Whisper in the Dark,” one of her early sensation stories.

Between 1870 and 1880, Alcott published many books, including five of the “Little Women” novels as well as six volumes of short stories under the title Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag. During this period, her mother died, and in 1879, following the death of her sister, May, Alcott took in May’s infant daughter. In 1882, Alcott’s father suffered a stroke, and Alcott cared for him as well.

In 1885, the family moved to Boston. The following year, Alcott published Jo’s Boys, and How They Turned Out (1886), a sequel to Little Men and the final book in the “Little Women” series. Alcott died on March 6, 1888, two days after her father died.

An avid readership of Alcott, particularly for Little Women, has continued through the generations. A year after she died, Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals provided more material for her adoring fans. The publication of Alcott’s sensation stories beginning in 1975 inspired interest nearly a century later in several adult novels she had published. Meanwhile, the sustained popularity of Alcott’s LittleWomen attests to the significance of the writer Alcott’s biographer Ednah Dow Cheney called “the Children’s friend.”

For More Information

Books

Alcott, Louisa May. Girlhood Diary of Louisa May Alcott, 1843–1846: Writings of a Young Author. Edited by Kerry A. Graves. Mankato, MN: Blue Earth Books, 2001.

Alcott, Louisa May. Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1889. Multiple reprints.

Cheney, Ednah Dow. Louisa May Alcott: The Children’s Friend. Boston: Prang, 1888. Reprint, New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 1980.

Eiselein, Gregory, Anne K. Phillips, and Madeleine B. Stern. The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001.

Gormley, Beatrice. Louisa May Alcott: Young Novelist. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999.

Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox. Little Women: A Family Romance. New York: Twayne, 1999.

Stern, Madeleine B. Louisa May Alcott: From Blood and Thunder to Hearth and Home. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.

Web Sites

“Little Women.” American Studies at the University of Virginia.http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/alcott/lwhp.html (accessed on June 16, 2004).

Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association. Orchard House—Home of the Alcotts.http://www.louisamayalcott.org/ (accessed on June 16, 2004).