Louisa May Alcott, born in 1832, was the second child of Bronson
Alcott of Concord, Massachusetts, a self-taught philosopher, school
reformer, and utopian who was much too immersed in the world of
ideas to ever succeed in supporting his family. That task fell to
his wife and later to his enterprising daughter Louisa May. While
her father lectured, wrote, and conversed with such famous friends
as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, Louisa taught school, worked as
a seamstress and nurse, took in laundry, and even hired herself out
as a domestic servant at age nineteen. The small sums she earned
often kept the family from complete destitution, but it was through
her writing that she finally brought them financial independence.
"I will make a battering-ram of my head," she wrote in her journal,
"and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world."
An enthusiastic participant in amateur theatricals since age ten,
she wrote her first melodrama at age fifteen and began publishing
poems and sketches at twenty-one. Her brief service as a Civil War
nurse resulted in Hospital Sketches (1863), but she earned more
from the lurid thrillers she began writing in 1861 under the
pseudonym of A.M. Barnard. These tales, with titles like "Pauline's
Passion and Punishment," featured strong-willed and flamboyant
heroines but were not identified as Alcott's work until the
1940s.
Fame and success came unexpectedly in 1868. When a publisher
suggested she write a "girl's book," she drew on her memories of
her childhood and wrote Little Women, depicting herself as Jo
March, while her sisters Anna, Abby May, and Elizabeth became Meg,
Amy, and Beth. She re-created the high spirits of the Alcott girls
and took many incidents from life but made the March family
financially comfortable as the Alcotts never had been. Little
Women, to its author's surprise, struck a cord an America's largely
female reading public and became a huge success. Louisa was
prevailed upon to continue the story, which she did in Little Men
(1871) and Jo's Boys (1886.) In 1873 she published Work- A Story of
Experience, an autobiography in fictional disguise with an all too
appropriate title.
Now a famous writer, she continued to turn out novels and stories
and to work for the women's suffrage and temperance movements, as
her father had worked for the abolitionists. Bronson Alcott and
Louisa May Alcott both died in Boston in the same month, March of
1888.
"The American female myth."—Madelon Bedell
"The American female myth."-Madelon Bedell
Alcott's standard gets bumped up to a Penguin Deluxe, complete with illustrated front and back covers, French flaps, and ragged paper. Very nice. Next time you're ordering new copies of LW, get this one. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
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