Louisa May Alcott

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Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott
Born November 29, 1832(1832-11-29)
Germantown, Philadelphia, PA
Died March 6, 1888 (aged 55)
Boston, Massachusetts
Pen name A. M. Barnard
Occupation Novelist
Nationality United States
Writing period Civil war
Subjects Young Adult stories
Notable work(s) Little Women
Official website

Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist. She is best known for the novel Little Women, written and set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts and published in 1868. This novel is loosely based on her childhood experiences with her three sisters.


Contents

[edit] Childhood and early work

Alcott was the daughter of noted transcendentalist and educator Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May Alcott. She shared a birthday with her father on November 29. In a letter to his brother-in-law, Samuel Joseph May, a noted abolitionist, her father wrote: "It is with great pleasure that I announce to you the birth of my second daughter...born about half-past 12 this morning, on my [33rd] birthday." Though of New England heritage, she was born in Germantown, which is currently part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the second of four daughters; Anna Bronson Alcott was the eldest, Elizabeth Sewall Alcott and Abigail May Alcott were the two youngest. The family moved to Boston in 1834,[1] After the family moved to Massachusetts, her father established an experimental school and joined the Transcendental Club with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

In 1840, after several setbacks with the school, the Alcott family moved to a cottage 2 acres (8,100 m2) along the Sudbury River in Concord, Massachusetts. The Alcott family moved to the Utopian Fruitlands community for a brief interval in 1843-1844 and then, after its collapse, to rented rooms and finally to a house in Concord purchased with her mother's inheritance and financial help from Emerson. Alcott's early education included lessons from the naturalist Henry David Thoreau. She received the majority of her schooling from her father. She also received some instruction from writers and educators such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller, who were all family friends. She later described these early years in a newspaper sketch entitled "Transcendental Wild Oats." The sketch was reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), which relates the family's experiment in "plain living and high thinking" at Fruitlands.

As an adult, Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist. In 1847, the family housed a fugitive slave for one week. In 1848 Alcott read and admired the "Declaration of Sentiments" published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights.

Poverty made it necessary for Alcott to go to work at an early age as an occasional teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic helper, and writer. Her first book was Flower Fables (1855), a selection of tales originally written for Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1860, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly. When the American Civil War broke out, she served as a nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown, D.C. for six weeks in 1862-1863. Her letters home, revised and published in the Commonwealth and collected as Hospital Sketches (1863, republished with additions in 1869), garnered her first critical recognition for her observations and humor. Her novel Moods (1864), based on her own experience, was also promising.

She also wrote passionate, fiery novels and sensation stories under the nom de plume A. M. Barnard. Among these are A Long Fatal Love Chase and Pauline's Passion and Punishment . Her protagonists for these tales are willful and relentless in their pursuit of their own aims, which often include revenge on those who have humiliated or thwarted them. These works followed a style which was wildly popular at the time and achieved immediate commercial success.

Alcott also produced moralistic and wholesome stories for children, and, with the exceptions of the semi-autobiographical tale Work (1873), and the anonymous novelette A Modern Mephistopheles (1875), which attracted suspicion that it was written by Julian Hawthorne, she did not return to creating works for adults.

[edit] Literary success and later life

Louisa May Alcott

Alcott's literary success arrived with the publication of the first part of Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, (1868) a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood with her sisters in Concord, Massachusetts. Part two, or Part Second, also known as Good Wives, (1869) followed the March sisters into adulthood and their respective marriages. Little Men (1871) detailed Jo's life at the Plumfield School that she founded with her husband Professor Bhaer at the conclusion of Part Two of Little Women. Jo's Boys (1886) completed the "March Family Saga."

Most of her later volumes, An Old Fashioned Girl (1870), Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag (6 vols., 1871–1879), Eight Cousins and its sequel Rose in Bloom (1876), and others, followed in the line of Little Women.

Alcott based her heroine "Jo" on herself in "Little Women." But whereas Jo marries at the end of the story, Alcott remained single throughout her life. She explained her "spinsterhood" in an interview with Louise Chandler Moulton, "... because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man."[2]'

In 1879 her younger sister, May, died. Alcott took in May's daughter, Louisa May Nieriker ("Lulu"), who was two years old. The baby had been named after her aunt, and was given the same nickname.

In her later life, Alcott became an advocate of women's suffrage and was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts in a school board election.

Louisa May Alcott's grave in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts

Alcott, along with Elizabeth Stoddard, Rebecca Harding Davis, Anne Moncure Crane, and others, were part of a group of female authors during the Gilded Age to address women’s issues in a modern and candid manner. Their works were, as one newspaper columnist of the period commented, "among the decided 'signs of the times'" (“Review 2 – No Title” from The Radical, May 1868, see References below).

Alcott continued to write until her death, which can be attributed to mercury poisoning. During her American Civil War service, she contracted typhoid fever which was commonly treated with calomel, a compound containing mercury. This treatment hampered her health for much of her later life. She died in Boston on March 6, 1888 at age 55, two days after visiting her father on his deathbed. Her last words were "Is it not meningitis?"[3]

The story of her life and career was initially told in Ednah D. Cheney's Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters and Journals (Boston, 1889) and then in Madeleine B. Stern's seminal biography Louisa May Alcott (University of Oklahoma Press, 1950).

[edit] Selected works

As A. M. Barnard

  • Behind a Mask, or a Woman's Power (1866)
  • The Abbot's Ghost, or Maurice Treherne's Temptation (1867)
  • A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866 - first published 1995)

First published anonymously

  • A Modern Mephistopheles (1877)

[edit] Published as

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Obituary: Louisa May Alcott, New York Times, March 7, 1888. The obituary indicates that the family moved to Boston when Alcott was 2 years old, therefore in 1834-5. This is supported by the United States Census, 1850 which records that her younger sister, Elizabeth, was born in Massachusetts and was aged 15 (therefore born around 1835) at the time of the census.
  2. ^ Little Women Introduction, Penguin Classics, 1989. ISBN 0-14-039069-3
  3. ^ vu.union.edu - Famous Last Words

[edit] References

  • Shealy, Daniel, Editor. "Alcott in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends and Associates." University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, Iowa, 2005. ISBN 0-87745-938-X.
  • “Review 2 – No Title” from The Radical (1865 - 1872). May 1868. American Periodical Series 1740 - 1900.[1] (link is password only) (29 January 2007).

[edit] Further reading

  • Saxton, Martha (1977). Louisa May: A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-25720-4. 
  • MacDonald, Ruth K. (1983). Louisa May Alcott. Twayne. ISBN 0-8057-7397-5. 
  • Myerson, Joel; Daniel Shealy, Madeleine B. Stern (1987). The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott. Little, Brown. ISBN 0-316-59361-3. 
  • Myerson, Joel; Daniel Shealy, Madeleine B. Stern (1989). The Journals of Louisa May Alcott. Little, Brown. ISBN 0-316-59362-1. 

[edit] External links

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