Louisa May Alcott (1832 - 1888) - Genealogy Louisa May Alcott Share your family tree and photos with the people you know and love Build your family tree online Share photos and videos in Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States Place of Burial: Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, MA Immediate Family: American Novelist, Author, novelist "Little Women" Managed by: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, 1836-1922 Text: ... Tribute Copyrighted lEcS Written for the Gazette 1 The death of Louisa May Alcott recalls ... to the death of her father and her own sad... Publication: Fort Worth, Tarrant, Texas, USA Date: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, 1836-1922 Text: ... respectable journal Ankstkemkd contemporary announces j the death ol Louisa M Alcott author ... will abolish all internal revenues GERMA... Publication: Fort Worth, Tarrant, Texas, USA Date: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, 1836-1922 Text: ...

Proctor widow of Barry Cornwall is dead BOSTON March GMiss Louisa M Alcott died this morning For a long timer Miss Alcott has been ill a... Publication: Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah, USA Date: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, 1836-1922 Text: ... Daley and two children were burned to deatb. Death ol Miss Louisa M. Alcott. Boston, Mass., Mar. 6.?Miss ... Louisa M. Alcott died this ... Publication: Alexandria, District of Columbia, USA Date: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, 1836-1922 Text: "...of Miss Alcott, the Authoress. Boston, March 5. —Miss Louise M. Alcott is reported very ill of brain fever. It is feared she will not... Publication: Helena, Lewis and Clark, Montana, USA Date: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, 1836-1922 Text: "...suddenly 4 announced death of Louisa M. Alcott 0; brings a double sorrow to the many friends ai of the family, while the loss of this...

Publication: Wheeling, Ohio, West Virginia, USA Date: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, 1836-1922 Text: ... Landmark. . ♦—^ —a It is a touching incident, the death of Louisa M. Alcott and her father almost on the same day. They were a remarkabl... Publication: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, 1836-1922 Text: ... take his bitters straight with the best of us. A. fironson Alcott, the well known author, died at the residence of his daughter in Bosto... Publication: Saint Johnsbury, Caledonia, Vermont, USA Date: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, 1836-1922 Text: ... freight. The Death of a Great Woman. IBOSToN. MASS., March 6.-Louisa Zi Alcott (lie(I here to-day THE DUDLEY CASE. A Confession ... of t...

Publication: Newberry, Newberry, South Carolina, USA Date: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, 1836-1922 Text: "...: She selU sea shells: shall he sell sea shells? Misa Louisa M, Alcott, the novelist, died in Boston Tuesday. Her death, following so... Publication: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, 1836-1922 Text: ... the meaning of "flirt" or "style." Sunday-School Evangelist. Louisa M. Alcott, the well known authoress, died last week. She was one of ... Publication: New Ulm, Brown, Minnesota, USA Date: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, 1836-1922 Text: "...of his daughter, Louisa M. Alcott. He was born m Connecticut in liUU. Closely fol lowing his death came that of Miss Alcott on Tuesda...

Publication: Bellows Falls, Windham, Vermont, USA Date: stepsister About Louisa May Alcott Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist and poet best known as the author of the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she also grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Louisa May Alcott is known worldwide as the author of Little Women, but less known is the fact that she served as a volunteer nurse during the civil war, seeing action in the battle of Fredericksburg. Famous author. Works include "Little Women." American Novelist Louisa May Alcott's transcendentalist family supported abolitionist and feminist movements during the Civil War. Her family was the inspiration for her best known novels, Little Women and Little Men.

Louisa May Alcott was the first woman in Concord to register to vote, which she and 19 other suffragettes did for the first time on this day 135 years ago. Source: Mass Moments (facebook) Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist. She is best known for the novel Little Women, published in 1868. This novel is loosely based on her childhood experiences with her three sisters. Childhood and early works Alcott was a daughter of noted Transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May Alcott. She was born on the same day as her father, who started the Temple School; her uncle, Samuel Joseph May, was a noted abolitionist. Though of New England parentage and residence, she was born in Germantown, which is currently part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the second born of the Alcott's four daughers; Anna Bronson Alcott was the eldest, and Elizabeth Sewall Alcott and Abigail May Alcott were the two youngest.

The family moved to Boston in 1834 or 1835, where her father established an experimental school and joined the Transcendental Club with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. During her childhood and early adulthood, she shared her family's poverty and Transcendentalist ideals. In 1840, after several setbacks with the school, her family moved to a cottage on 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 help from Emerson. Alcott's early education had included lessons from the naturalist Henry David Thoreau but had chiefly been in the hands of 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," afterwards reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), which relates the experiences of her family during their experiment in "plain living and high thinking" at Fruitlands. As she grew older, she became both 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. Due to the family's poverty, she began work at an early age as an occasional teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic helper, and writer — her first book was Flower Fables (1855), tales originally written for Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1860, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly. She was 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. Lesser-known parts of her work are the passionate, fiery novels and stories she wrote, usually under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. These works, such as A Long Fatal Love Chase and Pauline's Passion and Punishment, were known in the Victorian Era as "potboilers" or "blood-and-thunder tales." Her character Jo in "Little Women" publishes several such stories but ultimately rejects them after being told that "good young girls should [not] see such things." Their protagonists 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 achieved immediate commercial success and remain highly readable today.

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. Literary success and later life Louisa May AlcottLouisa May Alcott's overwhelming success dated from the appearance of the first part of Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, (1868) a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood years 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, remaining popular with her large and loyal public. Although the Jo character in Little Women was based on Louisa May Alcott, she, unlike Jo, never married. Alcott 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." In 1879 her younger sister, May, died. Alcott took in May's daughter, Louisa May Nieriker ("Lulu"), who was two years old. The baby was 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, MassachusettsAlcott, along with Elizabeth Stoddard, Rebecca Harding Davis, Anne Moncure Crane, and others, were part of a group of female authors during the U.S. 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, Despite worsening health, Alcott wrote through the rest of her life, finally succumbing to the after-effects of mercury poisoning contracted during her American Civil War service: she had received calomel treatments for the effects of typhoid. 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?" 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). (WIKIPEDIA): Louisa ...was an American novelist. She is best known for the novel Little Women, published in 1868. This novel is loosely based on her childhood experiences with her three sisters. CHILDHOOD AND EARLY WORKS: Alcott was a daughter of noted Transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May Alcott. She was born on the same day as her father (on his thirty-third birthday), who started the Temple School; her uncle, Samuel Joseph May, was a noyed abolitionist. Though of New England parentage and residence, she was born in Germantown, which is currently part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the second born of the Alcott's four daughters; Anna Bronson Alcott was the eldest, and Elizabeth Sewall Alcott and Abigail May Alcott were the two youngest. The family moved to Boston in 1834 or 1835, where her father established an experimental schol and joined the Transcendental Club with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

During her childhood and early adulthood, she shared her family's poverty and Transcendentalist ideals. In 1840, after several setbacks with the school, her family moved to a cottage on 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 help from Emerson. Alcott's early educationhad included lessons from the naturalist Henry David Thoreau but had chiefly been in the hands of 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 "Tanscendental Wild Oats," afterwards reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), which relates the experiences of her family during their experiment in "plain living and high thinking" at Fruitlands. As she grew older, she became both an ambolitionist 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. Due to the family's poverty, she began work at an early age as an occasional teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic helper,and writer -- her first book was Flower Fables (1855), tales originally written for Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1860, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly. She was 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 wit 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. Lesser-kniwn parts of her work are the passionate, fiery novels and stories she wrote, usually under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard.

These works, such as A Long Fatal Love Chase and Pauline's Passion and Punishment, were known in the Victorian Era as "potboliers" or "blood-and-thunder tales." Her character Jo in "Little Women" publishes several such stories but ultimately rejects tem after being told that "ggod young girls should (not) see such things." Their protagonists 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 achieved immediate commercial success and remain highly readable today. 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. LITERARY SUCCESS AND LATER LIFE: Louisa May Alcott's overwelming success dated from the appearance of the first part of Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, (1868) a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood years with her sisters on 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 remaining popular with her large and loyal public. Although the Jo character in Little Women was based on Louisa May Alcott, she, unlike Jo, never married. Alcott 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." In 1879 her younger sister, May, died.

Alcott took in May's daughter, Louisa May Nieriker ("Lulu"), who was two years old. The baby was 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. Alcott, along with Elizabeth Stoddard, Rebecca Harding Davis, Anne Moncure Crane, and others, were part of a group of female authors during the .S. 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) Despite worsening health, Alcott wrote through the rest of her life, finally succumbing to the after effects of mercury poisoning contracted during her American Civil War service: she had received calomel treatments for the effects of typhoid. 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?" 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). Obituary: Louisa May Alcott, New York Times, March 7, 1888. American Novelist Louisa May Alcott's transcendentalist family supported abolitionist and feminist movements during the Civil War. Her family was the inspiration for her best known novels, Little Women and Little Men. aka A. M. Barnard ______________ .in 1880, Louisa May Alcott and 19 other women attended the Concord Town Meeting. The year before, the Massachusetts legislature had made it legal for women to vote in school committee elections. A strong supporter of woman suffrage, the author of Little Women was the first woman in Concord to register to vote. She rallied other women to exercise the limited franchise they had been given.

When the day came, a group of 20 women, "mostly with husbands, fathers or brothers" appeared, "all in good spirits and not in the least daunted by the awful deed about to be done." When the votes were cast, she later reported, "No bolt fell on our audacious heads, no earthquake shook the town." Louisa May Alcott | The Character of Jo March | American Masters | PBS The Character of Jo March Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women The Character of Jo March December 12, 2009 Comments For many girls, Little Women is a reading experience so stirring and lasting in impact that as adults they name their baby daughters after the characters. When they judge their daughters old enough, they press the book on their little Megs, Josephines, Beths, and Amys; often it is the same copy they read with their mothers, sometimes the one their mothers read with their grandmothers, occasionally an early or original edition that represents continuity through a hundred or more years. Louisa May Alcott wrote many works in every genre — conservatively, more than two hundred, over a career that spanned almost forty years — but Little Women was far and away her most successful.

The story of the March sisters, which Alcott thought lifeless and flat as she was writing it, unexpectedly touching and true when she finished, struck a deep chord with readers when it appeared in 1868, just three years after the end of the Civil War. The sequel, Little Men, was a bestseller before it was even published. Readers anticipated Alcott’s juvenile novels with a fervor not seen again until the Harry Potter series of J. K. Rowling. One hundred forty years after the publication of Little Women, none of Louisa May Alcott’s eight novels for what is now called the “young adult” audience has ever been out of print. Women around the world cite Little Women as the most treasured book of their childhoods—“magically the book told my story,” as a writer for the Philippine Inquirer recently put it. Translated into more than fifty languages, Little Women crosses every cultural and religious border. It has been adapted for stage, television, opera, ballet, Hollywood, Bollywood, and Japanese anime. Its characters have been drafted for new versions set in California’s Beverly Hills, Salvador Allende’s Chile, and New York’s Upper West Side.

Little Women is a charming, intimate coming-of-age story about family love, loss, and struggle set in a picturesque rendering of mid-nineteenth-century New England life. What sets it apart is the young woman at its center. Her name is Jo March, but her character is Louisa Alcott. Jo March is a dazzling and original invention: bold, outspoken, brave, daring, loyal, cranky, principled, and real. She is a dreamer and a scribbler, happiest at her woodsy hideout by an old cartwheel or holed up in the attic, absorbed in reading or writing, filling page after page with stories or plays. She loves to invent wild escapades, to stage and star in flamboyant dramas. She loves to run. She wishes she were a boy, for all the right reasons: to speak her mind, go where she pleases, learn what she wants to know — in other words, to be free. At the same time, Jo is devoted to the fictional March family, which was closely modeled on the Alcott family: a wise and good mother, an idealistic father, and four sisters whose personalities are a sampler of female adolescence.

But while Jo March marries and is content within the family circle, Louisa Alcott chose an independent path. Descriptions of Louisa by her contemporaries matched Alcott’s first description of Jo March in Little Women: “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.” Frederick Llewellyn Willis wrote that his cousin Louisa Alcott was “full of spirit and life; impulsive and moody, and at times irritable and nervous. She could run like a gazelle. She was the most beautiful girl runner I ever saw. She could leap a fence or climb a tree as well as any boy and dearly loved a good romp.” Another Louisa May Alcott lurked behind the spirited hoyden who wrote the March family books (Little Women, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys), five other juvenile novels, and countless stories for children.

The real Louisa Alcott was infinitely more interested in the darker side of human nature and experience than in telling polite stories to nice children. She was a protean personality, a turbulent force, a passionate fighter attracted to danger and violence. The voice of the other Louisa is heard in writings that were unknown or unpublished for almost ninety years after her death. In pulp fiction written anonymously, or under the name “A. M. Barnard,” she is villain, victim, and heroine, sometimes all of them at once. An actress of professional caliber, Louisa played many roles in life and used them in her work. Much of her fiction is not fictional at all: Louisa Alcott held the jobs heroine Christie Devon holds in the gritty novel Work; loved the two men, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who inspired the characters Sylvia Yule loves in Moods; served in the Civil War as a nurse, as Tribulation Periwinkle does in Hospital Sketches; and displays her infinite variety in a lifetime of poetry, journals, and letters. She was her own best character.

In everything Louisa Alcott wrote she made use of the outward details and the hidden emotional currents of her life, and her life was no children’s book. She knew not only family affection but also dangerous family disaffection; not just domestic toil but grueling manual labor; she knew gnawing hunger and the bloody aftermath of war. She was familiar with scenes of wealth and fashion from visits to privileged relatives, knew the famed sights of Europe from traveling as paid companion to a wealthy woman, and had vast vicarious experience from a lifetime of reading novels. She wrote almost everything at high speed and for money. Works as different as Little Women and “Perilous Play” (a tale about the dangers and blessings of hashish) were written in the same year and brought to life from the same experiences. They are both filled with classical allusions and quotations from Shakespeare, both peppered with metaphysics and moral scrutiny. They provide tantalizing glimpses not of the New England spinster of popular conception, but of the real Louisa Alcott, a person we might recognize, someone so modern that she could pass at a dinner party as a woman born 150 years after her actual birth in 1832.

A Concord contemporary, Clara Gowing, described Louisa as “a strange combination of kindness, shyness, and daring; a creature loving and spiteful, full of energy and perseverance, full of fun, with a keen sense of the ludicrous, apt speech and ready wit; a subject of moods, than whom no one could be jollier and more entertaining when geniality was in ascendancy, but if the opposite, let her best friend beware.” Jo March resembles her creator most in the fertility of her imagination. Like Jo, the young Louisa May Alcott burned with genius, spinning tales of murder and treachery one minute, fairy tales and sentimental poetry the next. She told herself a dozen stories at a time, working out their plots in her head, sometimes for years. Spinning out her fantasies on paper, Louisa was transported, and liberated. Her imagination freed her to escape the confines of ordinary life to be flirtatious, scheming, materialistic, violent, rich, worldly, or a different gender.

In her struggle to fulfill her childhood vow to be “rich, famous, and happy before I die,” her imagination was her greatest comfort, and her refuge even in her last days, when she wrote in her journal, “Lived in my mind where I can generally find amusement. . . . A happy world to go into when the real one is too dull or hard.” –From Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, by Harriet Reisen. Henry Holt and Company, 384p. bibliog. index. ISBN 978-0-8050-8299-9. Copyright Harriet Reisen and Nancy Porter Little Woman | Humanities Little Woman The devilish, dutiful daughter Louisa May Alcott By John Matteson | HUMANITIES, November/December 2009 | Volume 30, Number 6 A few days before her second birthday, Bronson Alcott traced in his journal the hand of Louisa May and wrote that she “manifests uncommon activity and force of mind at present.” In adulthood, she became “Duty’s Faithful Child.” MS Am 1130.10 (6).

By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. + Click on image to enlarge. Louisa May Alcott was pleased with Frank Merrill’s illustrations for the 1880 edition of Little Women. She wrote to Thomas Niles, her editor at Roberts Brothers, that the “drawings are all capital.” The frontispiece shows the four sisters with Marmee. Courtesy Nancy Porter Productions, Inc. The greatest American literary sensation of the post-Civil War decade had its origins in a conversation between Thomas Niles, an editor at the publishing house of Roberts Brothers, and Bronson Alcott, the father of a thirty-five-year-old writer whom his wife had named for a favorite sister, Louisa May. When the elder Alcott and Thomas Niles sat down to talk business in May 1868, Louisa May Alcott had a respectable, if still modest, reputation as a highly prolific and versatile author. Her work had appeared several times in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly.

Her Hospital Sketches, a slightly fictionalized memoir of her work as a Union Army nurse, had been hailed as a work of “uncommon merit,” and her one published novel, Moods, had been reviewed, if somewhat coolly, by the young Henry James. But as Louisa herself knew, she had not risen to her full artistic potential. Now her father, in an effort to drum up some work for her, suggested to Niles that Louisa could write him a book of fairy stories. Niles was not taken with the idea; what he really wanted was a book to fill a yawning gap in the juvenile market—a smart, lively novel for girls. He had approached Louisa herself with the same idea the previous autumn. She had told him she would try, and promptly started the project—and just as promptly set it aside. It was not simply that she disliked the idea, though that was true enough. Her experience also told her that writing for juveniles “doesn’t pay as well as rubbish.” Still worse, Alcott considered herself wholly unqualified for the task.

An irrepressible tomboy in her youth, Louisa had “never liked girls or [known] many” other than her three siblings: her older sister, Anna, and her younger sisters, Lizzie and May. She saw only a faint possibility that the “queer plays and experiences” that the four of them had shared would interest a popular audience. All of her concerns, however, were finally outweighed, as they often were, by Louisa’s desire to help her father. Bronson Alcott, whose capacity for fascinating conversation was so great that people paid to hear him talk, had repeatedly failed to convert his verbal inspirations into writing. Nevertheless, he was now revising a philosophical manuscript called “Tablets,” which was possibly the best work he had ever done. Niles, however, would take Bronson’s book only on one condition. He must have Louisa’s book for girls. That settled it. Louisa flung herself into the project. She liked the idea of using the name of a month, like her own middle name, as a surname of the family of girls that she would closely base on herself and her sisters.

Because she wanted a colder, harsher month, however, the Alcotts became not the Mays, but the Marches. Inspired by her own rough-and-tumble adolescence, she also fancied the idea of a tomboy main character whose given name could be shortened to sound like a boy’s; within her own family, she had been known as “Lu.” Thus Josephine or “Jo” March was born. Writing at the small, semicircular desk that her father had built for her, barely taking time to eat or sleep, Louisa produced 402 manuscript pages in two months and then collapsed from fatigue. Her heart heavy, her head “full of pain from overwork,” Louisa still entertained few hopes for the thick packet she sent off to Niles under the title of “Little Women.” For a woman who liked to observe that everything in her life went “by contraries,” the contrast between Alcott’s expectations regarding Little Women and its phenomenal success was only one in a series of improbable circumstances that influenced both her character and her art. These circumstances originated largely within her family, for there could have been no father more unusual than Bronson Alcott.

In an age when few fathers took primary responsibility for the care of their children, Bronson was so obsessed with the subject of parenthood that he kept exhaustive journals that recorded every event in the early growth and development of his three eldest daughters. Whereas Americans of previous generations tended to see nothing distinctive about the minds of children, Bronson regarded them with outright worship. “Look not into the world,” he wrote, “for the image of the Father. There it is dimmed, disfigured. But look into the radiant face of childhood ere earth hath left its traces upon it, and be blessed—nay, saved!” Believing that children, so recently arrived from the celestial realm, possessed a purity that could redeem humankind, Alcott founded a series of schools dedicated to drawing out the divine essence of his pupils and a potent moral philosophy. Although his schools drew lavish praise from men like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became a lifelong friend of the Alcott family, Bronson never felt that he could reach the children of other parents soon enough to perfect his theories. He therefore turned toward his own home, where he hoped to discover the secret of infant perfection in his own daughters and publish his findings to a respectful world.

Carefully controlling their environment to exclude all influences they deemed harmful, Bronson and his wife, Abigail, tried to give their children an ideal—if highly scrutinized—upbringing, exhorting them to resist every selfish impulse and to indulge every creative one. On the one hand, youngest daughter, May, was allowed to draw on the walls of her room. On the other, four-year-old Louisa was required to give up the last slice of her birthday cake when an unexpected guest arrived at the party. The NEH-funded documentary Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, to be aired December 28 on PBS, contains a charming scene that nicely encapsulates the atmosphere of the Alcott home. In the scene, Bronson lies with young Louisa on the floor of his study, using his uplifted legs to teach her the letter “V.” When Bronson could relate to his children in a context of learning, he did so with passion and pleasure. However, his parenting was dominated by theory and perfectionism, and he could deliver painful reproofs when his children did not rise to his lofty expectations. These criticisms, it seems, fell disproportionately on Louisa.

Impetuous, high-spirited, and cursed with a sometimes ferocious temper, she resisted her father’s efforts to shape her into a model child. Bronson’s theories could account neither for her violent mood swings nor for the fact that her favorite pastimes included falling out of trees and running away from home. Never guessing that Louisa’s volcanic nature might signify a greater brilliance than his paradigms accounted for, Bronson denounced Louisa in his journals, calling her “unfaithful” and even a “devil.” Louisa tried to parry his critiques with humor, signing early letters to him as “your loving demon.” But Bronson’s faultfinding had deep effects. It took decades before Louisa felt sure of his love in all aspects of life. The Alcotts’ idealism reached its pinnacle in 1843, when Bronson and an English reformer, Charles Lane, cofounded a utopian community called Fruitlands, whose members swore off all animal products, as well as coffee, tea, and any commodity generated by slavery. The Fruitlands community called itself a “consociate family,” meaning that all its members were entitled to an equal claim on one another’s loyalties and affections.

Ill-planned from the start, Fruitlands foundered in less than a year, but not before Bronson and Lane had proposed that the men imitate the Shakers by segregating themselves from the women. Since the only women left at Fruitlands by this time were Abigail and her daughters, the plan essentially meant that Bronson would leave his family. Eleven-year-old Louisa responded with tearful prayers. In her journal, she begged God to keep her family together. The Alcotts did not separate. However, Louisa’s experience of first gaining a larger family and then watching her biological family nearly dissolve left a tremendous impression. It both convinced her of the importance of family unity as a bulwark against misfortune and opened her mind to the possibility of forming close attachments on some basis other than blood or marriage. Both the centrality of the family and a willingness to redefine family on broadly inclusive terms were to characterize much of her later writing. The signature dissonance of Louisa’s formative years was the contrast between its lush intellectual richness and its grinding material poverty.

Alcott expert Joel Myerson has quipped that, during her family’s years in Concord, Massachusetts, Louisa May Alcott grew up inside the Norton Anthology of American Literature. Before Louisa reached the age of eight, she had attended school in a room in Emerson’s house. During her teenage years, Emerson gave her free access to his library, from which she borrowed such works as Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Under his watchful supervision, she discovered Milton, Schiller, and Carlyle. Emerson’s fellow transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau played his flute for her and took her on nature walks through the Concord woods. Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose novels and tales were regular fare in the Alcott household, took little evident interest in Louisa’s education. Nevertheless, he was a longtime family acquaintance and, for the last four years of his life, their next-door neighbor. This Concord constellation did much to open Louisa’s eyes to nature, literature, and life.

Yet every day spent among Emerson’s books and Thoreau’s woods ended with a trudge back to a home where supper was likely to consist of coarse bread and apples, where the father was habitually out of work, and all were, as Louisa described somewhat later, as “poor as rats.” The august tutelage of Emerson, Thoreau, and her own father made Louisa acutely conscious of the importance of unseen, spiritual realities. At the same time, however, her father’s asceticism, ironically intended to teach the Alcott girls the unimportance of worldly wealth, powerfully persuaded Louisa of the importance of money. By personal observation, she discovered that metaphysical essays and meditations on the Oversoul earned little. Unlike her great triumvirate of mentors, she had no desire to explore nonfiction.

Because of her family’s chronic indebtedness, writing for her was always a matter of “tak[ing] Fate by the throat and shak[ing] a living out of her.” Indeed, her authorial ambitions were so distant from those of her transcendental mentors that, after she published her first successful book, Hospital Sketches, in 1863, she made the surprising claim that she “never had a literary friend to lend a helping hand.” Only once in her important fiction does Louisa engage directly with the philosophical movement that enthralled her father, and the story in which she does so, a fictionalization of the Fruitlands experiment called “Transcendental Wild Oats,” plays its subject primarily for laughs. Literary influence can be terribly difficult to trace. In its sympathy for the plight of working women, its love of playful characterization, and its unerring aim at the most tender sentiments of its readers, Alcott’s fiction seems to owe less to her close acquaintances than to Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—authors with whom her personal connection was either slight or nonexistent.

In her greatest book, Little Women, Alcott’s mother and sisters are all boldly transformed into enduring characters, whereas Mr. March, the novel’s patriarch who shares many traits with Bronson, is barely visible. Nonetheless, Emerson, Thoreau, and the elder Alcott can be found in Louisa’s fiction, if one knows where to look.

Louisa began Moods, her first novel for adults, with an epigraph from Emerson’s essay “Experience”: “Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.” Emerson appears in Moods as Geoffrey Moor, a serene and cordial man to whom “no hint of night or nature [is] without its charm and its significance.” Thoreau also turns up in Moods in the guise of Adam Warwick, a “violently virtuous” soul who “always take[s] the shortest way, no matter how rough it is.” Thoreau also supplies the basis for a main character in Alcott’s other adult novel, Work, as does the lesser-known transcendentalist Theodore Parker, a radical Unitarian minister who helped finance John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and who rallied Louisa out of a nearly suicidal depression when she was twenty-five. Yet of all the Concord and Boston literati, it is Bronson Alcott himself who figures most prominently as an ideological inspiration for his once-wayward daughter.

For at least fifteen years, Louisa intended but never succeeded in writing a novel about her father’s strivings and misfortunes, which she meant to call “The Cost of an Idea.” As it turned out, her best representation of him in her fiction was the “funny match” that she made for Jo March in Little Women: the educational pioneer Professor Bhaer, who, like Bronson “was poor, yet always appeared to be giving something away . . . no longer young,—but as happy-hearted as a boy; plain and odd, —yet his face looked beautiful to many.” In Plumfield, the academy founded by Jo and the Professor at the end of Little Women and that supplies the milieu for Little Men and Jo’s Boys, Alcott deftly combines a pastoral setting reminiscent of Fruitlands with the progressive, morally directed curriculum of her father’s early schools. When asked to write a preface to a book about the short-lived but influential Temple School, which Bronson had founded in Boston when she was a toddler, Louisa wrote: “As many people . . .

inquire if there ever was or could be a school like Plumfield, I am glad to reply by giving them a record of the real school which suggested some of the scenes described in Little Men. . . . Not only is it a duty and a pleasure, but there is a certain fitness in making the childish fiction of the daughter play the grateful part of herald to the wise and beautiful truths of the father.” After books like Little Women, An Old-Fashioned Girl, and Little Men had banished economic distress from her life forever, Louisa May Alcott could only look back with bemusement on the peculiar path she had followed, to becoming for a time the most popular author in America. “Life,” she told her journal in 1874, “always was a puzzle to me, and gets more mysterious as I go on. I shall find it out by and by and see that it’s all right, if I can only keep brave and patient to the end.” When that end came fourteen years later, it came no less strangely than anything that had gone before.

Bronson, who had long since set aside all his early disapproval of Louisa and had at last embraced her as “Duty’s Faithful Child,” suffered a massive stroke in 1882. He was fading rapidly at the start of March 1888, when Louisa came to see him for the last time. Observing a smile on his face, Louisa asked about its cause. “I am going up,” her father replied. He then added a macabre invitation: “Come with me.” Louisa answered, “I wish I could.” On March 4, Bronson Alcott died. The same day, without having learned of her father’s passing, Louisa lay down for a nap and only briefly regained consciousness. Her doctor diagnosed an apoplexy. Two days later, on the day of her father’s funeral, she did, indeed, “come up.” About the Author John Matteson is Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, and the author of Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, which received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

Funding Information Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women has received $690,000 in NEH support for planning, scripting, and production. The American Masters film, directed by Nancy Porter and written by Harriet Reisen, airs December 28 on PBS. Professor Matteson is among the cast of scholarly commentators; Elizabeth Marvel portrays Louisa May Alcott in the documentary, and Jane Alexander plays her first biographer, Ednah Cheney. Keywords Family and work for starters, according to a new TV documentary. By Vincent J. Cannato Was the den mother of modernism a fascist? By Barbara Will Andrew Jackson stares down the national bank and wins. By Daniel Feller Even toward the end of her life, the writer revealed a youthful zest for life and art. By Danny Heitman Before writing a single book, Bento de Spinoza was considered a dangerous thinker By Steven Nadler SparkNotes: Little Women: Character List Character List Plot Overview Analysis of Major Characters Josephine March - The protagonist of the novel, and the second-oldest March sister. Jo, who wants to be a writer, is based on Louisa May Alcott herself, which makes the story semi-autobiographical.

Jo has a temper and a quick tongue, although she works hard to control both. She is a tomboy, and reacts with impatience to the many limitations placed on women and girls. She hates romance in her real life, and wants nothing more than to hold her family together. Meg March - The oldest March sister. Responsible and kind, Meg mothers her younger sisters. She has a small weakness for luxury and leisure, but the greater part of her is gentle, loving, and morally vigorous. Read an in-depth analysis of Laurie Laurence. Marmee - The March girls’ mother. Marmee is the moral role model for her girls. She counsels them through all of their problems and works hard but happily while her husband is at war. Mr. March - The March girls’ father and Marmee’s husband. He serves in the Union army as a chaplain. When he returns home, he continues acting as a minister to a nearby parish. Mr. Brooke - Laurie’s tutor. Mr. Brooke is poor but virtuous. Frederick Bhaer - A respected professor in Germany who becomes an impoverished language instructor in America. Mr. Bhaer lives in New York, where he meets Jo.

He is kind and fatherly. Mr. Laurence - Laurie’s grandfather and the Marches’ next-door neighbor. Mr. Laurence seems gruff, but he is loving and kind. Hannah - The Marches’ loyal servant. Aunt March - A rich widow and one of the March girls’ aunts. Although crotchety and difficult, Aunt March loves her nieces and wants the best for them. Daisy - Meg and Mr. Brooke’s daughter. Daisy is the twin of Demi. Her real name is Margaret. Demi - Meg and Mr. Brooke’s son and Daisy’s twin. Demi’s real name is John Laurence. Mrs. Kirke - The woman who runs the New York boarding house where Jo lives. Kate Vaughn - One of Laurie’s British friends. At first, Kate turns up her nose at the bluntness and poverty of the Marches. She later decides that she likes them, however, showing that she is able to overcome her initial prejudice. Sallie Gardiner - Meg’s rich friend. Sallie represents the good life to Meg, and Meg often covets Sallie’s possessions. Aunt Carrol - One of the March girls’ aunts.

Aunt Carrol is ladylike, and she takes Amy with her to Europe. Florence - Aunt Carrol’s daughter. Florence accompanies her aunt and Amy to Europe. Fred Vaughn - One of the Vaughn siblings. Fred is Laurie’s friend, but he soon develops a romantic interest in Amy. Esther - Aunt March’s servant. Esther is a French Catholic. Annie Moffat - Another wealthy friend of Meg’s. Annie is fashionable and social, and she wears stylish clothing that Meg envies. Ned Moffat - The older brother of Meg’s friend Annie Moffat. Frank Vaughn - One of the Vaughn siblings. Frank is sickly. Grace Vaughn - The youngest sister of the Vaughn family. Grace and Amy become friends on a picnic. Dr. Bangs - A doctor who tends to Beth when she is ailing. The Hummels - A family that lives near the Marches. The Hummels are poor and in bad health. Louisa May Alcott - Author of Little Women Louisa May Alcott Occupation: writer. Briefly: tutor (of Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson), nurse.

Known for: Little Women and other children's stories, connections to other Transcendentalist thinkers and writers Also known as: L. M. Alcott, Louisa M. Alcott, A. M. Barnard, Flora Fairchild, Flora Fairfield Family: Father: Amos Bronson Alcott, Transcendentalist, philosopher and educational experimenter, founder of Fruitlands, a utopian community which failed Mother: Abigail May, relative of abolitionist Samuel May Louisa was the second of four daughters Marriage, Children: Louisa May Alcott never married. She was a guardian for her sister's daughter and adopted a nephew. Louisa May Alcott Biography: Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, but the family quickly moved to Massachusetts, a location with which Alcott and her father are usually associated. As was common at the time, she had little formal education, taught mainly by her father using his unconventional ideas about education. continue reading below our video 4 Tips for Improving Test Performance She read from the library of neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson and learned botany from Henry David Thoreau.

She associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller , Elizabeth Peabody , Theodore Parker, Julia Ward Howe , Lydia Maria Child . The family's experience when her father founded a utopian community, Fruitlands, is satirized in Louisa May Alcott's later story, Transcendental Wild Oats . The descriptions of a flighty father and down-to-earth mother probably reflect well the family life of Louisa May Alcott's childhood. She early realized that her father's flighty educational and philosophical ventures could not adequately support the family, and she sought ways to provide financial stability. She wrote short stories for magazines and published a collection of fables she'd originally written as tutor for Ellen Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson's daughter. During the Civil War, Louisa May Alcott tried her hand at nursing, going to Washington, DC, to work with Dorothea Dix and the U.S. Sanitary Commission . She wrote in her journal, "I want new experiences, and am sure to get 'em if I go." She became ill with typhoid fever and was affected for the rest of her life with mercury poisoning, the result of the treatment for that illness.

When she returned to Massachusetts, she published a memoir of her time as a nurse, Hospital Sketches, which was a commercial success. She published her first novel, Moods, in 1864, traveled to Europe in 1865, and in 1867 began editing a children's magazine. In 1868, Louisa May Alcott wrote a book about four sisters, published in September as Little Women , based on an idealized version of her own family. The book was successful quickly, and Louisa followed it a few months later with a sequel, Good Wives, published as Little Women or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, Part Second. The naturalism of the characterizations and the non-traditional marriage of Jo were unusual and reflected the Alcott and May families' interest in Transcendentalism and social reform, including women's rights. Louisa May Alcott's other books never matched the lasting popularity of Little Women. Her Little Men not only continues the story of Jo and her husband, but also reflects the educational ideas of her father, which he was never able to communicate effectively in writing.

Louisa May Alcott nursed her mother through her final illness, while continuing to write short stories and some books. Louisa's income financed the move from the Orchard House to the Thoreau house, more central in Concord. Her sister May died of complications of childbirth, and assigned guardianship of her child to Louisa. She also adopted her nephew John Sewell Pratt, who changed his name to Alcott. Louisa May Alcott had been ill since her Civil War nursing work, but she became worse. She hired assistants to care for her niece, and moved to Boston to be near her doctors. She wrote Jo's Boys which neatly detailed the fates of her characters from her most popular fiction series. She also included the strongest feminist sentiments in this final book. By this time, Louisa had retired to a rest home. Visiting her father's deathbed on March 4, she returned to die in her sleep on March 6. A joint funeral was held, and they were both buried in the family cemetery plot. While she is best known for her writings, Louisa May Alcott was also a supporter of reform movements including antislavery, temperance , women's education, and women's suffrage.

More women's history biographies, by name: Archival Picture Gallery | Louisa May Alcott Archival Picture Gallery Bronson Alcott, age around fifty, `Mr. March` of Little Women Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association Abigail May Alcott, age around fifty, `Marmee` of Little Women Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association Louisa May Alcott in her mid-twenties, `Jo` of Little Women Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association Anna Alcott, age twenty-seven, `Meg` of Little Women Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association Elizabeth Alcott, in her early twenties, `Beth` of Little Women Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association May Alcott in her late teens, `Amy` of Little Women Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association Youth To Age A sketch, probably of Louisa, by a family friend.

Houghton Library, Harvard University Daguerreotype of Louisa at age 25 Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association Louisa as a young woman Concord Free Public Library Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association Louisa lost a great deal of weight in her last illness Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association The Family's Early Years Bronson traced three year-old Louisa`s hand on a page of his journal Houghton Library, Harvard University The short-lived Temple School was Bronson`s educational achievement Bostonian Society The Temple School classroom was elegant and airy - an innovation Houghton Library, Harvard University The Temple School curriculum stressed discussion, outdoor play, and journals Houghton Library, Harvard University Louisa`s doll (replica), made by `Marmee` for her seventh birthday Fruitlands Ralph Waldo Emerson: poet, essayist, Transcendentalist, and Louisa`s literary mentor Library of Congress Henry David Thoreau: essayist, naturalist, and Louisa`s guide to the natural world Concord Free Public Library Nathaniel Hawthorne was Louisa`s reclusive neighbor and author of The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance (about utopian settlement Brook Farm).

New York Public Library Margaret Fuller, co-editor (with Emerson) of the Dial, and much admired by Louisa, met with a tragic fate. Library of Congress Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison ran `My Contraband` in the Liberator; the Atlantic feared Southern reaction. Getty Images John Brown, abolitionist: a man Louisa was proud to know. Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association Sojourner Truth: born into slavery, abolitionist, preacher, advocate of women`s rights New York Public Library Frederick Douglass: abolitionist, orator, author, escapee from slavery New York Public Library Harriet Tubman: fugitive from slavery, liberator of the enslaved, scout and nurse for the Union Army New York Public Library Charles Lane: English member of Alcott House, co-founder of Fruitlands Fruitlands Museum Ednah Dow Littlehale Cheney: Bronson`s admirer, Alcott family friend, and Louisa`s authorized biographer Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association Reverend Samuel May: Abigail`s brother, constant support, and dedicated abolitionist Cornell University Reverend Theodore Parker: fiery abolitionist and Louisa`s comfort in vicissitudes of independent city life.

Schlesinger Library, Harvard University Orchard House, home of the Alcotts, 1857-1877 Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association Boston, where Louisa spent her early years: aerial view from a balloon Boston Public Library Dove Cottage, the Alcott`s first home in Concord Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association Concord, 1840 Louisa much admired actress Charlotte Cushman, who played Hamlet and Macbeth in male costume. Houghton Library Theatre Collection Anna Alcott met John Pratt acting with the Concord Dramatic Union Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association Anna and John Pratt’s sons, Louisa`s nephews Fred and John Pratt, circa 1870 Ernst Niereker, May Alcott`s husband and seventeen years her junior, in 1878. Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association Louisa`s niece `Lulu` Niereker and her doll, mid 1880s.

Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association Lulu, age about eight Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association Louisa hosted the children at her summer home in Nonquitt, 1880s Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association Search for: 10 Things You May Not Know About 'Little Women' | Mental Floss 10 Things You May Not Know About 'Little Women' gutenberg.org Like us on Facebook Americans recently added Little Women by Louisa May Alcott to their top 10 favorite books. To welcome it to the list, here are some facts about this beloved children’s classic. 1. Louisa May Alcott didn’t want to write Little Women. Alcott was writing both literature and pulp fiction (sample title: Pauline's Passion and Punishment ) when Thomas Niles, the editor at Roberts Brothers Publishing, approached her about writing a book for girls. Alcott said she would try, but she wasn’t all that interested, later calling such books “ moral pap for the young .” When it became clear Louisa was stalling, Niles offered a publishing contract to Louisa’s father, Bronson Alcott.

Although Bronson was a well-known thinker who was friends with Emerson and Thoreau, his work never achieved much acclaim. When it became clear that Bronson would have an opportunity to publish a new book if Louisa started her girls' story, she caved in to the pressure. 2. Little Women took only ten weeks to write. Alcott began the book in May 1868. She worked on it day and night, becoming so consumed with it that she sometimes forgot to eat or sleep. On July 15, she sent all 402 pages to her editor. In September, a mere four months after starting the book, Little Women was published. It became an instant best seller and turned Alcott into a rich and famous woman. 3. The book as we know it was originally published in two parts. The first half was published in 1868 as Little Women: Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. The Story Of Their Lives. A Girl’s Book. It ended with John Brooke proposing marriage to Meg. In 1869, Alcott published Good Wives, the second half of the book. It too only took a few months to write. 4.

Meg, Beth, and Amy were based on Alcott’s real sisters. Meg was based on Louisa’s sister Anna, who fell in love with her husband John Bridge Pratt while performing opposite him in a play. The description of Meg’s wedding in the novel is supposedly like Anna’s actual wedding. Beth was based on Lizzie, who died from scarlet fever at age 23. Like Beth, Lizzie caught the illness from a poor family her mother was helping. Amy was based on May (Amy is an anagram of May), an artist who lived in Europe. In fact, May—who died in childbirth at age 39—was the first woman to exhibit paintings in the Paris Salon. Jo, of course, is based on Alcott herself. 5. Like the March family, the Alcotts knew poverty. Bronson Alcott’s philosophical ideals made it difficult for him to find employment—for example, as a socialist, he wouldn't work for wages—so the family survived on handouts from friends and neighbors. At times during Louisa’s childhood, there was nothing to eat but bread, water, and the occasional apple.

When she got older, Alcott worked as a paid companion and governess, like Jo does in the novel, and sold “sensation” stories to help pay the bills. She also took on menial jobs, working as a seamstress, laundress, and a servant. Even as a child, Alcott wanted to help her family escape poverty, something Little Women made possible. 6. Alcott refused to marry Jo to Laurie. Alcott, who never married herself, wanted Jo to remain unmarried too. But while she was working on the second half of Little Women, fans were clamoring for Jo to marry the boy next door, Laurie. Alcott 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.” As a compromise—or to spite her fans—Alcott married Jo to the decidedly unromantic Professor Bhaer. Laurie ends up with Amy. 7. So who was Laurie based on? People have theorized Laurie was inspired by everyone from Thoreau to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son Julian, but this doesn’t seem to be the case.

In 1865, while in Europe, Alcott met a Polish musician named Ladislas Wisniewski, who Alcott nicknamed Laddie. The flirtation between Laddie and Alcott culminated in them spending two weeks together in Paris, alone. According to biographer Harriet Reisen, Alcott later modeled Laurie after Laddie. How far did the Alcott/Laddie affair go? It’s hard to say, as Alcott later crossed out the section of her diary referring to the romance. In the margin, she wrote, “couldn’t be.” 8. You can still visit Orchard House, where Alcott wrote Little Women. Wikimedia Commons Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts was the Alcott family home. In 1868, Louisa reluctantly left her Boston apartment to write Little Women there. Today, you can tour this house and see May’s drawings on the walls, as well as the small writing desk that Bronson built for Louisa to use. 9. Little Women has been adapted many times. CheckTrailer In addition to a 1958 TV series, multiple Broadway plays, a musical, a ballet, and an opera, Little Women has been made into seven movies.

The most famous are the 1933 version starring Katharine Hepburn, the 1949 version starring June Allyson (with Elizabeth Taylor as Amy), and the 1994 version starring Winona Ryder. 10. You can watch the Japanese anime version of Little Women online. In 1987, Japan made an anime version of Little Women that ran for 48 half-hour episodes. Watch the first two episodes above. Little Women Louisa May Alcott and Her Father | GradeSaver Little Women Louisa May Alcott and Her Father Buy Study Guide Little Women is largely autobiographical. Deeper understanding of the real experiences in the Alcott family can provide a more nuanced understanding of the characters' relations with one another. The influences of Amos Bronson Alcott, Louisa's father, on the book are extensive. For example, Pilgrim's Progress, Louisa's metaphor for the first half of the book, was Bronson's favorite book. Some of Bronson's teaching methods, such as having a student who misbehaved strike him rather than striking the child, are utilized by Mr. Bhaer 's character in Little Men.

However, Louisa May Alcott 's relationship with her father was much more tumultuous than Jo 's with the saintly Mr. March was. With greater understanding of Bronson's role in Louisa's life, it is possible to identify remnants of the tension between Louisa and Bronson in the relationship between Jo and her Father . Bronson Alcott was a fervent philosopher and educator. He believed in Transcendentalism, a diverse movement rooted in New England in the nineteenth century and now associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. He both wrote about and tried to live his beliefs. Alcott's philosophy focused on drawing out people's intuitive truth and morality. This belief translated into an educational method that disregarded rote memorization and textbooks in favor of practical learning experiences and the Socratic Method. Bronson applied this method in several experimental schools, most famously the Temple School, which he opened in Boston in 1834. The school flourished until Bronson published Conversations with the Gospels in 1836, which described the success of his teaching methods. Unfortunately, Conversations was poorly received, as people objected to children engaging in adult conversations.

Some parents withdrew their children from Temple School, particularly after Bronson admitted an African American student. The school closed in 1839 and left Bronson deeply in debt. After living in Concord near Emerson and Thoreau and other philosophers who encouraged Bronson's beliefs, he founded an experimental, communal farm called Fruitlands in 1843. Bronson's strict philosophy, a poor harvest, and ill health all led to the demise of Fruitlands. Bronson was asked to join a Shaker community, which he considered, despite the requirement to separate from his wife and children, as Christian does in Pilgrim's Progress. Louisa, who was eleven at the time, remembered this time sadly and prayed that they would stay together. Bronson chose to stay with the family, and after six months at Fruitlands, they moved away. Bronson's depression at the collapse of his utopia was severe. He refused to work as a laborer, could not find a job as a teacher, and fell in the estimation of his friends. Emerson, though he distanced himself publicly from Bronson, supported the family financially for years in the future and eventually helped fund a permanent home for them.

Eventually, Bronson was selected as Superintendent of Concord Schools and then started a successful School of Philosophy. Louisa and her father had a loving respect for one another, yet they caused each other great consternation. Bronson was a perfectionist who made few exceptions for worldly realities. Louisa was wild, impulsive, and strong-tempered, and she frustrated his philosophies. Louisa, for her part, was sometimes angered by her Father's idealism. Louisa described the Fruitlands experiment in a satirical story "Transcendental Wild Oats." This knowledge gives greater meaning to Mr. March's encouragement to Jo to try to write better stories, disregarding the money, and Jo's perseverance in writing her sensation stories in order to pay off the family bills that her own father could not. At first glance, Mr. March appears as an unworldly and idealistic but good man whose devotion to his family was unwavering. His characterization seems to reflect very little of Louisa's frustration with her father. In Part I, this is partially due to her father's absence. Scholars argue that she reduced and softened his role because he was so unique that readers would have trouble identifying with the family.

Yet Bronson was in fact away much of the time, leaving his wife responsible for the household. During one such memorable time at Fruitlands, Bronson and a colleague were away seeking recruits for the farm when a storm threatened the entire barley crop. Taking charge, Louisa's mother directed her children to gather as much barley as they could onto her blankets and sheets before the storm came. In Little Women, none of Jo's frustration at their poverty and the necessity of her work is directed at her father. In truth, Louisa's diary expresses annoyance at his over-extensions of generosity, such as inviting others to stay in their home despite their poverty. She dislikes having to work and sew in order to get by, and is hurt by Bronson's favoritism toward her sisters Anna and May, who are more docile than she is. With this understanding of Bronson and Louisa's relationship, it is Louisa's portrayal of Mr. March's and Jo's relationship after Beth 's death that rings the most true. The time had come when they could talk together as not only father and daughter, but as man and woman, and able and glad to serve each other with mutual sympathy as well as mutual love.

With Little Women, Louisa was able to pay off her family's debts and gain the respect of the world. When Bronson lectured, he was now introduced as the father of Louisa May Alcott. This new arrangement fostered mutual respect and care in adulthood. Amos Bronson Alcott died on March 4, 1888. He asked Louisa to "come up with me." Two days later, she did.

Question: What is the surname of the family in the book Little Women by Louisa May Alcott?
Answer: March