Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832-March 6, 1888), best known as the author of Little Women, was an advocate of abolition, women's rights, and temperance. Her stories, novels, and poems helped to support the Alcott family, and most have now been republished, widening her reputation beyond that of children's author and bringing fresh critical notice to her work.

Louisa was the second daughter of Bronson Alcott and Abigail May, who met while Abigail was visiting her brother, Samuel J. May, minister of the Unitarian church in Brooklyn, Connecticut. Abigail fell for the tall, handsome young schoolteacher with radical ideas. Her family feared 'rightly' that Bronson had little notion of how to support a family, but the young people were not to be deterred. They were married on May 23, 1830, at King's Chapel, Boston, where the May family were members.

The couple moved to Philadelphia, where their first daughter Anna was born. They lived in Germantown when Louisa arrived on November 29, 1832. Before Louisa's second birthday they returned to Boston for the opening of Bronson Alcott's unconventional Temple School, which lasted almost five years. Elizabeth was born in June, 1835, and Abby May five years later. By that time the Alcotts were living, for the first of several times, in Concord, Massachusetts. Under the wing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alcott recovered from the failure of his Temple School and looked about for new projects.

The girls were mostly educated at home. "I never went to school," Louisa wrote, "except to my father or such governesses as from time to time came into the family. . . . so we had lessons each morning in the study. And very happy hours they were to us, for my father taught in the wise way which unfolds what lies in the child's nature as a flower blooms, rather than crammed it, like a Strasburg goose, with more than it could digest. I never liked arithmetic nor grammar . . . but reading, writing, composition, history, and geography I enjoyed, as well as the stories read to us with a skill peculiarly his own."

When Louisa was ten the family, now under the influence of Bronson Alcott's English friends Charles Lane and Henry Wright, moved to Harvard, Massachusetts. On a hillside farm they planned to establish a model community, Fruitlands, making use of no animal products or labor except, as Abigail Alcott observed, for that of women. She and her small daughters struggled to keep household and farm going while the men went about the countryside philosophizing. In a few months quarrels erupted, and winter weather saw the end of the experiment. The only lasting product of Fruitlands was Louisa's reminiscence,"Transcendental Wild Oats."

The family retreated to Concord and for the next three years lived across the road from Emerson in a house they called Hillside, a relatively happy period preserved in the first chapters of Little Women. Closeness to the Emerson family was important to Louisa. Her first book, Flower Fables, 1854, was written for Ellen Emerson, whose father she idolized.

"In browsing over Mr. Emerson's library," she later wrote, "I found Goethe's 'Correspondence with a Child,' and at once was fired with a desire to be a Bettine, making my father's friend my Goethe. So I wrote letters to him, but never sent them; sat in a tall cherry tree at midnight, singing to the moon til the owls scared me to bed; left wild flowers on the doorstep of my 'Master,' and sung Mignon's song under his window in very bad German."

Years later Alcott told Emerson about her early romance. "He was much amused," she wrote, "and begged for his letters, kindly saying he felt honored to be so worshipped. The letters were burnt long ago, but Emerson remained my 'Master,' while he lived, doing more for me, 'as for many another' than he knew, by the simple beauty of his life, the truth and wisdom of his books, the example of a great, good man."

In these years, Louisa "got religion," as she later put it. Running in the Concord woods early one fall morning, she stopped to see the sunshine over the meadows. "A very strange and solemn feeling came over me as I stood there," she wrote in her journal, "with no sound but the rustle of the pines, no one near me, and the sun so glorious, as for me alone. It seemed as if I felt God as I never did before, and I prayed in my heart that I might keep that happy sense of nearness all my life."

In adulthood she wrote: "When feeling most alone, I find refuge in the Almighty Friend. If this is experiencing religion, I have done it; but I think it is only the lesson one must learn as it comes, and I am glad to know it."

Over the next few years she read Plutarch, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Goethe, Schiller, Bettine Brentano, Mme. de Stael, Emerson, Charlotte Bronte, Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, and George Sand, among others. Such literature fueled her active imagination with ideas for the thrillers she began writing in her teens, hoping to support what she called "the pathetic family."

Her first story, "The Rival Painters, A Tale of Rome" was written at the Hillside house in 1848 and published four years later in Olive Branch. By that time, the Alcotts were back in Boston, where they lived at five different addresses between 1849 and 1852. The two older girls contributed to the meager family income by teaching. Louisa's unhappy few weeks with a Dedham family were recorded in her essay, "How I Went Out to Service." Publisher James T. Fields rejected the piece and advised her: "Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can't write." Disheartened but determined, she continued to write, gradually learning how to produce what would sell. On her own in Boston she also took in sewing and served occasionally as governess. Living as frugally as possible, she sent home almost all the money she earned..

In this difficult time Louisa discovered Theodore Parker. "Go to hear Parker," she wrote in her journal, "and he does me good. Asks me to come Sunday evenings to his house. I did go there, and met [Wendell] Phillips, [William Lloyd] Garrison, . . . and other great men, and sit in my corner weekly, staring and enjoying myself."

Article by Joan Goodwin