About Louisa May Alcott

Trying to set down the life of the remarkable Louisa May Alcott in a few paragraphs is, without a doubt, a fool’s errand. I hope this short sketch serves as a launching point toward further investigation of her life and work.

Louisa May Alcott was born November 29, 1832. She fell in love with books and ideas and worked at becoming a writer from an early age. But finding space and time for her work was a challenge. Louisa’s father Bronson was a brilliant philosopher but struggled to provide for the family, and they moved many times throughout Louisa’s childhood.

Louisa had been published in her twenties, but the Civil War changed her writing career as well as her life. Working as a nurse at the Union Hospital in Washington DC, Louisa recorded the stories of her patients in a series that later became the book Hospital Sketches. Her time at the hospital was short-lived: After a few weeks Louisa fell ill and returned to her family in Concord. Though she was only thirty, her illness and the damaging calomel used to treat it took a toll on her body. Louisa believed the pain, fatigue, and other symptoms she suffered for the rest of her life were the result of mercury poisoning, though one new biography suggests she may actually have been suffering from lupus.

Whatever the cause of her ill health, Louisa felt she had come close to death. The realization that life could end at any time fueled her passion for work. Her father and publisher encouraged her to try a book for young girls that captured her childhood with her three sisters. Louisa was reluctant to write Little Women. The interest in Hospital Sketches made her feel like she was finally being taken seriously as a writer for adults; writing for young girls felt like a step backward. But the promise of desperately needed income was impossible to resist.

Louisa's room at Orchard House, the Alcott family home (courtesy of www.louisamayalcott.org)

The first part of Little Women was published in 1868 and became an overnight success. Young women fell in love with Meg, Beth, Amy, and especially strong-willed Jo, whom Louisa admitted she had based on herself. Louisa got to work on a sequel, Good Wives, which was released the following year. The publisher soon combined the two parts together under one title, the Little Women we know today.

After Little Women, Louisa no longer had to worry about money, though she always did. It seems you could take the poverty out of her life but not our of her mind. Her loyal fans were hungry for more stories about young people “getting into scrapes” and learning about humility and hard work. Louisa cranked out several more novels for young readers over the ensuing decades, though the material often bored her.

To satisfy her vivid imagination, which she felt was restricted by the limits of writing like Little Women, Louisa also wrote what she called “blood and thunder tales,” both anonymously and sometimes under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard. These racy stories involved elements neither Louisa nor her publisher wanted associated with what we would think of today as the Louisa May Alcott “brand”—family curses, violent revenge plots, and even a little bit of hashish. (These stories were forgotten after her death, and it wasn’t until 1942 that rare book dealer Leona Rostenberg, along with Alcott scholar Madeline Stern, connected Louisa to the pseudonym.) Louisa also wrote what she considered “serious” novels (like Moods) under her own name, but to her dismay they were sometimes met with lukewarm reception.

Louisa continued to write for the rest of her life. She also became increasingly active in the women’s suffrage movement and used her notoriety to bring attention to the cause. She organized reading groups for women to educate them about the issues of the day and circulated petitions. She was the first woman in Concord to register to vote.

As the years went by, the Alcott family became increasingly dependent on Louisa for support. Lizzie, just like her Little Women counterpart Beth, died of scarlet fever at age twenty. Anna married a poor but loving man who gave her two sons and died young. Abba’s health worsened and Louisa nursed her until she died. May went off to Europe to study art, married, and gave birth to a daughter but died soon after. The little girl, named after her Aunt Louisa and nicknamed Lulu, came to Concord to live, though she later went back to her father in Switzerland. In 1888, Louisa’s last patient, her father, died. Two days later, she passed away in the middle of the night.