Louisa May Alcott

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott at about age 25
Born November 29, 1832(1832-11-29)
Germantown, PA, U.S.
Died March 6, 1888(1888-03-06) (aged 55)
Boston, MA, U.S.
Pen name A. M. Barnard
Occupation Novelist
Nationality American
Period Civil war
Subjects Young Adult stories
Notable work(s) Little Women
Signature

Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist. She is best known for the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys. Little Women was 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 was born on November 29, 1832[1] – her father's 33rd birthday. 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[1], 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,[2] After the family moved to Massachusetts, Alcott's 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 on 2 acres (8,100 m2) of land, situated 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. They moved into the home they named "Hillside" on April 1, 1845.[3]

Alcott's early education included lessons from the naturalist Henry David Thoreau. She received the majority of her schooling from her father. She received some instruction also 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 (1849), 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) – brought 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 sensational 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.

Alcott produced wholesome stories for children also, and after their positive reception, she did not generally return to creating works for adults. Adult-oriented exceptions include the anonymous novelette A Modern Mephistopheles (1875), which attracted suspicion that it was written by Julian Hawthorne; and the semi-autobiographical tale Work (1873).

[edit] Literary success and later life

Louisa May Alcott

Alcott's literary success arrived with the publication by the Roberts Brothers 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".

In Little Women, Alcott based her heroine "Jo" on herself. 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." However, Alcott's romance while in Europe with Ladislas Wisniewski, "Laddie", was detailed in her journals but then deleted by Alcott herself before her death. Alcott identified Laddie as the model for Laurie in Little Women, and there is strong evidence this was the significant emotional relationship of her life.[4][5]

When her younger sister May died in 1879, Alcott took in May's daughter, Louisa May Nieriker ("Lulu"), who was two years old. The baby had been named after her aunt, but was nicknamed Lulu, whereas Louisa May's nicknames were "Weed" and "Louy".[4]

In her later life, Alcott became an advocate for 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 who addressed 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, who continued to write until her death, suffered chronic health problems in her later years, [6] including vertigo. [7]She and her earliest biographers[8] attributed her illness and death to mercury poisoning: during her American Civil War service, Alcott contracted typhoid fever and was treated with a compound containing mercury.[6] Recent analysis of Alcott's illness, however, suggests that her chronic health problems may have been associated with an autoimmune disease, not acute mercury exposure. Moreover, a late portrait of Alcott shows rashes on her cheeks characteristic of lupus.[6][9] Alcott died at age 55 of a stroke in Boston, on March 6, 1888 at 3:30 A.M. [7], two days after her father's death. Her last words were "Is it not meningitis?"[10]

The story of her life and career was told initially 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). In 2008, John Matteson won the Pulitzer Prize in Biography for his first book, Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. Harriet Reisen's biography, "Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women," was published in 2009, and includes the most extensive primary source material (much of which was discovered after Stern's biography), including Madelon Bedell's unpublished notes of interviews with Lulu before Lulu's death.[4] The children's biography Invincible Louisa, written by Cornelia Meigs, received the Newbery Award in 1934 for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.

[edit] Selected works

Louisa May Alcott
Bust of Louisa May Alcott

As A. M. Barnard

First published anonymously

  • A Modern Mephistopheles (1877)

[edit] See also

Portal icon Children's literature portal
  • Walpole, New Hampshire, where the abundant lilacs in the town inspired Alcott to write the book Under the Lilacs
  • Greenwich Village, New York City, where Alcott lived for a time while she was writing Little Women

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ a b Kathryn Cullen-DuPont (1 August 2000). Encyclopedia of women's history in America. Infobase Publishing. p. 8-9. ISBN 978-0-8160-4100-8. http://books.google.com/books?id=oIro7MtiFuYC&pg=PA374. Retrieved 28 November 2011. 
  2. ^ 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.
  3. ^ Matteson, John. Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007: 174. ISBN 978-0-393-33359-6
  4. ^ a b c "Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women," Harriet Reisen, 2009
  5. ^ Little Women Introduction, Penguin Classics, 1989. ISBN 0-14-039069-3
  6. ^ a b c Maura Lerner, "A diagnosis, 119 years after death," Star Tribune, August 12, 2007.
  7. ^ a b Donaldson, Norman and Betty (1980). How Did They Die?. Greenwich House. ISBN 0-517-403021. 
  8. ^ Hirschhorn, Norbert; Greaves, Ian (Spring 2007). "Louisa May Alcott: Her Mysterious Illness". Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 50 (2): 243–259. doi:10.1353/pbm.2007.0019. PMID 17468541. 
  9. ^ Hirschhorn and Greaves (2007), pp. 243–259.
  10. ^ 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) (January 29, 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. 
  • Reisen, Harriet. Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind 'Little Women'. 
  • Eiselein, Gregory and Anne K. Phillips (eds.) (2001). The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia. Greenwood Press. 

[edit] External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Louisa May Alcott
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Louisa May Alcott
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Louisa May Alcott

Sources

Archival Materials

Other

Works by Louisa May Alcott
Novels
Louisa May Alcott headshot.jpg
Short works
Miscellany
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Louisa_May_Alcott&oldid=476381388"
Personal tools
Namespaces
Variants
Actions
Navigation
Interaction
Toolbox
Print/export
Languages