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About Louisa May Alcott With the publication of "Little Women" in 1868, Louisa May Alcott became one of the most famous and admired women in America. Loved by parents, children and contemporaries (Henry James dubbed her the Trollope of the nursery and schoolroom), she was far more complex than her public persona as the "Benefactor of Households" and "Youth's Companion." Alcott was a fierce and funny woman with a rapier wit, which she used to irreverently mock and satirize the moral and class pieties of her day. She had a florid and sensuous imagination, writing about hashish experimentation, psychosexual manipulation, interracial romance and murderous passion. Alcott was born on Nov. 29, 1832 in Germantown, Penn., the second daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May Alcott. She was raised in a progressive, liberal household; her parents were idealists, vegetarians, abolitionists, hoydens, and her mother was a suffragette. The Alcotts moved frequently between Boston and Concord. Louisa's education, which she received at home, was haphazard, but exceptional: She counted Henry Thoreau among her "instructors." In 1843, Bronson established a utopian community at a run-down farm on Prospect Hill in the tiny hamlet of Harvard. It was a fiasco, and the heretofore self-confident and dynamic Bronson collapsed into a suicidal depression. Abigail took charge of the family, and in 1844 the Alcotts returned to Concord. As a child, Alcott was an active tomboy. She staged splendid theatricals in the barn. She went through a "book mania" stage and devoured Dickens, Shakespeare and Goethe. She opened a little school in the barn with Ralph Waldo Emerson's children as her star pupils. In 1848, the family moved to Boston and Alcott began her unending, Herculean effort to keep the "Alcott Sinking Fund" afloat. She sewed, taught, tried governessing and even worked as a servant. Alcott was 22 when her first book, "Flower Fables," was published. In 1862, Alcott volunteered as an army nurse in a Civil War hospital. She worked in the unbelievably squalid Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown. After six weeks, she contracted typhoid fever and was brought home. Hospital Sketches (1863), based on the letters she had written to her family, were Alcott's first real literary success. Throughout the 1860s, Alcott continued to churn out "rubbishy" tales about drug addicts, fiends, assassins and femmes fatales that were published anonymously. These sensational potboilers eased her family out of debt. In 1864, she published her first novel, "Moods," an intriguing study of marriage, or mismarriage. "Moods" was a moderate success, but it also shocked some readers who were offended at the author's manner of "speaking freely" on matrimony. Ironically it was "Little Women," a book about the wholesome March family (that Alcott did not even want to write), that was responsible for her wealth and fame. From 1870 onward, Alcott turned out a steady succession of "healthy and hearty" novels, tales and sketches for an insatiable audience of children and young adults. She told a correspondent that "though I do not enjoy writing 'moral tales' for the young, I do it because it pays well." Alcott's last years were devoted to caring for her father. She also assumed care of her niece, Lulu. Alcott was often in very poor health, and increasingly found it difficult to write. In 1888, she died in a convalescent home in Roxbury, near Boston. | |
