Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott: The Sensationalist Who Wrote Little Women

Before Little Women, Louisa May Alcott wrote under the name A. M. Barnard about incest, murder, suicide, secret identities and sensuality. The stories paid well, and she kept her name off them to protect a literary reputation she had not yet earned. Then her publisher Thomas Niles asked her for a book for girls. She was reluctant, and produced the most durable American novel of domestic life ever written.

Born Into an Experiment

She was born on 29 November 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, the second of four daughters — Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth, May — to the transcendentalist educator Amos Bronson Alcott and the social worker Abigail May Alcott. Her father's friend Elizabeth Peabody often looked after her. Bronson educated his daughters himself on a regime of strict moral discipline, and the household's visitors did the rest: Henry David Thoreau taught her biology and Native American history, Ralph Waldo Emerson supplied literary mentorship and, on occasion, the rent. The Orchard House museum describes the family as "a famous yet flawed family who firmly believed in the power of unconditional love, personal agency, and social justice," and Bronson as "a revolutionary educator and passionate educational reformer." Both halves of that sentence mattered to her.

Fruitlands

The Alcotts moved to Concord, Massachusetts in 1840, where Emerson settled them at Hosmer Cottage; Louisa called those three years the happiest of her life. In 1842–43 Bronson and Charles Lane founded Fruitlands, a utopian community at Harvard, Massachusetts, where the family endured harsh conditions and a great deal of manual labour. It collapsed in 1844 and left behind a poverty that never entirely lifted.

Teacher, Seamstress, Governess, Laundress

After a return to Concord and the purchase of Hillside — later renamed The Wayside — the family moved to Boston in 1848. Louisa worked as a teacher, a seamstress, a governess, a domestic helper and a laundress, keeping the household solvent. Her first publication appeared in 1851 under the pseudonym Flora Fairchild, and her first book, Flower Fables (1854), collected stories she had told to Emerson's daughter Ellen. Under the pen name A. M. Barnard she wrote the sensation novels and lurid short stories for adults that funded the rest.

Six Weeks at Georgetown

When the Civil War came she applied to nurse, and on 11 December 1862, aged thirty, she was assigned to the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown. She cleaned wounds, fed patients, dressed injuries and assisted at amputations. After six weeks she contracted typhoid fever and was treated with calomel, a mercury compound; her father came to collect her. The mercury poisoning almost certainly caused the vertigo, dyspepsia, headaches and limb pain that troubled her for the rest of her life, and medical historians have since suggested lupus or another autoimmune condition. Out of those six weeks came Hospital Sketches (1863), her first critical success.

Little Women

Niles read it and commissioned a book for girls. Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy appeared in 1868, semi-autobiographical, written and set at Orchard House in Concord — the museum notes that the house "is most noted for being where Louisa May Alcott wrote and set Little Women in 1868." Jo was Louisa; Laurie drew on the Polish revolutionary Ladislas Wisniewski and on Alfred Whitman. The book's popularity astonished its author. Good Wives followed in 1869, Little Men in 1871 — written specifically to support her widowed sister Anna — and Jo's Boys in 1886, which took seven years to finish. Together they form the March Family Saga, and they are what has lasted.

The First Woman to Register

She was a committed abolitionist, in a family who had served as station masters on the Underground Railroad. She went to abolitionist rallies and wrote anti-slavery fiction including "M. L.," "My Contraband" and "An Hour," and when John Brown was hanged in 1859 she called it "the execution of Saint John the Just." After her mother's death in 1877 she turned to suffrage, and on 9 March 1879 became the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts, for a school board election. She helped found the Women's Educational and Industrial Union in Boston in 1877 and Concord's first temperance society, and joined Sorosis to argue about dress and health reform. Her essay "Happy Women" made the case that a woman need not marry. She never did.

Why Louisa Is Called a Genius

The faculty is tonal control across registers that should be incompatible. Alcott was writing pseudonymous sensation fiction about incest and murder for cash at the same time as she was producing a domestic novel so steady in its handling that it has never gone out of print. The craft in Little Women lies in its refusal of sentimentality while operating inside the most sentimental genre then available — a book about four girls that declines to lie about poverty, thwarted artistic ambition, or the death of a child. Doing that on commission, reluctantly, in a form she did not respect, is the hard part.

The counter-case is that the claim rests on essentially one book and its sequels. The sensation fiction is read today largely because she wrote it, not on its own strength, and the late Lulu's Library collections of 1886–89 are minor. She wrote fast and for money and the weaker books show it. Notably, none of the sources reach for the word genius at all; what they record instead is influence, which is a different and in some ways heavier currency. Ursula K. Le Guin and J. K. Rowling have named her as formative, as have Theodore Roosevelt, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Hillary Clinton and Sandra Day O'Connor. That is the specific achievement — a book that altered what several generations of its readers believed was available to them — and it is more measurable than genius usually is.

Legacy

Her sister May died in London in 1879 of complications from childbirth, and in September 1880 Louisa took in her niece Lulu and raised her. When Bronson suffered a stroke in 1882 she became his carer. She sold Orchard House in June 1884, and as her health failed her doctors instructed her to stop writing. She had a stroke on 3 March 1888 and died on 6 March, two days after her father, and was buried on Authors' Ridge at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, alongside Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau. Little Women has been adapted for screen repeatedly since 1933, and she entered the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996.

Achievements

• Notable work: Little Women
• Notable work: An Old-Fashioned Girl
• Notable work: Jo's Boys
• Notable work: Work: A Story of Experience
• Genres: Gothic literature