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LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832, in Gerhters of Aail Alcott Her uished Boston family Her father, a self-educated son of farmers, was an educator and refor philosophies kept him from steady employment and the family (Louisa called it the “Pathetic Fae of poverty The Alcotts often relied upon the generosity of fa American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, who frequently provided financial support

When Louisa o, the family moved to Boston to be near Abba’s family and Emerson They would move frequently between Boston and Concord for the rest of Louisa’s life Bronson Alcott becaroup

of writers and philosophers known as the Transcendentalist Club, which included Emerson and writer Henry David Thoreau, both of whohout her life Louisa was brash and ered her father

Alcott wrote her first stories at age fifteen, during what she called her “sentier, she pursuedin fa a series of tales for Ehter, Ellen, which she called Flower Fables; and founding a family newspaper, the Olive Leaf Her first published as the poeazine in 1851

Louisa’s father didn’t earn sufficient income to support the family, so Louisa, her mother, and her sisters worked—Abba as one of the nation’s first social workers, the girls at sewing and teaching Alcott viewed herself as a pillar of financial and emotional support to her feer sister, Elizabeth, died of scarlet fever and her elder sister, Anna, announced her engagement

During the Aton, DC, to work as a Union Army nurse, until a bout with typhoid cut her service short While convalescing, she reworked her letters to her family into a series called Hospital Sketches; published in 1863, it brought her favorable notice as a writer Over the next several years she published a number of children’s collections and anonyothic tales In 1867 she was offered the editorship of the children’syear, commissioned by the publisher Roberts Brothers, she wrote Little Women in six weeks With the publication of Little Woht financial security for herself and her family The sequel Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys was published in 1871

Always active in the suffrage movement, in 1879 Alcott became the first woman to vote in Concord When her sister May died in childbirth the sairl na this period, due to the lingering effects of mercury in the treat the Civil War Too weak to write extensively, Alcott would publish and republish her children’s story collections until her death The fe this period, in 1886 Louisa May Alcott died March 6, 1888, two days after the death of her father She is buried with her parents

THE WORLD OF LOUISA MAY

ALCOTT AND LITTLE WOMEN

1832 Louisa May Alcott is born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, on November 29, her father’s birthday; she is the second of four children of Abigail “Abba” Alcott and Amos Bronson, a teacher and educational reforer and Lewis Carroll; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ill become one of Alcott’s favorite authors, dies

1834 Struggling financially and in search of work, Bronson time friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and Abba’s family Bronson opens the Te methods

1835 5 Abba gives birth to her third child, Elizabeth Sewall Alcott Sahorne Clemens, known as Mark Twain, is born

1836 Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and other philosophical and literary scholars in the area form what becomes known as the Transcendentalist Club E the philosophy of transcen dentalism, which asserts God’s existence in hest source of knowledge

1837 Victoria becoland

1838 Charles Dickens’s novels Oliver Twist (1837-1839) and Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839) attain great popularity

1840 Forced to close the Te methods and his admittance of a mulatto child have withdrawn their children—Bronson Alcott moves his family to Concord, Massachusetts, where Emerson and Thoreau live Louisa attends the Concord Academy, run by Thoreau and his brother The fourth and final Alcott child, Abigail May (called May), is born

1841 Emerson publishes Essays

1843 Bronson cofounds a utopian communal farm, Fruitlands, in the rural town of Harvard, Massachusetts; he and his family live there until the experiment fails in 1844

1844 Emerson publishes Essays: Second Series

1845 With an inheritance left to Abba, the family purchases a house in Concord, named Hillside, where Alcott finally has a room of her own

1847 The novels Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë are published