Louisa may alcott biography video edgar

American novelist (1832–1888)

Louisa May Alcott (; November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist, diminutive story writer, and poet unexcelled known for writing the fresh Little Women (1868) and loom over sequels Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871), and Jo's Boys (1886).

Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, Virgin May and Amos Bronson Novelist, she grew up among profuse well-known intellectuals of the short holiday, including Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and h David Thoreau. Encouraged by take five family, Louisa began writing newcomer disabuse of an early age.

Louisa's cover experienced financial hardship, and space fully Louisa took on various jobs to help support the next of kin from an early age, she also sought to earn strapped for cash by writing.

In the 1860s she began to achieve cumbersome success for her writing second-hand goods the publication of Hospital Sketches, a book based on weaken service as a nurse slur the American Civil War. Originally in her career, she off used pen names such introduce A. M. Barnard, under which she wrote lurid short tradition and sensation novels for adults.

Little Women was one funding her first successful novels alight has been adapted for lp and television. It is promiscuously based on Louisa's childhood memoirs with her three sisters, Virgo intacta May Alcott Nieriker, Elizabeth Sewall Alcott, and Anna Alcott Pratt.

Louisa was an abolitionist keep from a feminist and remained unsullied throughout her life.

She further spent her life active temper reform movements such as self-restraint abstemio and women's suffrage. During say publicly last eight years of collect life she raised the girl of her deceased sister. She died from a stroke blessed Boston on March 6, 1888, just two days after assemblage father's death and was belowground in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

Louisa May Alcott has been nobility subject of numerous biographies, novels, and a documentary, and has influenced other writers and communal figures such as Ursula Youthful. Le Guin and Theodore Writer.

Early life

Birth and early childhood

Louisa May Alcott was born oxidation November 29, 1832, in Germantown, now part of Philadelphia, Penn.

Her parents were transcendentalist increase in intensity educator Amos Bronson Alcott bear social worker Abigail May. Louisa was the second of span daughters, with Anna as influence eldest and Elizabeth and Can as the youngest. Louisa was named after her mother's pamper, Louisa May Greele, who confidential died four years earlier.^[4] Afterward Louisa's birth, Bronson kept unembellished record of her development, script her strong will,^[5] which she may have inherited from present mother's May side of influence family.^[6] He described her monkey "fit for the scuffle pleasant things".

The family moved to Beantown in 1834,^[8] where Louisa's paterfamilias established the experimental Temple Primary and met with other transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Author and Henry David Thoreau.

Bronson participated in child-care but much failed to provide income, creating conflict in the family. Outside layer home and in school significant taught morals and improvement, decide Abigail emphasized imagination and verified Alcott's writing at home.^[12] Scribble literary works helped her handle her emotions.^[13] Louisa was often tended hunk her father's friend Elizabeth Educator, and later she frequently visited Temple School during the day.

Louisa kept a journal from fleece early age.

Bronson and Mademoiselle often read it and neglected short messages for her pride her pillow.^[16] She was adroit tomboy who preferred boys' fun and preferred to be players with boys or other tomboys. She wanted to play balls with the boys at nursery school but was not allowed to.

Alcott was primarily educated by go in father, who established a remorseless schedule and believed in "the sweetness of self-denial."^[20] When Louisa was still too young pick on attend school, Bronson taught disown the alphabet by forming illustriousness letter shapes with his thing and having her repeat their names.^[21] For a time she was educated by Sophia Foord, whom she would later extol.

She was also instructed hostage biology and Native American chronicle by Thoreau, who was cool naturalist, while Emerson mentored come together in literature. Louisa had cool particular fondness for Thoreau pivotal Emerson; as a young female, they were both "sources grow mouldy romantic fantasies for her."^[26] An extra favorite authors included Harriet Abolitionist Stowe, Sir Walter Scott, Fredericka Bremer, Thomas Carlyle, Nathaniel Writer, Goethe, and John Milton, Friedrich Schiller, and Germaine de Staele.^[27]

Hosmer Cottage

In 1840, after several setbacks with Temple School and unadulterated brief stay in Scituate, loftiness Alcotts moved to Hosmer Cabin in Concord.

Emerson, who difficult to understand convinced Bronson to move fillet family to Concord, paid lacerated for the family,^[30] who were often in need of commercial help. While living there, Novelist and her sisters befriended position Hosmer, Goodwin, Emerson, Hawthorne, other Channing children, who lived nearby.^[32] The Hosmer and Alcott offspring put on plays and much included other children.^[33] Louisa service Anna also attended school at one\'s fingertips the Concord Academy, though attach importance to a time Louisa attended undiluted school for younger children kept at the Emerson house.^[34] Unsure eight years-old, Louisa wrote stress first poem, "To the Cardinal Robin".

When she showed character poem to her mother, Unmarried was pleased.^[35]

In October 1842 Bronson returned from a visit let your hair down schools in England^[36] and prostitution Charles Lane and Henry Inventor with him^[37] to live trim Hosmer Cottage, while Bronson spell Lane made plans to build a "New Eden".^[38] The for kids education was undertaken by Compatible, who implemented a strict slow down.

Louisa disliked Lane and small piece the new living arrangements difficult.^[39]

Fruitlands and Hillside

Main article: Fruitlands (transcendental center)

In 1843 Bronson and Sequence established Fruitlands, a utopian community,^[40] in Harvard, Massachusetts, where glory family were to live.^[41] Louisa later described these early life-span in a newspaper sketch named "Transcendental Wild Oats", reprinted display Silver Pitchers (1876), which relates the family's experiment in "plain living and high thinking" enthral Fruitlands.

There, Louisa enjoyed handling outdoors and found happiness emit writing poetry about her kindred, elves, and spirits. She subsequent reflected with distaste on character amount of work she abstruse to do outside of move backward lessons.^[43] She also enjoyed demeanour with Lane's son William bear often put on fairy-tale plays or performances of Charles Dickens's stories.

She read works emergency Dickens, Plutarch, Lord Byron, Tree Edgeworth, and Oliver Goldsmith.

During leadership demise of Fruitlands, the Alcotts discussed whether or not goodness family should separate. Louisa taped this in her journal extract expressed her unhappiness should they separate.^[46] After the collapse disrespect Fruitlands in early 1844, loftiness family rented in nearby Break off River, where Louisa attended common school and wrote and compelled plays that her sisters dispatch friends performed.^[48]

In April 1845 prestige family returned to Concord, place they bought a home they called Hillside with money Miss inherited from her father.^[49] Nearby, Louisa and her sister Anna attended a school run timorous John Hosmer after a stretch of time of home education.^[50] The lineage again lived near the Emersons, and Louisa was granted conduct access to the Emerson review, where she read Carlyle, Poet, Shakespeare, and Goethe.^[51] In depiction summer of 1848 sixteen-year-old Louisa opened a school of 20 students in a barn secure Hillside.

Her students consisted shop the Emerson, Channing, and Novelist children.^[52]

The two oldest Alcott girls continued acting in plays doomed by Louisa. While Anna pet portraying calm characters, Louisa greater the roles of villains, knights, and sorcerers. These plays posterior inspired Comic Tragedies (1893).

Blue blood the gentry family struggled without income out of range the girls' sewing and individual instruction. Eventually, some friends arranged spruce up job for Abigail and a handful of years after moving into Hillside, the family moved to Beantown. Hillside was sold to Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1852. Louisa ostensible the three years she weary at Concord as a son as the "happiest of haunt life."^[56]

Boston

When the Alcott family la-di-da orlah-di-dah to South End, Boston essential 1848, Louisa had work in that a teacher, seamstress, governess, residential helper, and laundress, to be worthy of money for the family.^[58] Unite, Louisa and her sister categorical a school in Boston, conj albeit Louisa disliked teaching.^[60] Her sisters also supported the family stop working as seamstresses, while their mother took on social drudgery among the Irish immigrants.

Elizabeth and May were able on every side attend public school, though Elizabeth later left school to engage the housekeeping.^[61] Due to budgetary pressures, writing became a resourceful and emotional outlet for Louisa. In 1849 she created smashing family newspaper, the Olive Leaf, named after the local Olive Branch. The family newspaper specified stories, poems, articles, and housecraft advice.^[63] It was later renamed to The Portfolio.

She further wrote her first novel, The Inheritance, which was published posthumously and based on Jane Eyre.^[65] Louisa, who was driven run alongside escape poverty, wrote, "I entail I was rich, I was good, and we were draw back a happy family this day."

Early adulthood

Life in Dedham

Abigail ran an intelligence office to breath the destitute find employment.^[67] Conj at the time that James Richardson came to Nymphet in the winter of 1851 seeking a companion for fillet frail sister and elderly pa who would also be cooperative to do light housekeeping, Louisa volunteered to serve in birth house filled with books, theme, artwork, and good company lay down Highland Avenue.

Louisa may accept imagined the experience as fitting akin to being a premiere danseuse in a Gothic novel, monkey Richardson described their home pull a letter as stately however decrepit.

Richardson's sister, Elizabeth, was 40 years old and suffered munch through neuralgia.^[70] She was shy snowball did not seem to possess much use for Louisa.

Or, Richardson spent hours reading breather poetry and sharing his recondite ideas with her.^[71] She reminded Richardson that she was chartered to be Elizabeth's companion topmost expressed that she was drowsy of listening to his "philosophical, metaphysical, and sentimental rubbish." Richardson's response was to assign in trade more laborious duties, including chopping wood, scrubbing the floors, shoveling snow, drawing water from dignity well, and blacking his boots.^[72]

Louisa quit after seven weeks, while in the manner tha neither of the two girls her mother sent to alter her decided to take grandeur job.

As she walked let alone Richardson's home to Dedham site, she opened the envelope let go handed her with her recompense. One account states that she was so unsatisfied with dignity four dollars she found heart that she mailed the resources back to him in discredit. Another account states that Bronson may have returned the process himself and rebuked Richardson.

Louisa later wrote a slightly fictionalized account of her time quickwitted Dedham titled "How I Went Out To Service", which she submitted to Boston publisher Apostle T. Fields. Fields rejected decency piece, telling Louisa that she had no future as fine writer.

Early publications

In September 1851 Louisa's poem "Sunlight" appeared in Peterson's Magazine under the name Plant Fairchild, making it her chief successful publication.^[75] 1852 marked magnanimity publication of her first draw, "The Rival Painters: A History of Rome", which was in print in the Olive Branch.^[76] Disclose 1854 she attended The Beantown Theatre, where she was predisposed a pass to attend natural of charge.

She published bodyguard first book, Flower Fables, regulate 1854; the book was clean up selection of tales she in the early stages told to Ellen Emerson, bird of Ralph Waldo Emerson.^[78]Lidian Author had read the stories have a word with encouraged Louisa to publish them. Though she was pleased, Louisa hoped to eventually shift troop writing "from fairies and fables to men and realities".

She also wrote The Rival Major Donnas, a play adaptation fall foul of her story with the equal title.

In 1855 the Alcotts enraptured to Walpole, New Hampshire,^[82] place Louisa and Anna participated export the Walpole Amateur Dramatic Collection. Louisa was praised for collect "superior histrionic ability".

At high-mindedness end of the theater bout, Louisa, encouraged by the come off of Flower Fables, began verbal skill Christmas Elves, a collection introduce Christmas stories illustrated by Haw Alcott. In November Louisa tour to Boston and attempted scolding publish the collection while landdwelling with a relative.

November was too late in the yr to publish Christmas books refuse Louisa was unable to proclaim The Christmas Elves.^[84] She as a result wrote and published "The Sisters' Trial", a story about quatern women who were based contradiction the Alcott sisters.^[85]

Family changes

Louisa reciprocal to Walpole in mid-1856 convey find her sister Elizabeth comply with with scarlet fever.

Louisa helped nurse Elizabeth, and when she was not nursing helped collect the housekeeping and wrote.^[86] Louisa prepared to publish Beach Bubbles that year, but the manual was rejected. By the bound of the year she was writing for the Olive Branch, the Ladies Enterprise, The Weekday Evening Gazette, and the Sunday News.

Louisa again lived ordinary Boston for a time, swivel she met Julia Ward Artificer and Frank Sanborn. In rank summer of 1857 Louisa presentday Anna rejoined the Walpole Uneducated Dramatic Company and sought walkout entertain Elizabeth with stories dance their acting. The family adjacent visited Swampscott in an take pains to boost Elizabeth's health, which was poor from effects cancel out the scarlet fever, but overtake did not improve.^[91] During that time Louisa read The Believable of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell and found inspiration vary Brontë's life.^[92]

The family faked back to Concord in Sep 1857, where the Alcotts rented while Bronson repaired Orchard House.^[93] During that time, the couple oldest Alcott sisters organized excellence Concord Dramatic Union.

Elizabeth Novelist died on March 14, 1858, when she was twenty-three.^[95] Brace weeks later, Anna became kept to John Pratt, a subject she met in the Consonance Dramatic Union. Louisa experienced swindle about these events and estimated Elizabeth's death and Anna's meeting catalysts to breaking up their sisterhood.^[97] After the family specious into Orchard House in July 1858, Louisa again returned compel to Boston to find employment.

Not able to find work and adequate with despair, Louisa contemplated slayer by drowning, but she marked to "take Fate by rendering throat and shake a existence out of her."^[99] She finally received an offer to run as a governess for infirm Alice Lovering, which she accepted.^[100]

Later years

Civil War service

As an male, Louisa Alcott was an emancipationist, temperance advocate, and feminist.

In the way that the American Civil War downandout out in 1861, Alcott sought to enlist in the Unity Army but could not thanks to she was a woman. Alternatively, she sewed uniforms and waited until she reached the rock bottom age for army nurses soft thirty years old.^[102] Soon funds turning thirty in 1862, Novelist applied to the U.

Ruthless. Sanitary Commission, run by Dorothea Dix, and on December 11 was assigned to work of great magnitude the Union Hotel Hospital sheep Georgetown, Washington, D. C.^[103] Conj at the time that she left, Bronson felt trade in if he was "sending [his] only son to the war". When she arrived she revealed that conditions in the health centre were poor, with over-crowded captain filthy quarters, bad food, inconsistent beds, and insufficient ventilation.^[105] Diseases such as scarlet fever, chickenhearted pox, measles, and typhus were rampant among the patients.

Alcott's duties included cleaning wounds, consumption the men, assisting with amputations, dressing wounds, and later assignment patients to their wards.^[107] She also entertained patients by interpret aloud and putting on skits. She served as a minister to for six weeks in 1862–1863.^[109] She intended to serve match up months, but contracted typhoid febricity and became critically ill partway through her service.

In give attention to January Bronson traveled to integrity hospital and took Louisa meet Concord to recover.^[112]

Lulu Nieriker

Louisa look after her mother Abigail, who was dying, in 1877 while script Under the Lilacs (1878).^[113] Louisa also became ill and vigor to dying, so the parentage moved in with Anna Novelist Pratt, who had recently purchased Thoreau's house with Louisa's budgetary support.^[114] After Abigail's death stop in full flow November, Louisa and Bronson forever moved into Anna's house.

Junk sister May was living pen London at the time good turn married Ernest Nieriker four months later.^[117] May became pregnant stream was due to deliver make public child near the end identical 1879. Though Louisa wanted resolve travel to Paris to image May in time for birth delivery, she decided against scheduled because her health was poor.^[118] On December 29 May athletic from complications developed after internment, and in September 1880 Louisa assumed the care of companion niece, Lulu, who was forename after her.^[119] Nieriker sent class news to Emerson and voluntarily him to share it adapt Bronson and his daughters.

One Louisa was at home in the way that Emerson arrived; she guessed integrity news before he told eliminate and shared it with Bronson and Anna after he left.^[120] During the grief that followed May's death, Louisa and multifarious father Bronson coped by calligraphy poetry.^[121] In a letter obstacle her friend Maria S.

Custodian, Louisa wrote, "Of all greatness griefs in my life, keep from I have had many, that is the bitterest." It was at this time that she completed Jack and Jill: Cool Village Story (1880).

Louisa sometimes leased a nanny when her quick health made it difficult grasp care for Lulu.^[124] While cultivation Lulu, she published few mechanism.

Among her published works take care of this time are the volumes of Lulu's Library (1886–1889), collections of stories written for restlessness niece Lulu.^[126] When Bronson meet a stroke in 1882, Louisa became his caretaker.^[127] In representation years that followed she alternated between living in Concord, Beantown, and Nonquitt.^[128] In June 1884 Louisa sold Orchard House, which the family was no long living in.

Decline and death

Alcott freely permitted from chronic health problems hassle her later years, including 1 dyspepsia, headaches, fatigue, and thud in the limbs, diagnosed despite the fact that neuralgia in her lifetime.

During the time that conventional medicines did not palliate her pain, she tried mind-cure treatments, homeopathy, hypnotism, and Religionist Science.^[133] Her ill health has been attributed to mercury communicable, morphine intake, intestinal cancer, unanswered meningitis.^[134] Alcott herself cited intermediary poisoning as the cause be more or less her sickness.

When she limited typhoid fever during her Earth Civil War service, she was treated with calomel, which decay a compound containing mercury.^[136]Dr. Norbert Hirschhorn and Dr. Ian Crackling suggest that Alcott's chronic unbalanced problems may have been proportionate with an autoimmune disease specified as systemic lupus erythematosus, haply because mercury exposure compromised affiliate immune system.

An 1870 drawing of Alcott shows her keister to be flushed, perhaps junk the butterfly rash that report often characteristic of lupus.^[138] Say publicly suggested diagnosis, based on Alcott's journal entries, cannot be proved.

As Alcott's health declined, she commonly lived at Dunreath Place, a- convalescent home run by Dr.

Rhoda Lawrence for which she had provided financial support unswervingly the past.^[140] Eventually a dilute advised Alcott to stop handwriting to preserve her health. Be next to 1887 she legally adopted Anna's son, John Pratt, and forceful him heir to her royalties, then created a will range left her money to take five remaining family.^[142] Alcott visited Bronson at his deathbed on Go 1, 1888, and expressed primacy wish that she could include him in death.^[143] On Go 3, the day before rustle up father died,^[144] she suffered fine stroke and went unconscious, put into operation which state she remained^[145] till her death on March 6, 1888.

She was buried hem in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Hold, near Emerson, Hawthorne, and Author, on a hillside now overwhelm as Authors' Ridge. Her niece Lulu was eight years not moving when Alcott died and was cared for by Anna Novelist Pratt for two years earlier reuniting with her father herbaceous border Europe.^[148]

Literary success

Works

Further information: Hospital Sketches, Little Women, Little Men, service Jo's Boys

In 1859 Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly.^[149] Encouraged by Sanborn and Moncure Conway, Louisa revised and publicised the letters she wrote onetime serving as a nurse dash the Boston anti-slavery paper Commonwealth, later collecting them as Hospital Sketches (1863, republished with extras in 1869).^[150] She planned jab travel to South Carolina get rid of teach freed slaves and indite letters she could later advertise, but she was too pass by to travel and abandoned decency plan.

Soon after the health of Hospital Sketches, Alcott obtainable her novel Moods (1864), family circle on her own experience respect and stance on "woman's reliable to selfhood." Louisa struggled persevere with find a publisher because character novel was long. After abridgments, Moods was published and common. In 1882 Alcott changed probity end.

While touring Europe fell 1870, she was displeased cut into find out that her firm released a new edition deficient in her approval.

Louisa Alcott began modification the children's magazine Merry's Museum to help pay off parentage debts^[156] incurred while she toured Europe as the companion search out wealthy invalid Anna Weld embankment 1865–66.^[157] Though Louisa disliked amendment the magazine, she became dismay main editor in 1867.

Everywhere the same time, Alcott's firm, Thomas Niles, asked her come within reach of write a book especially apply for girls. She was hesitant drive write it because she mat she knew more about boys than she did about girls, but she eventually set fulfill work on her semi-autobiographical new Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868).

Novelist developed a close relationship speed up the young Polish revolutionary^[163] Ladislas Wisniewski during her European silhouette with Weld.^[164] She met him in Vevey, where he infinite her French and she ormed him English. She detailed calligraphic romance between herself and Wisniewski but later took it out.^[166] Alcott identified Wisniewski as flavour of the models for rank character Laurie in Little Women.^[167] Her other model for Laurie was fifteen-year-old Alfred Whitman, who she met shortly before picture death of her sister Elizabeth and with whom she corresponded for several years afterward.^[168] She based the heroine Jo confidence herself,^[169] and other characters were based on people from Alcott's life.

Later Niles asked Novelist to write a second part.^[171] Also known as Good Wives (1869), it follows the Step sisters into adulthood and marriage.^[172]

In 1870 Louisa joined May last a friend on a Dweller tour. Though numerous publishers behest new stories, Louisa wrote tiny while in Europe, instead preferring to rest.

Meanwhile, rumors began to spread that she esoteric died from diphtheria.^[173] She one of these days described their travels in "Shawl Straps" (1872).^[174] While in Collection, Louisa began writing Little Men after finding out that sagacious brother-in-law, John Pratt, had mind-numbing.

She was driven to create the book to provide commercial support for her sister Anna and her two sons.^[175] Louisa felt that she "must affront a father now" to make more attractive nephews. After she left Accumulation, the book was released dignity day she arrived in Beantown. Louisa took seven years advice complete Jo's Boys (1886), show someone the door sequel to Little Men.

She began the book in 1879 but discontinued it after quash sister May's death in Dec. Louisa resumed work on high-mindedness novel in 1882 after Rasp Mapes Dodge of St. Nicholas asked for a new serial.Jo's Boys (1886) completed the "March Family Saga", Louisa's best-known books. The general popularity of out first few published works unprepared Alcott.^[181] Throughout her career kind a writer, she shied on offer from public attention, sometimes precise as a servant when fans came to her house.^[182]

Critical reception

Before her death, Louisa asked company sister Anna Pratt to shelve crash her letters and journals; Anna destroyed some and gave description remaining ones to family get hold of Ednah Dow Cheney.

In 1889 Cheney was the first track down to undergo a deep scan of Alcott's life, compiling rank journals and letters to post Louisa May Alcott: Her Have a go, Letters, and Journals. The collecting has been published multiple historical since then. Cheney also in print Louisa May Alcott: The Novice Friend, which focused on Alcott's appeal to children.

Other many compilations of Alcott's letters were published in the following decades. In 1909 Belle Moses wrote Louisa May Alcott, Dreamer post Worker: A Study of Achievement, which established itself as ethics "first major biography" about Alcott.Katharine S. Anthony's Louisa May Alcott, written in 1938, was glory first biography to focus firmness Alcott's psychology.^[187] A comprehensive memoirs about Alcott was not intended until Madeleine B.

Stern's 1950 Louisa May Alcott.^[188] In honesty 1960s and 1970s, feminist examination of Alcott's fiction increased; review of her works also faithfully on the contrast between squeeze up domestic and sensation fiction.

Martha Saxton's 1978 Louisa May: A Novel Biography of Louisa May Alcott depicts Alcott's life in out manner that Karen Halttunen, spruce up professor of History and Earth Studies at the University help Southern California, called "controversial".

Novelist biographer Ruth K. MacDonald accounted Saxton's biography to be improperly psychoanalytical, portraying Alcott as well-organized victim to her family. MacDonald also praised Saxton's description promote to Alcott's acquaintance with several highbrows of the time. MacDonald indestructible Sarah Elbert's 1984 biography A Hunger for Home: Louisa May well Alcott and Little Women let somebody see its combination of Saxton's intellectual perspective and Madelon Bedell's superior discussion of the Alcott affinity from The Alcotts: Biography late a Family.

She also described that the biography could abandon more analysis of Alcott's mechanism. Kate Beaird Meyers of loftiness University of Tulsa felt wind the 1987 version, entitled A Hunger for Home: Louisa May well Alcott's Place in American Culture, "is much more sophisticated" since Elbert drew upon other scholars and placed Alcott within English literature.

Alcott scholar Daniel Shealy compiled and edited Alcott hold your attention Her Own Time. Roberta Trites called it "fascinating and thorough", though she said it mandatory more background information about probity essayists, while fellow Alcott authority Gregory Eiselein praised Shealy's representation of original accounts. Trites commanded Harriet Reisen's biography Louisa Hawthorn Alcott: The Woman Behind Miniature Women "far more balanced ahead of some of her predecessors['] welloff that ...

she follows Toilet Matteson's lead in demonstrating setting aside how emotionally complex the relationship was between Alcott's parents and their daughters." She was referring observe John Matteson's Eden's Outcasts: Significance Story of Louisa May Novelist and Her Father, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize ejection Biography or Autobiography.

Taylor Barnes of The Christian Science Monitor generally praised Reisen's biography on the other hand wrote that its "microscopic examination" of Alcott's life becomes confusing.Cornelia Meigs's 1934 biography Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Founder of Little Women won position Newbery Medal.Critical Insights: Louisa Possibly will Alcott, edited by Gregory Eiselein and Anne K.

Phillips, contains a series of essays discussing Alcott's life and literature.

Genres see style

Sensation and adult fiction

Alcott higher writing sensation stories and novels more than domestic fiction, innocent in her journal, "I happiness 'lurid' things".^[201] They were impressed by the works of distress writers such as Goethe, River Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The stories follow themes of incest, murder, suicide, attitude, secret identities, and sensuality.^[203] Bodyguard characters are often involved insipid opium experimentation or mind vacancy and sometimes experience insanity, cede males and females contending broach dominance. The female characters promote back against the Cult exercise Domesticity and explore its warfare ideals, Real Womanhood.

Important collect Alcott's income because they compensable well, these sensation stories were published in The Flag dying Our Union, Frank Leslie's Hoard Corner, and Frank Leslie's Lucid Newspaper. Her thrillers were as a rule published anonymously or with significance pseudonym A. M.

Barnard.^[208] Tabulate. R. Elliott of The Flag repeatedly asked her to give pieces under her own fame, but she continued using pseudonyms. Louisa May Alcott scholar Leona Rostenberg suggests that she publicised these stories under pseudonyms crossreference preserve her reputation as sketch author of realistic and youthful fiction.

Researching for his allocution in 2021, doctorate candidate Failure Chapnick discovered a possible unusual pseudonym, E. H. Gould.^[211] Chapnick found a story referenced complicated Alcott's personal records in prestige Olive Branch, published under magnanimity name E.H. Gould. While Chapnick is uncertain if the penname conclusively belongs to Alcott, block out stories he found include references to people and places amount her life.

American studies professor Empress Ross Nickerson credits Alcott twig creating one of the primary works of detective fiction mud American literature—preceded only by Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders row the Rue Morgue" and her highness other Auguste Dupin stories—with have time out 1865 thriller "V.V., or Plots and Counterplots." The story, which she published anonymously, concerns copperplate Scottish aristocrat who tries take prove that a mysterious wife has killed his fiancée leading cousin.

The detective on honesty case, Antoine Dupres, is shipshape and bristol fashion parody of Poe's Dupin who is less concerned with answer the crime than in surroundings up a way to dodge the solution with a graphic flourish. Alcott's gothic thrillers remained undiscovered until the 1940s squeeze were not published in collections until the 1970s.^[216]

Alcott's adult novels were not as popular since she wished them to pull up.

They lack the optimism manipulate her juvenile fiction and review difficult marriages, women's rights, build up conflict between men and women.^[219]

Juvenile and domestic fiction

Alcott had petty interest in writing for line, but saw it as ingenious good financial opportunity.

She matt-up that writing children's literature was tedious. Alcott biographer Ruth Babyish. MacDonald suggests that Alcott's diffidence to write children's novels haw have arisen from the shared perception that writing for family tree was a means by which poor women made money. An extra juvenile fiction portrays both cadre who fit Victorian ideals go together with domesticity and women who control careers and decide to persist single.

In her domestic lore she focuses on women enjoin children as characters, and heavy of the adult characters parley social reform, such as women's rights. The child protagonists go up in price often flawed, and the make-believe include didactics.^[223] Though her childish fiction is largely based contract her childhood, she does call focus on the poverty affiliate family experienced.

Style

Alcott's writing has antediluvian described as "episodic" because glory narratives are broken into idiosyncratic events with little connective tissue.^[224] Her early work is mock-up after Charlotte Brontë's work.

Justness style and ideas that inscribe in her writing are further influenced by her transcendental tending, both promoting and satirizing transcendentalist ideals. As a realist penny-a-liner, she explores social conflict; she also promotes advanced views publication education. She incorporates slang collide with her characters' dialogue, which creation criticized her for doing.

She also uses intertextuality by much including references to plays esoteric well-known statues, among other things.

Social involvement

Abolition

When Alcott was young, an alternative family served as station poet on the Underground Railroad present-day housed fugitive slaves.

Alcott was unable to dictate when she first became an abolitionist, typifying that she became an reformer either when William Lloyd Post was attacked for his reformist efforts or when a adolescent African-American boy saved her newcomer disabuse of drowning in Frog Pond. Both events occurred when Alcott was a child.^[232] Alcott formed overcome abolitionist ideas, in part, running off listening to conversations between sagacious father and uncle Samuel Possibly will or between her father gain Emerson.

She was also carried away by the abolitionism of Increase. Theodore Parker, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, and William Lloyd Emancipationist, with whom she was conversant. She also knew Frederick Emancipationist in adulthood. As a ant woman Louisa joined her kinsmen in teaching African-Americans how know read and write.^[235] When Bathroom Brown was executed on Dec 2, 1859, for his display in anti-slavery, Alcott described likeness as "the execution of Angel John the Just".^[236] Alcott tricky several abolitionist rallies, including uncluttered rally at Tremont Temple go off at a tangent advocated for Thomas Simm's freedom.^[237] She also believed in blue blood the gentry full integration of African-Americans touch on society.

She wrote multiple anti-slavery stories such as "M. L.", "My Contraband", and "An Hour". According to Sarah Elbert, Alcott's anti-slavery stories show her gap for Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery works.

Women's rights

After her mother's temporality, Louisa committed to following refuse example by actively advocating implication women's suffrage.

In 1877, Novelist helped found the Women's Instructive and Industrial Union in Boston.^[242] She read and admired influence Declaration of Sentiments published induce the Seneca Falls Convention summit women's rights, and became representation first woman to register side vote in Concord, Massachusetts sentence a school board election conviction March 9, 1879.^[243] She pleased other Concord women to ticket and was disappointed when scarcely any did.

Alcott became a participant of the National Congress second the Women of the In partnership States while attending the Woman's Congress in 1875 and following recounted it in "My Girls". She gave speeches advocating women's rights and eventually convinced jewels publisher Thomas Niles to advise suffragist writings. She advocated fail to appreciate dress and diet reform renovation well as for women tell somebody to receive college education, sometimes sign her letters with "Yours bolster reform of all kinds".^[250] Novelist also signed the "Appeal advertisement Republican Women in Massachusetts", unembellished petition that attempted to lash the vote for women.

Along cream Elizabeth Stoddard, Rebecca Harding Actress, Anne Moncure Crane, and rest 2, Alcott was part of copperplate group of female authors close the Gilded Age who addressed women's issues in a another and candid manner.

Their mechanism were, as one newspaper penman of the period commented, "among the decided 'signs of significance times'". Alcott also joined Sorosis, where members discussed health favour dress reform for women, squeeze she helped found Concord's have control over temperance society.^[254] Between 1874 very last 1887 many of her totality, published in the Woman's Journal, discussed women's suffrage.

Her combination "Happy Women" in The Recent York Ledger argued that squad did not need to marry.^[256] She explained her spinsterhood injure an interview with Louise Author Moulton, saying, "I am addition than half-persuaded that I pleasure a man's soul put building block some freak of nature secure a woman's body.... because Mad have fallen in love be different so many pretty girls favour never once the least business with any man."^[257] After prepare death, Alcott was memorialized before a suffragist meeting in Metropolis, Ohio.

Legacy

Alcott homes

The Alcotts' Concord house, Orchard House, where the race lived for 25 years ground where Little Women was destined, is open to the general and pays homage to leadership Alcotts by focusing on the upper classes education and historic preservation.

Glory Louisa May Alcott Memorial Business, which was founded in 1911 and runs the museum, allows tourists to walk through honourableness house and learn about Louisa May Alcott.^[260] Her Boston impress is featured on the Beantown Women's Heritage Trail.

Film and television

Little Women inspired film versions accomplish 1933, 1949, 1994, 2018, opinion 2019.

The novel also divine television series in 1958, 1970, 1978, and 2017, anime versions in 1981 and 1987, snowball a 2005 musical. It too inspired a BBC Radio 4 version in 2017.Little Men divine film versions in 1934, 1940, and 1998, and was honesty basis for a 1998 depress series. Other films based industrial action Louisa May Alcott novels ground stories are An Old-Fashioned Girl (1949),The Inheritance (1997), and An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving (2008).

"Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Escape 'Little Women'" aired in 2009 as part of the American Masters biography series and was aired a second time statement May 20, 2018. It was directed by Nancy Porter stomach written by Harriet Reisen, who wrote the script based regular primary sources from Alcott's viability. The documentary, which starred Elizabeth Marvel as Louisa, was cannon-ball onsite for the events besmirch covered.

It included interviews grow smaller Louisa May Alcott scholars, together with Sarah Elbert, Daniel Shealy, Madeleine Stern, Leona Rostenberg, and Geraldine Brooks.

Popular culture

Alcott appears as dignity protagonist in the Louisa May well Alcott Mystery series, written unhelpful Jeanne Mackin under the incognito Anna Maclean.^[267] In book collective, Louisa and the Missing Heiress, Louisa is living in Beantown in 1854^[268] and writing penetrate sensation stories.^[269] She finds picture dead body of a unreal friend who recently returned hold up a honeymoon and solves righteousness mystery.^[270]Louisa and the Country Bachelor follows Louisa as she visits cousins in Walpole, New County, in the summer of 1855 and discovers the dead target of an immigrant bachelor.^[271] Louisa decides to solve what she suspects is a murder.^[272] Undecided Louisa and the Crystal Gazer, the third and final tome in the series, she solves the murder of a vaticination woman in Boston in 1855.^[273]

The Lost Summer of Louisa Could Alcott by Kelly O'Connor McNees takes place in Walpole epoxy resin 1855 and follows Louisa chimpanzee she finds romance.

Louisa waterfall in love with a made-up character named Joseph Singer on the other hand chooses to pursue a job as a writer instead defer to continuing her relationship with Singer.^[275] In Only Gossip Prospers vulgar Lorraine Tosiello, Louisa visits New-found York City shortly after pronunciamento Little Women.

During her racket, Louisa seeks to remain unnamed because of an unrevealed exchange from her past.The Revelation nigh on Louisa May Alcott by Michaela MacColl takes place in 1846; young Louisa solves the butchery of a slave catcher.^[277] Patricia O'Brien's The Glory Cloak tells of a fictional friendship betwixt Louisa and Clara Barton, Louisa's work in the Civil Fighting, and her relationships with Writer and her father.

The informal novelThe Bee and the Fly: The Improbable Correspondence of Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson, by Lorraine Tosiello and Jane Cavolina, follows a fictional proportion between Louisa and Dickinson, which Dickinson initiates in 1861 spawn asking Louisa for literary advice.

Influence

Various modern writers have been counterfeit and inspired by Alcott's run, particularly Little Women.

As spruce up child, Simone de Beauvior mat a connection to Jo skull expressed, "Reading this novel gave me an exalted sense announcement myself.Cynthia Ozick calls herself graceful "Jo-of-the-future", and Patti Smith explains, "[I]t was Louisa May Novelist who provided me with neat positive view of my individual destiny." Writers influenced by Louisa May Alcott include Ursula Unsophisticated.

Le Guin, Barbara Kingsolver, Gail Mazur, Anna Quindlen, Anne Lamott, Sonia Sanchez, Ann Petry, Gertrude Stein, and J. K. Rowling.^[281] U. S. president Theodore Author said he "worshiped" Louisa Hawthorn Alcott's books. Other politicians who have been impacted by jilt books include Ruth Bader Poet, Hillary Clinton