ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY

(1832-1888), author. Alcott spent her early years in and around Boston, where her transcendentalist father, Bronson, wrote, lectured, and established short-lived experimental primary schools. Her mother, Abigail May, was an early and ardent abolitionist and involved in many contemporary issues including feminism, dietary reforms, and the causes of poverty. Alcott grew up surrounded by the writers and activist friends of her parents such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, the Peabody sisters, William Lloyd Garrison, Orestes Brownson, and Margaret Fuller. Although Alcott associated transcendentalism with impracticality and fuzzy thinking, she was deeply affected by the abolitionist cause. Her active role in her mother's struggles with the family's poverty caused by Bronson's economic vagaries led Alcott to feminism. For reasons of health and temperament, she manifested her allegiance with the suffrage movement more in her writings than in public.

Alcott began writing as an adolescent, publishing her first story, "The Rival Prima Donnas," in a theatrical paper. She called the story, which featured two actresses pitted against one another professionally and personally, "rubbish" and followed it quickly with Flower Fables, fairy stories she had written for Emerson's daughter, Ellen. These tales illustrated the theme that hard work, self-denial, and patience can win love from even the chilliest heart.

These beginnings indicate the two directions Alcott's work would take. On the one hand, she wrote, enthusiastically and often pseudonymously, colorful and improbable stories for grown-ups about unrequited or tragically misdirected love, jealousy, vengeance, and retribution. On the other hand, she wrote, more slowly and with less gusto, moral stories for children, which illustrated the principles of Flower Fables. As she matured, these works also contained lessons for women about transcending their roles as mothers and housekeepers by becoming doctors, writers, or charity workers.

In the winter of 1862-1863 Alcott went to Washington, D.C., as a nurse in Dorothea Dix's newly established service. She washed, fed, and tended wounded soldiers until, after only a few weeks, she fell ill. In accordance with army medical practice she was given large doses of calomel, an emetic containing mercury, which rendered her a semi-invalid for the last two decades of her life. She returned home to convalesce. In the following years she wrote her most exciting pseudonymous thrillers as well as Hospital Sketches, a humorous account of her nursing experiences.

In 1868, following an often repeated suggestion of her father, who had an exceptionally strong influence on her life, she wrote Little Women. It was a heartwarming and rigidly moral account of her difficult childhood and her strenuous efforts to cope with her rebellious thoughts and feelings while growing up in a large, poor family, guided unsteadily by an improvident idealist. The success of Little Women was immediate and lasting. Alcott dismissed it and its many sequels (Good Wives, Little Men, Jo's Boys, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, and Under the Lilacs) as "pap" for the young, but she enjoyed some aspects of her success including the comforts and the trips to New York and Europe it provided her and her family. Her health deteriorated, and she died at the age of fifty-five, four days after the death of her eighty-eight-year-old father.

Louisa May Alcott, Plots and Counterplots, ed. Madeleine Stern (1977).

Martha Saxton

See also Feminist Movement; Literature; Transcendentalism.