about Louisa May Alcott
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Her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was a noted Transcendentalist.
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Her family was good friends with Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. She was mentored somewhat by both of them, babysat for Emerson, and one of the first things she published was a book of fairy stories she had created for Emerson’s daughter.
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She wrote and performed plays, and played tableaux with her sisters.
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She grew up poor and desired to become rich and famous and happy.
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She wrote in many different genres, including “blood-and-thunder tales”, but didn’t achieve her dream of fame and fortune until she began writing her wholesome children’s stories.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson said of her, “She is a natural source of stories….She is and is to be, the poet of children. She knows their angels.”
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Cyrus Bartol said of her, “She unlatches the door to one house, and…all find it is their own house which they enter.
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She learned from Emerson, “He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That which is done at home must be the history of the times and the spirit of the age to us.”
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After she began writing, she found that her stories were not as good as those of greater writers. She became discouraged and her pages stayed blank; “her mind was a room in confusion.” Only her mother could encourage her by writing:
I am sure your life has many fine passages well worth recording, and to me they are always precious….Do write a little each day, dear, if but a line, to show me how bravely you begin the battle, how patiently you wait for the rewards sure to come when the victory is nobly won.
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When young and seeking to earn money, she took a job as a companion to a lady in the hopes of being in good society. In reality, she became the maid. Her employer began inviting her into his study for discussions, plying her with poems, leaving her “reproachful little notes” under her door. To his “maudlin attentions” she gave him an ultimatum, declaring that she had come to be his sister’s companion, not his own. Her reward was that all the work of the house fell into her lap. After seven more weeks she announced she was leaving. (Her situation seems to mirror the unwanted advances of Lord Arlington to Edith in The Inhertiance.)
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She was an abolitionist, and her family once housed a fugitive slave when she was young.
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The idea to write a “girls’ book” was suggested by her publisher, and at first she wasn’t sure. She decided to write about her own experiences growing up, which became Little Women.
from Louisa May Alcott: A Biography by Madeleine B. Stern
