Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1832, the second of four daughters of Bronson Alcott — Transcendentalist philosopher, educational reformer, vegetarian, and almost congenital non-earner — and Abigail May Alcott, who held the household together by force of will and underpaid social work. The family moved constantly, mostly within the orbit of Concord, Massachusetts, where the Alcotts were intimate with Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. Bronson's experiments in living were idealistic and frequently disastrous: the 1843 utopian commune at Fruitlands collapsed within seven months, leaving the family destitute. Louisa understood very early that if money came into the house she would have to bring it.

She worked as a teacher, governess, seamstress, and domestic servant through her twenties, writing constantly on the side. From the late 1850s she began placing sensational thrillers — tales of cross-dressing avengers, hashish-eaters, and women who poisoned faithless lovers — in story papers like The Flag of Our Union, mostly under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. These stories were a financial lifeline and a creative outlet for material she could not put under her own name; they were not rediscovered until the 1940s, and their existence permanently changed how scholars read the rest of her work.

In December 1862 she went to Washington to nurse Union soldiers at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, a converted tavern overwhelmed with casualties from Fredericksburg. Within six weeks she had contracted typhoid pneumonia and was sent home in a delirium. The doctors treated her with calomel — a mercury compound — and the mercury poisoning permanently damaged her health. She was thirty. For the rest of her life she suffered headaches, vertigo, joint pain, and exhaustion that no contemporary doctor could explain. Her Hospital Sketches (1863), worked up from letters home, was her first real critical success.

In 1868 her publisher Thomas Niles at Roberts Brothers pressed her to write "a book for girls." She did not want to. She found girls' fiction sentimental and disliked the genre. But Bronson was again broke and the family needed the money, so she sat down and produced Little Women in about ten weeks, drawing directly on her own childhood with her sisters Anna, Lizzie (who had died of scarlet fever in 1858), and May. The novel made her famous and finally solvent. She wrote the sequel — published in Britain as Good Wives — almost immediately, then Little Men (1871), Jo's Boys (1886), and a long string of further family novels she came to regard with a mixture of gratitude and exhaustion.

She supported her parents and her dead sister May's daughter Lulu for the rest of her life. She campaigned for women's suffrage and was the first woman to register to vote in Concord. She never married — she once told an interviewer her affections had always been for women, though biographers continue to argue about what she meant. She died in Boston in March 1888, two days after her father; the mercury damage from 1863 almost certainly contributed. She was fifty-five.