Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott was born in 1832 and lived along the eastern coast of the US with her parents and four sisters. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was an education reformer, who kept company with other Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller. While Alcott seems to cherish a kind of free thinking, as manifest in the main protagonist of Little Women, Josephine March, it did come with a cost. Money was often sparse in the Alcott house. The girls grew up learning the run of domestic and rural chores, but also engaging the modern ideas and principles of women’s right to

be educated, work, and vote as well as the abolition of slavery. Activating her principles brought Louisa May Alcott out to the front during the Civil War, where she served as a nurse in an army hospital, contracted typhoid fever, and gained valuable experience for one of her early works, Hospital Sketches.

Part of the reason for the popularity of Little Women at the time of publishing (first published as a book for children in 1868), to the present, is Alcott’s ability to embrace “the great charm of all power…modesty. In concise chapters with tidy moral lessons at the finish, Alcott was able to explore the dynamics of a person, a family and a country growing up, growing apart, and somehow all along, growing closer together. Though Civil War does not play a prominent role in Little Women, it does serve as a backdrop for many of Jo’s dilemmas. Her father is a chaplain in the Union Army. While Jo fights for her own freedom, as the Confederacy did, she also fights to keep her family together, the thrust behind Federalism. Jo, as an embodiment of many of Alcott’s qualities, is one of the most vigorous opponent of Meg’s marriage to Mr. Brooke, searching for a love that is not so “traditional” as she sees Meg’s to be. She is both vehement and clear in her refusal of Laurie’s love, and finds a way to make both her writing career and her union with Mr. Bhaer a joyful possibility. Beyond a relational context, she is a thrill seeker, an adventurer, a non-conformist, and an empathic friend. In many ways, Alcott crafted an enduring protagonist and story far beyond her time.

Mark DuMez