ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY (1832-1888)

This article appears in Volume V01, Page 529 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY (1832-1888) , American author, was the daughter of Amos Bronson

Alcott

ALCOTT, AMOS BRONSON (1799-1888)
ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY (1832-1888)

, and though of New England parentage and residence, was born in Germantown, now part of Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania

PENNSYLVANIA
PENNSYLVANIA, UNIVERSITY OF

, on the 29th of November 1832. She began

work

WORK

at an early. age as an occasional teacher and as a writerher first book was Flower Fables (1854), tales originally written for Ellen, daughter of R. W. Emerson. In 186o she began writing for the Atlantic Monthly, and she. was nurse in the Union

Hospital

at Georgetown, D.C., for "six weeks in 1862-1863. Her home letters, revised and published in the Commonwealth and collected as

Hospital

' Sketches (1863, re-published with additions in 1869), displayed some power of observation and record; and Moods, a novel (1864), despite its uncertainty of method and of

touch

TOUCH (derived through Fr. toucher from a common Teutonic and Indo-Germanic root, cf. " tug," " tuck," O. H. Ger. zucchen, to twitch or draw)

, gave considerable promise. She soon turned, however, to the rapid production of stories for girls, and, with the exception of the cheery tale entitled

Work

WORK

(1873), and the anonymous novelette A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), which attracted little notice, she did not return to the more ambitious fields of the novelist. Her success dated from the

appearance

APPEARANCE (from Lat. apparere, to appear)

of the first

series

SERIES (a Latin word from serere, to join)

of Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868), in which, with unfailing humour; freshness and lifelikeness, she put into story form many of the sayings and doings of herself and sisters. `Little Men (1871) similarly treated the character and ways of her nephews in the Orchard

House

HOUSE
HOUSE (O. Eng. hiss, a word common to Teutonic languages, cf. Dut. huis, Ger. Haus; in
Gothic
- GOTHIC
it is only found in gudhiss, a temple; it may be ultimately connected with the root of " hide," conceal)

in Concord, Massachusetts, in which Miss

Alcott

ALCOTT, AMOS BRONSON (1799-1888)
ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY (1832-1888)

's industry had now established her parents and other members of the Alcott family; but most of her later volumes, An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag (6 vols., 1871-18i9), Rose in Bloom (1876), &c., followed in the line of Little Women, of which the author's large and ipyal public never wearied. Her natural love of labour, her wide-reaching generosity, her

quick

QUICK

perception and her fondness for sharing with her many readers that cheery humour which radiated from her personality and her books, led her to produce stories of a diminishing value, and at last she succumbed to overwork, dying in Boston on the 6th of March 1888, two days after the death of her father in the same city. Miss Alcott's early education had partly been given by the naturalist Thoreau, but had chiefly been in the hands of her father; and in her girlhood and early womanhood she had fully shared the trials and poverty incident to the life of a peripatetic idealist. In a newspaper sketch entitled " Transcendental Wild Oats," afterwards re-printed in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), she narrated, with a delicate humour, which showed what her literary powers might have been if freed from drudgery, the experiences of her family during an experiment towards communistic " plain living and high thinking " at " Fruitlands," in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1843.
The story of her career has been fully and frankly told in Mrs Ednah D. Cheney's Louisa May Akott: Her Life, Letters and Journals (Boston. 1889). (C. F. R.)

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