Louisa May Alcott was born November 29, 1832 in Germantown Pennsylvania, on her father’s birthday. She was the second of the four daughters she later made famous in Little Women.

Her father Bronson Alcott was a difficult man to pin down. He was a self-taught philosopher—an idealist who made few compromises with the workaday world. Ralph Waldo Emerson was so impressed with him that he invited the Alcotts to settle near his own family in Concord. Bronson’s ideas helped form Emerson’s essays and lectures on transcendentalism. Bronson was endlessly fascinated with his own mind; he kept a journal that eventually totaled over five million words.

All this navel-gazing left him little time to earn a living; that was up to his wife Abba Alcott, and then his daughter Louisa. To give him credit, however, Bronson was a staunch abolitionist and a supporter of women’s right to vote when both were highly unpopular and sometimes dangerous positions. He ran a school for a while in Boston, which was closed down by angry, bigoted parents when he admitted a black girl to his class.

Louisa was the rowdy daughter, just like her creation Jo March in Little Women. She loved nature, jokes, plays and her family. She was very athletic for her day, going on daily runs in the woods and fields around Concord and Boston to keep her mind and muscles in shape. All that ended, though, after she caught typhoid while working as a nurse in a Union Army hospital in Washington DC during the Civil War. The treatment for typhoid in those days was an oral form of mercury, now known to be poisonous. Louisa suffered terrible stomach, eye and muscle pains from the mercury in her body for the rest of her life.

Photo by Kit Bakke Louisa's father, Bronson, built this slightly drafty, gothic-doored School of Philosophy in 1879 behind the family house in Concord, MA. It still stands today and is used for seminars and conferences.

Louisa never married, preferring, as she said, “to paddle my own canoe.” In her day, marriage meant a considerable loss of personal and legal freedom. She loved to travel, making two year-long trips to Europe. Besides working to free the slaves and gain the right to vote for women, Louisa was also involved in efforts to improve conditions in prisons, orphanages and work houses.

Her primary goal, though, was to dig the Alcott family out of perennial poverty and free her tired mother from her work as an employment counselor and social worker for poor women. This meant she had to find a way to earn money, not an easy challenge for a woman in the 1800s, especially one who said she wouldn’t “marry for money.” She tried every possibility open to a respectable woman in the mid-1800s—sewing, house cleaning, teaching, being a servant and a paid companion. She hit the jackpot, though, with writing.

She wrote three kinds of books and stories:

1. A series of eight books that are in the Little Women genre—girls and boys growing up and learning about the world; making mistakes and usually, eventually getting it right.
2. Many lurid, gothic short stories about murder, suicide, drugs, love and betrayal. For these, she used a pseudonym “A.M. Barnard.”
3. Several serious novels for and about adults. Moods was her favorite and Work is my favorite. She also wrote a terrific short book about her experiences as a nurse during the Civil War called Hospital Sketches and one about her commune days called Transcendental Wild Oats.

When Louisa was 48, her youngest sister May (Amy in Little Women) died in childbirth in Paris. The baby was named after Louisa. May’s dying wish was that Louisa would raise her daughter. So Louisa became a single mother at age 48 when Lulu, as she was called, arrived in Boston.

Louisa died eight years later, in March 1888, of the accumulated complications of her Civil War mercury poisoning.

Photo by Kit Bakke Louisa's grave at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery on a ridge behind the Alcott family home in Concord MA. Nearby graves mark the Alcotts' neighbors Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

You can visit the Alcotts’ home in Concord, Massachusetts, where Louisa wrote Little Women. The Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association is a membership organization that offers a newsletter and educational activities for its members. See www.louisamayalcott.org for more details.

If you visit Concord, you can also tour Louisa’s neighbors’ homes: Ralph Waldo Emerson lived across the road and Nathaniel Hawthorne lived right next door. Henry David Thoreau, with whom Louisa was a little bit in love, lived with the Emersons for a while, when not with his mother in town. After the Thoreaus died, Louisa bought the Thoreau family house and gave it to her sister Anna.