Little Women (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)
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Authors: Louisa May Alcott
BOOK: Little Women (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
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Always active in the suffrage movement, in 1879 Alcott became the first woman to vote in Concord. When her sister May died in childbirth the same year, Alcott adopted the baby, a girl named Lulu. Alcott’s health declined greatly during this period, due to the lingering effects of mercury in the treatment she had received for typhoid fever during the Civil War. Too weak to write extensively, Alcott would publish and republish her children’s story collections until her death. The feminist-leaning
Jo’s Boys
was also published during this period, in 1886. Louisa May Alcott died March 6, 1888, two days after the death of her father. She is buried with her parents.
Jo’s Boys
was also published during this period, in 1886. Louisa May Alcott died March 6, 1888, two days after the death of her father. She is buried with her parents.
THE WORLD OF LOUISA MAY
ALCOTT AND
LITTLE WOMEN
LITTLE WOMEN
| 1832 | Louisa May Alcott is born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, on November 29, her father’s birthday; she is the second of four children of Abigail “Abba” Alcott and Amos Bronson, a teacher and educational reformer. Also born this year are Horatio Alger and Lewis Carroll; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who will become one of Alcott’s favorite authors, dies. |
| 1834 | Struggling financially and in search of work, Bronson moves his family to Boston, nearer the support of longtime friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and Abba’s family. Bronson opens the Temple School, based on his controversial teaching methods. |
| 1835 5 | Abba gives birth to her third child, Elizabeth Sewall Alcott. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known as Mark Twain, is born. |
| 1836 | Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and other philosophical and literary scholars in the area form what becomes known as the Transcendentalist Club. Emerson pub lishes Nature, an essay explaining the philosophy of transcen dentalism, which asserts God’s existence in man and nature, and individual intuition as the highest source of knowledge. |
| 1837 | Victoria becomes queen of England. |
| 1838 | Charles Dickens’s novels Oliver Twist (1837-1839) and Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839) attain great popularity. |
| 1840 | Forced to close the Temple School—parents alarmed by Bronson’s teaching methods and his admittance of a mulatto child have withdrawn their children—Bronson Alcott moves his family to Concord, Massachusetts, where Emerson and Thoreau live. Louisa attends the Concord Academy, run by Thoreau and his brother. The fourth and final Alcott child, Abigail May (called May), is born. |
| 1841 | Emerson publishes Essays. |
| 1843 | Bronson cofounds a utopian communal farm, Fruitlands, in the rural town of Harvard, Massachusetts; he and his family live there until the experiment fails in 1844. |
| 1844 | Emerson publishes Essays: Second Series. |
| 1845 | With an inheritance left to Abba, the family purchases a house in Concord, named Hillside, where Alcott finally has a room of her own. |
| 1847 | The novels Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë are published. |
| 1848 | Alcott creates the Flower Fables stories for Emerson’s young daughter Ellen. Later in the year Alcott writes her first adult story, “The Rival Painters: A Tale of Rome.” The Alcotts move back to Boston, where Abba finds employment as one of the nation’s first social workers. |
| 1849 | Alcott creates a family newspaper called the Olive Leaf Pub lication begins of Dickens’s novel David Copperfield. Alcott writes her first novel, The Inheritance, which is not published until 1996. |
| 1850 | Emerson’s Representative Men and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter are published. |
| 1851 | Peterson’s Magazine publishes Alcott’s poem “Sunlight” under the pseudonym Flora Fairfield; it is her first published work. To help support their family, Alcott and her sisters find jobs teaching and sewing. Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick are published. |
| 1852 | The Boston periodical the Olive Branch publishes “The Rival Painters: A Tale of Rome.” Hawthorne purchases Hillside, giv ing the Alcotts some financial security. Alcott and her sister Anna open a school in the parlor of their home in Boston. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is published. |
| 1853 | Bronson goes on a lecture tour in the Midwest. |
| 1854 | Alcott’s Flower Fables, dedicated to Ellen Emerson, is pub lished; her short story “The Rival Prima Donnas” appears in the Saturday Evening Gazette. Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods is published. |
| 1855 | The family moves to Walpole, New Hampshire, although Alcott remains in Boston, teaching; she attends lectures by the liberal clergyman and reformer Theodore Parker. She spends the summer in Walpole, where she organizes the Wal pole Amateur Dramatic Company. The first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass appears. |
| 1857 | The Alcott family returns to Concord; with money from friends, including Emerson, they purchase Orchard House (where Alcott will later write Little Women). |
| 1858 | Elizabeth Alcott dies of scarlet fever. Anna announces her engagement to John Pratt, whom she will marry in 1860. Alcott is greatly unsettled by the loss of her two sisters. |
| 1859 | Bronson becomes superintendent of schools in Concord, receiving a salary of $100 per year. Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species is published. |
| 1860 | Alcott writes her novel Moods. The Boston Theater Company produces her play Nat Bachelor’s Pleasure Trip. Abraham Lin coln becomes president of the United States. Publication begins of Dickens’s Great Expectations. |
| 1861 | Alcott starts work on an autobiographical novel, tentatively titled Success (it will be published in 1873 as Work: A Story of Experience). The American Civil War begins. |
| 1862 | Henry David Thoreau dies, and Alcott writes the poem “Thoreau’s Flute” in his honor. At the end of the year she trav els to Washington, D.C., to serve as a Union Army nurse. |
| 1863 | Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper anonymously serializes Alcott’s story, “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” and awards her a prize of $100. After working as a nurse for only six weeks, Alcott becomes seriously ill with typhoid; she returns to Con cord where she receives treatment with calomel, a medicine containing mercury that permanently damages her health. While convalescing, Alcott reworks her wartime letters to her family into a collection titled Hospital Sketches; it is serialized in the Boston Commonwealth, an abolitionist paper, and pub lished in book form later in the year to great praise. Alcott receives almost $600 from writing this year. Over the next sev eral years she will write many gothic stories, either anony mously or under a pseudonym. |
| 1864 | The Rose Family: A Fairy Tale and On Picket Duty, and Other Tales are published in January. In December Moods is pub lished but is not well received. Horatio Alger publishes his first boys’ book, Frank’s Campaign. |
| 1865 | Bronson leaves his superintendent post. Anna and John give birth to a child, who will become Alcott’s heir. Alcott travels to Europe as an assistant to an invalid, Anna Weld; there she meets Ladislas Wisniewski, the inspiration for Laurie in Little Women. The Confederates surrender at Appomattox, marking the end of the Civil War. Lincoln is assassinated on |
| April 14. Lewis Carroll publishes Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. | |
| 1867 | Alcott accepts editorship of the children’s magazine Merry’s Museum for $500 per year. |
| 1868 | She moves from Boston to Concord to care for her family while continuing her editorship; she will continue to move back and forth between the two cities until her death. Thomas Niles of the publisher Roberts Brothers commissions Alcott to write a book for girls; she completes the first part of Little Women in six weeks, and it is published to great acclaim. Bolstered by its suc cess, she writes an equally popular second part at the rate of a chapter per day. |
| 1869 | The second part of Little Women is published under the title Good Wives. Alcott travels to Canada and Maine to recover her health, compromised by the rapid pace with which she wrote Little Women. She receives $8,500 in royalties and pays all her family’s debts. |
| 1870 | Her novel An Old-Fashioned Girl is published. Alcott travels to Europe with her sister May. Anna’s husband, John Pratt, dies. Charles Dickens dies. |
| 1871 | Still in Europe, Alcott writes Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys, a sequel to Little Women published this year. She and May return to Boston later in the year. Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There is published. |
| 1872 | Publication begins in the Christian Union of Alcott’s autobio graphical novel Work. Alcott will publish copiously until her death, producing, among other volumes, many short-story collections. |
| 1873 | Alcott attends the debates on suffrage in Boston with her father. |
| 1875 | She attends Vassar’s tenth anniversary and the Women’s Con gress in Syracuse, New York. Her novel Eight Cousins is pub lished in book form. She travels to New York City for Christmas, visiting the Tombs, the Newsboys’ Home, and the Randall’s Island orphanage, where she draws experience for her novel Rose in Bloom. May returns to Europe. |
| 1876 | Alcott protests the centennial celebrations at Concord because women are prohibited from participating. Rose in Bloom is published. Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer appears. |
| 1877 | Alcott’s A Modern Mephistopheles is published anonymously as part of the Roberts Brothers No Name series. Alcott and her |
| sister Anna purchase the Thoreau house in Concord, where they move with their father and ailing mother; later this year Abba Alcott dies. | |
| 1878 | May marries Ernest Nieriker in London, but the Alcotts can not attend the wedding. Alcott’s Under the Lilacs is published in book form. |
| 1879 | Alcott becomes the first woman to register to vote in Concord. Her sister May dies of complications from childbirth. |
| 1880 | Alcott undertakes the care of her namesake, May’s infant daughter, Louisa May Nieriker, called Lulu. She ceases work on the novel Diana and Persis (published posthumously in 1978). Her novel Jack and Jill and the revised Moods are pub lished. Bronson Alcott founds the Concord School of Philoso phy. Too sick to write extensively, Alcott authorizes publication of many collections of previously published stories over the next several years. |
| 1882 | Ralph Waldo Emerson dies. Bronson suffers a stroke and gives up teaching. Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are born. |
| 1884 | Alcott’s health begins to decline severely, a result of the mer cury treatment she had received for her typhoid in 1863; she seeks medical treatment throughout the Northeast. Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published. |
| 1885 | D. H. Lawrence, Sinclair Lewis, and Ezra Pound are born. |
| 1886 | Alcott publishes the sequel to Little Men, the feminist novel Jo’s Boys, and How They Turned Out, which took her great effort to write. Henry James’s The Bostonians is published. |
| 1888 | Alcott visits her father, who is near death. Bronson Alcott dies on March 4. Louisa May Alcott dies on March 6 and is buried with her parents. |
| 1893 | A collection of Alcott’s plays, Comic Tragedies Written by “Jo” and “Meg” and Acted by the “Little Women,” is published. Anna Alcott Pratt dies. |
INTRODUCTION
On March 22, 1927, the
New York Times
printed the results of a poll of high-school students who had been asked, “What book has interested you most?” The respondents overwhelmingly chose
Little Women
as their favorite, as the book that had most influenced them, surpassing even the Bible, which stalled at the number two position. Pause a moment to absorb this: Fifty-eight years after its publication in full, Louisa May Alcott’s domestic novel
Little Women
bore more influence on the lives and thought processes of American high-school students than did the Bible.
Little Women,
as John Lennon would claim of the Beatles forty years later, was more popular than Jesus. Although one may want to interpret this poll primarily as an indication of the increasingly secular interests of twentieth-century American youth, one must allow that, with all the other choices of reading matter available, beating out the Bible is clearly a tremendous feat. As related proof of
Little Women’s
influence, John Bunyan’s unusual 1684 religious allegory
The Pilgrim’s Progress—
which is the March family’s favorite book and guide to life in
Little Women,
and which provides an organizing framework for Alcott’s novel—came in at number three in the poll. I do believe Bunyan must thank Louisa May Alcott for his book’s second wind.
New York Times
printed the results of a poll of high-school students who had been asked, “What book has interested you most?” The respondents overwhelmingly chose
Little Women
as their favorite, as the book that had most influenced them, surpassing even the Bible, which stalled at the number two position. Pause a moment to absorb this: Fifty-eight years after its publication in full, Louisa May Alcott’s domestic novel
Little Women
bore more influence on the lives and thought processes of American high-school students than did the Bible.
Little Women,
as John Lennon would claim of the Beatles forty years later, was more popular than Jesus. Although one may want to interpret this poll primarily as an indication of the increasingly secular interests of twentieth-century American youth, one must allow that, with all the other choices of reading matter available, beating out the Bible is clearly a tremendous feat. As related proof of
Little Women’s
influence, John Bunyan’s unusual 1684 religious allegory
The Pilgrim’s Progress—
which is the March family’s favorite book and guide to life in
Little Women,
and which provides an organizing framework for Alcott’s novel—came in at number three in the poll. I do believe Bunyan must thank Louisa May Alcott for his book’s second wind.
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