Louisa May Alcott

born:

1832, Germantown, Pennsylvania

in print as of:

1852, Boston, Massachusetts

profession:

teacher, companion, war nurse, and author

died:

1888

Stories for Young People
Flower Fables: Depending on your tolerance for Romantic sentimentalism, you may or may not enjoy these fables and poems. This was the author's first published book, and it should be remembered she was still quite young.

Little Women: A thinly-disguised autobiographical novel of the author's youth with her parents and three sisters, in which tomboy and aspiring author Jo is the author's counterpart.

Good Wives: This sequel to Little Women, picking up after a three-year hiatus and dealing with the March girls as they become women indeed, is usually published in the same volume under that title, and most modern readers aren't even aware they were originally separate books..

Little Men: A further continuation of the story of the March family, centered on Plumfields, the school at which Jo and her husband board and teach a motley group of boys.

Jo's Boys: The boys of Plumfields are now young men, with all the complications growing up brings. This story ends the March family cycle.

The Old-Fashioned Girl: Polly was already an old-fashioned girl in Victorian days, she yet remains remarkably sympathetic even to a modern reader as she deals with city friends, city temptations, growing up, and staying true to her values.
Eight Cousins, or The Aunt-Hill: Our orphaned heroine, Rose, must leave her quiet girls' boarding school to move in with six aunts, seven boy cousins, and other horrors.
A Rose in Bloom: A sequel to Eight Cousins. Rose returns a young woman after a long trip abroad, and finds everyone much the same---and yet altered---as adults. They've all grown, but so have their vices and virtues, and some of their friendships are growing into love.

Under the Lilacs: In a twist on the classic tale, a boy and his dog run away from the circus to find his family. Along the way, he finds a surrogate family and a new life.
The Inheritance: The author's first novel, written when she was only seventeen, and left unpublished til it was found in 1988. This rags-to-riches story is set in England. Interesting to fans of the author, and perhaps also to aspiring writers, it reveals the early stages of the skill shown in her later stories.
Stories for Adults
Hospital Sketches
Moods

A Long Fatal Love Chase
 
Louisa May Alcott and me:
I received Little Women as a birthday gift when I was eight years old. I became quite ill a little over a month later and missed the last several weeks of school and spent the entire summer in bed. During that time at home, Little Women was one of the many books I read. How I cried when Jo rejected Laurie, and when Beth died, and how dubious I was when Jo married the professor! And how I did identify with Jo, whose life was so different from mine, because I think somewhere I already knew that my ambition was to be a writer.
My enjoyment of this first book was sufficient that Little Men and Jo's Boys soon followed, and I once again plunged myself into 19th Century New England. I came to love the professor, even if I didn't quite understand why Jo married him. The rest of her novels for young people followed. I loved An Old-Fashioned Girl, too, though I did get hung up on the idea of someone wearing bronze boots (it sounded very uncomfortable)...
Re-reading the books when I was in college allowed me to see some of their facets with new and more understanding eyes. For instance, I then understood that Jo loved Professor Bhaer, though I still didn't understand her rejection of Laurie.
When I read the collection for the third time at thirty years of age, I was struck first by how my understanding had changed---Of course Jo loved the professor! And Laurie might have had boyish charm and a good heart, but...well, he was no Professor Bhaer. I was also struck by some of the values I had internalized without realizing---and by some I had missed altogether. I realized that I believed in equal opportunity for women in the way that her heroines did, and that I believed in the virtue of controlling my temper, as Mrs March taught Jo, and of not trying to be popular by pretending I'm something I'm not, as Meg learned. I had learned to value what could be found or made at home, including fun. I had learned that charity is not the exclusive province of the wealthy, because charity can be giving of oneself. And it's just possible that my earliest understanding of death may have come from her books, too.
I noted all these things with interest, not having previously realized the influence these Victorian children's books had had on me. But there was another revelation: As an aspiring writer, Professor Bhaer's talk with Jo about her writing in Little Women hit home to me. The night I read that section, I went thoughtfully to my various stories-in-progress and read them as a reader, asking myself, "Is this Abfahl?" Is this garbage? What were the values I was espousing---whether I realized it or not? Would the reader receive anything of value from my stories? I realized that some of the stories I had written---perhaps out of a sublimated desire to be au courrant with the world---did not reflect my own values (note that I speak of stories, not of characters, which is another matter).
Resolved that my future stories would all have something positive to say to the reader, I rewrote or abandoned several stories of which I found I was not proud.
A number of the lifestyle choices I made as a young adult reflect the childhood influence of this writer of horror stories who, ironically, only turned to novels for young people under protest. I believe it goes back to the message written time and again into Little Women and her other children's books. Raised in a family that lived by it, as Abolitionists, as Suffragists, as innovative educators, as persons of idealism who suffered poverty because of their moral choices, Louisa May Alcott was able to convey this message with conviction: The virtue of doing what you know to be the right thing, even if the world encourages a different choice, conveys its own reward in a heart and mind at peace.
 
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