29 November: Louisa May Alcott

Here are some things you might not know about Louisa May Alcott, who wrote Little Women, and was born on this date in 1832.

1. Her father was Amos Bronson Alcott, a philosopher, teacher and transcendentalist. Her mother was a social worker called Abigail May, and she had four sisters. Amos Bronson was a principled man who supported the abolition of slavery and vegetarianism. He taught his daughters the alphabet by getting them to make the shapes of the letters with their bodies (eg standing tall and straight for “I”) and made his entire family keep diaries every day.
2. Louisa grew up around some famous family friends, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau. Louisa went on nature walks with Henry David Thoreau.
3. The family weren't well off, so both Louisa and her sisters had to work to help support the family. Louisa worked as a teacher, seamstress, governess, and domestic servant, and also as a writer. She first found her way into print when a magazine published one of her poems when she was 19, under the pen name Flora Fairfield. The first time she published under her own name was at 22, when she published a collection of fairy tales she had written for Ellen, Ralph Waldo Emerson's daughter.
4. She's best remembered for the wholesome tale of Little Women, but she also wrote Gothic pulp fiction using the pen name A.M. Barnard. The subject matter of these stories included cross-dressers, spies, revenge, and hashish.
5. In fact, she wasn't keen on the idea of writing Little Women at all at first. That she write a novel for girls, rather than fairy stories, was suggested by Thomas Niles, an editor at a publishing house. Louisa, a tomboy, didn't think she'd have enough material. However, soon after that, Louisa's father was trying to convince Niles to publish his manuscript about philosophy. Louisa agreed to write a novel about girls because Niles told her father that if she did, he'd publish the philosophy book. So she really only wrote it to help her father. Little Women took her 10 weeks to write.
6. The four sisters in Little Women were based on Louisa herself and her three sisters. It was a runaway success and soon attracted a fan following. Louisa wasn't comfortable with fame and would sometimes pretend to be a servant if fans came calling. Louisa originally wanted Jo to remain single, as she had herself, but fans repeatedly asked her to marry Jo off to Laurie, the boy next door. “Girls write to ask who the little women marry,” Louisa wrote in her diary, “as if that was the only aim and end of a woman’s life. I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone.” When she eventually married Jo to Professor Bhaer rather than Laurie, it isn't known whether it was a compromise or a move to spite them for their preoccupation with who Jo would marry.
7. Louisa never did marry, and once said in an interview that she wondered if she was “a man's soul put by some freak of nature into a woman's body”. However, while she didn't have any biological children, when her sister May died in childbirth, she adopted her daughter, named Louisa after her, and brought her up until she was eight.
8. She believed in votes for women and was the first woman in her town who registered to vote. She wrote for a women’s rights periodical and went door-to-door in Massachusetts to encourage women to vote. Her family also opposed slavery and would house fugitive slaves as part of the “Underground Railroad”.
9. She was also ahead of her time in that she had a fitness regime – she went running. She kept up running until she died. She wrote about running in her diary and also encouraged other young women to take it up.
10. She did a stint as an army nurse during the US Civil War. She wrote a book, Hospital Sketches, about her experiences. Sadly, though, nursing may have contributed to her premature death at the age of 55. She caught typhoid after about six weeks of nursing. The treatment at the time was a toxic Mercury compound called calomel. She survived the bout of typhoid only to suffer from symptoms of mercury poisoning for the rest of her life. Doctors today think she may have suffered from an autoimmune disorder, such as lupus, rather than mercury poisoning, although the mercury wouldn't have done her immune system any good. She died of a stroke, aged 55, two days after her father died. Louisa's last known words were "Is it not meningitis?"

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