Little Women

Biographie de Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott (1832-88). Now best remembered for her classic tale Little Women, Alcott was a prolific and varied writer who did much to promote the cause of women's suffrage. Louisa May Alcott was born on 29 November 1832 ; her father's (the prominent Transcendentalist, Amos Branson Alcott) thirty-third birthday. She was the second of Amos and his wife Abba May's four daughters, and was brought up in Concord, Massachusetts. Educated at home, Louisa was fascinated by books and from an early age recalls `playing with books in my father's study... looking at pictures, pretending to read, and scribbling on blank pages whenever pen or pencil could be found'. As she grew older she devoured the books in the family library, reading widely from both American and European authors. She also found great intellectual stimulation in the men in her father's circle, eminent figures such as Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne. Her father's strong anti-materialism, coupled with his complete financial ineptitude, often meant that the family found it difficult to make ends meet, and from an early age all the children were expected to help out by taking in sewing, teaching or doing domestic service. After the death of her sister Lizzie in 1858 and her sister Anna's marriage, Louisa became more involved with her writing, often contributing articles, short stories and poems to periodicals. Alcott never married (`I'd rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe'), and many of her essays explore the possibilities of a single life for women. In 1862 she volunteered as a nurse in a Civil War army hospital in Washington but after only six weeks she contracted typhoid fever and was forced to return home. The break from her family and her experiences gave her the material for her first successful book, Hospital Sketches. During the next few years, as her writing became more profitable, she was able to give up her other jobs and write full-time. Alcott experimented with several different styles of writing and pseudonyme, at one time calling herself Flora Fairfield. She also wrote several lurid thrillers under the ambiguous pen-narre `A. M. Barnard', and of these Behind a Mask is probably the best known. The success of Little Women in 1868 brought both fame and the financial security she had so long desired for her family and she went on to write other stories in the same vein : An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Little Men (1871), Eight Cousins (1875), Rose in Bloom (1876), Jo's Boys (1886) and others. In 1871 Alcott visited Europe and on her return to Boston became involved with women's suffrage and temperance movements. Alcott died in Boston in 1888, the same day her father was buried.