ALCOTT, Louisa May

“I like good strong words that mean something…” 

Louisa May Alcott was an extraordinary woman, particularly for the era in which she lived.  She knew and studied under Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathanial Hawthorne, worked as a nurse during the American Civil War, helped with escaping enslaved people on the Underground Railroad, and was the first woman to register to vote in her hometown, Concord, in 1879.  She also had to help with the household income, as the family frequently struggled with financial woes.  She worked as a teacher and took in washing – but it was her writing that was to prove both emotionally and financially rewarding.  She initially wrote short, frequently lurid, stories for magazines, but in 1868 she was asked by her publisher to write a novel for young women.  To do so, she reached back into her own childhood reflecting life with her sisters - the result was Little Women, which proved to be an instant success, allowing her to write in her journal "Paid up all the debts...thank the Lord!" The success led to 3 further novels in the March sisters series,  plus a number of unrelated novels, which allowed Louisa to finally live a comfortable life. 

Little Women was a significant influence on later female writers, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood and A.S. Byatt have all paid tribute; Ursula K Le Guin once wrote that Alcott’s Jo March “made writing seem like something even a girl could do.”  

In 1996 Louisa Alcott was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

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