Louisa May Alcott

Her father put the family on a farm called Fruitlands in 1843 to prove that plain living and high thinking could feed people. It could not. The community collapsed inside a year, the Alcotts sat down to discuss whether they ought to separate, and Louisa, eleven years old, wrote in her journal that she could not bear the thought. What followed was two decades of work: teacher, seamstress, governess, laundress, domestic help. At 16 she ran a school of 20 pupils out of a barn. At 18 she hired out as a companion in Dedham and quit after seven weeks, when the man of the house responded to her boredom with his philosophy by assigning her the wood-chopping, the floors and his boots.

She published her first poem in 1851 under the name Flora Fairchild and her first book, Flower Fables, in 1854, out of stories she had told to Emerson's daughter. What she actually liked writing was lurid. As A. M. Barnard she turned out sensation stories thick with opium, mind control, disguise and murder, which paid better than anything else she did, and in 1865 she published a thriller that scholars now count among the earliest American detective fiction. Six weeks nursing Union soldiers in a Georgetown hospital produced Hospital Sketches in 1863 and her first real notice. Then her publisher Thomas Niles asked her for a book for girls. She thought she knew more about boys, found writing for children tedious, and wrote Little Women anyway in 1868. Three sequels followed over 18 years.

The book that made her famous is the least interesting thing that happened to her body. She caught typhoid nursing in Georgetown and was dosed with calomel, a mercury compound, and she spent the remaining 25 years blaming that treatment for what followed: vertigo, indigestion, headaches, exhaustion, pain in the limbs. Her doctors called it neuralgia. When medicine failed she tried mind-cure, homeopathy, hypnotism and Christian Science. Two physicians writing in 2007 proposed lupus instead, possibly set off by the mercury, and pointed at an 1870 portrait that shows the flush across her cheeks. Others have argued for morphine, intestinal cancer or meningitis. None of it can be proved. She nursed her mother through her last illness in 1877, took in her dead sister's baby in 1880, and cared for her father after his stroke in 1882.

She fell unconscious on March 3, 1888, her father died the next day, and she died on the sixth without waking. They buried her at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, on the hillside now called Authors' Ridge, near Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau. She had asked her sister Anna to burn her letters and journals. Anna burned some and handed the rest to a family friend, who printed them the following year. The thrillers stayed lost until the 1940s and uncollected until the 1970s, so the writer readers argue about now is not the one they had for a century. Simone de Beauvoir, Patti Smith, Ursula K. Le Guin and Ruth Bader Ginsburg have all traced something back to her.

Louisa May Alcott's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Flower Fables book
  Stories first told to Ralph Waldo Emerson's daughter Ellen 1854
• Hospital Sketches book
  Her letters from the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, revised for print 1863
• V.V., or Plots and Counterplots book
  Published anonymously, and now counted among the earliest American detective fiction 1865
• Moods book
  Her adult novel on a woman's right to selfhood, re-ended in 1882 1865
• Little Women book
  Written because her publisher wanted a book for girls and she wanted the money 1868
• Jo's Boys book
  Seven years in the writing, and the last of the March family novels 1886

• 1843 aged ~11 Her father founds Fruitlands, a utopian community at Harvard, Massachusetts It collapsed within a year and the family discussed separating.
• 1848 aged ~16 At 16 she opens a school for 20 pupils in a barn near the family house Her students were Emerson, Channing and Alcott children.
• September 1851 aged 18 Publishes her first poem, under the name Flora Fairchild
• March 14, 1858 aged 25 Her sister Elizabeth dies at 23 of the effects of scarlet fever Three weeks later her sister Anna became engaged, and Alcott wrote of the sisterhood breaking up.
• December 11, 1862 aged 30 Assigned as a nurse to the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown She lasted six weeks before typhoid sent her home.
• 1868 aged ~36 Publishes Little Women Her publisher immediately asked for a second part.
• March 9, 1879 aged 46 Becomes the first woman to register to vote in Concord She urged other women to follow and was disappointed when few did.
• September 1880 aged 47 Takes custody of her niece Lulu after her sister May dies of childbirth complications
• March 6, 1888 aged 55 Dies in Boston, two days after her father She had suffered a stroke on March 3 and never regained consciousness.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882
  Essayist and philosopher who led the Transcendentalist movement and shaped American intellectual thought. neighbour and lender of books
• Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804–1864
  Novelist whose The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables explored Puritan guilt and sin. bought her family's house
• Dorothea Dix 1802–1887
  Social reformer who championed humane treatment of the mentally ill and established asylums nationwide. ran the nursing service she joined
• Susan B. Anthony 1820–1906
  Suffragist and civil rights leader who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. shared the suffrage campaign
• Ursula K. Le Guin 1929–2018
  Writer who used speculative fiction to examine gender, power, culture, and alternative social arrangements. named her an influence
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg 1933–2020
  Supreme Court Justice whose advocacy for gender equality made her a cultural icon. named her an influence