Little Women

LITTLE WOMEN

Louisa M. Alcott

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT was born in 1832 and died in 1888. She was the daughter of A. Bronson Alcott, the “Sage of Concord.” Her early surroundings were of a highly intellectual and literary character, and she naturally took to writing while still very young.

In her sketch “Transcendental Oats” she describes in an amusing way the experience of a year at Fruitlands, where an attempt was made to establish an ideal community.

Miss Alcott was obliged to be a wage-earner to help out the family income, and so taught school, served as a governess and at times worked as a seamstress. Wearying of this, she wrote for the papers stories of a sensational nature, which were remunerative financially, but unsatisfactory to her as a literary pursuit, and she abandoned this style of writing.

In a Washington hospital she served as a nurse for a time, but the work was so hard that she failed in health, and when she recovered she had to find new fields of work; then she traveled as attendant to an invalid, and with her visited Europe.

After several attempts at literature, Miss Alcott wrote “Little Women,” which was an immediate success, reaching a sale of 87,000 copies in three years. She wrote from the heart, and wove into the story incidents from the lives of herself and her three sisters at Concord. She afterward wrote “An Old-Fashioned Girl,” “Little Men,” “Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag,” “The Eight Cousins,” and “Rose in Bloom,” besides other stories and sketches.

In their old-fashioned New England home the little women lived with Mrs. March, their brisk and cheery mother, who always had a “can-I-help-you” look about her, and whom her four girls lovingly called “Marmee.”

Pretty Meg, the oldest, was sixteen, and already showed domestic tastes and talents, though she detested the drudgery of household work; and, a little vain of her white hands, longed at heart to be a fine lady. Jo, fifteen, was tall, thin, and coltish, and gloried in an unconcealed scorn of polite conventions. Beth, thirteen, was a loveable little thing, shy, fond of her dolls and devoted to music, which she tried hopefully to produce from the old, jingling tin pan of a piano. Amy, twelve, considered herself the flower of the family. An adorable blonde, she admitted that the trial of her life was her nose. For, when she was a baby Jo had accidentally dropped her into the coal-hod and permanently flattened that feature, and though poor Amy slept with a patent clothespin pinching it, she couldn't attain the Grecian effect she so much desired.

Father March was an army chaplain in the Civil War, and in his absence Jo declared herself to be the man of the family. To add to their slender income, she went every day to read to Aunt March, a peppery old lady; and Meg, too, earned a small salary as daily nursery governess to a neighbor's children.