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N3FIX > TODAY 29.11.18 14:24l 59 Lines 3344 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Born: Louisa May Alcott
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Louisa May Alcott: Daughter of the Transcendentalists
Louisa May Alcott, the second daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, teacher
and transcendentalist philosopher, and Abigail May, social worker and
reformer, was born in the “disagreeable month” of November, just like
her literary creation Jo March, the rambunctious heroine of Little Women .
During Louisas early years, her fathers innovative Temple School in
Boston failed, as did the familys experiment with communal living with
a group of transcendentalist mystics at Fruitlands, an early
eighteenth-century farmhouse.
A happier time began after the family settled at Hillside House, later
Nathaniel Hawthornes residence, which he renamed the Wayside, in
Concord, Massachusetts. There, the Alcotts found a sympathetic community
and like-minded friends. Louisa and her sisters were always welcome to
participate in the conversations of the poets, philosophers, and
reformers that made up their parents circle.
The Alcott girls enjoyed the natural beauty of Concord, boating on the
river, ice skating on Walden Pond, and running free in the surrounding
fields and woods. Henry David Thoreau was one of Louisas instructors
when she was a young girl. In one of his fanciful lessons, he taught her
that a cobweb was a “handkerchief dropped by a fairy.” As a teenager,
Louisa enjoyed borrowing books from Ralph Waldo Emersons collection and
delighted in conversing with the “sage of Concord.”
For the most part, the Alcotts taught their daughters at home. Daily
journal-keeping formed a significant part of the home curriculum. Louisa
and her sisters each wrote a weekly journal in which they recorded
family events and published their literary and artistic endeavors. The
girls and their neighbors formed a dramatic society, and the Hillside
barn became the local theater where they performed Louisas melodramatic
plays.
Although their home and community life was rich, the family remained
financially impoverished. Of necessity, all family members pitched in to
support the family, with the daughters working as teachers, companions,
and domestics. Besides their paid labors, they contributed their time
and talents to the abolition movement, the womens suffrage movement,
and to the relief of those poorer than themselves.
During the Civil War, Louisa served as a nurse at a Union Army hospital
in Washington, D.C. There, she kept careful journals which she published
later as Hospital Sketches. A severe bout of typhoid fever brought her
home to Concord an invalid. It is thought that she was treated with
mercury for her fever, as were many others who became ill during this
period. Mercury poisoning was apparently the cause of the slow
debilitation that led to her death twenty years later.
Louisas later years were financially secure and her family was able to
live comfortably and pursue their many intellectual and artistic
interests at their second home in Concord, Orchard House. Her last
years, however, were shadowed by the deaths of two of her sisters and
her brother-in-law. As the sole support of her parents, sisters, and her
nephews and niece, she became overburdened with work and ill health.
Louisa May Alcott died, two days after her father, on March 6, 1888, at
the age of fifty-six.
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