Louisa May Alcott

29 November 1832 - 06 March 1888

Standard Name: Alcott, Louisa May

Birth Name: Louisa May Alcott

Pseudonym: Flora Fairfield

Pseudonym: A. M. Barnard

Used Form: Louisa Alcott

United States novelist LMA published during the later nineteenth century more than three hundred writings, including works for children, short stories, letters, poetry, novels, plays, sensation fiction, and journalism. Little Women, her best-known work, remains a classic among fiction for young adults.

Full profile

Connections

Connections	Author name Sort ascending	Excerpt
Literary responses	Charlotte Yonge	During her lifetime CY was ranked as a serious novelist with Austen , Trollope , Balzac , and Zola . Contemporaries like Louisa Alcott , Margaret Oliphant , Ellen Wood , and Rhoda Broughton made...
Reception	Queen Victoria	Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands outsold many books that appeared in 1868, including Wilkie Collins 's The Moonstone, Robert Browning 's Ring and the Book, and Louisa May Alcott
Theme or Topic Treated in Text	Alison Uttley	Rather stiff and formal in style, it advises somewhat predictable texts like Anna Sewell 's Black Beauty (which AU calls well-nigh forgotten by this generation), Louisa May Alcott 's Little Women, and other classics. Judd, Denis. Alison Uttley. Michael Joseph. 91
Education	Susan Tweedsmuir	She was, however, always reading as a child: she and her sister had few books, but knew by heart whole chapters of the ones they did have. As a child Susan hated Mrs Mortimer 's...
Education	Mary Stewart	The village of Trimdon was so isolated that there was little to do but play games and read. By the time she was four Mary could read, having begged to be included in the reading...
Textual Production	G. B. Stern	Her next play was For Husbands Only, written jointly with Mrs D. C. F. Harding and staged at the Ambassadors Theatre in 1920. After that came the great success of her dramatised novel, The...
Textual Features	G. B. Stern	A listing of books which GBS feels to be particularly her own includes Jane Austen , Edna St Vincent Millay , Dorothy Parker , and Rebecca West 's essays. But most of the women authors...
Education	Constance Smedley	With her sister, CS began her education at home with her mother as teacher. She read Shakespeare at four years old, and later learned the violin. She and Ida were concert-goers from an early age...
Literary responses	Evelyn Sharp	Beverly Lyon Clark , who wrote an introduction to this book and thought extremely highly of it, argued that the neglect of it stemmed from its belonging not just to one but to several under-appreciated...
Education	Anne Ridler	Her education began with her mother and a governess. At six she began attending a class run by the sister of another Rugby master. Later came visits to a piano teacher, and at home a...
Education	Beatrix Potter	Beatrix, educated at home and six years older than her brother, was a solitary child. She had few toys; but she became deeply interested in science, and was also, from an early age, devoted to...
Education	Helen Oyeyemi	HO reports having been an avid reader and beginning to write at an early age. She recounts that reading Louisa May Alcott 's Little Women as a child turned me into a writer. ....
Material Conditions of Writing	Helen Oyeyemi	HO reports having experimented with literary activity at an early age. She mentions rewriting Alcott 's Little Women as a child, and she wrote plays while a student at Cambridge.
Intertextuality and Influence	Helen Oyeyemi	HO identifies more as a reader than as a writer: she cites, alludes to, and rewrites a large number and variety of authors: Emily Dickinson , Nella Larsen , Louisa May Alcott , and Simi Bedford
Intertextuality and Influence	Helen Oyeyemi	As an avid reader, HO often cites other women writers—as well as men—as influential on her writing. She frequently cites and mentions both Louisa May Alcott 's Little Women and Emily Dickinson , of whom...

Timeline

8 September 1836

The Transcendental Club (also known as the Hedge Club and the Symposium ) was formed in Cambridge, Massachusetts; it brought together various thinkers who were at the forefront of Transcendentalism.

1861

A company in Salem, Massachusetts, issued what seems to be the earliest version of a game called Authors, whose object was to collect sets of cards bearing the names of writers and the...

26 September 1991

Elaine Showalter published Sister's Choice: Traditions and Change in American Women's Writing , complement or sequel to her book of British women's literary history, A Literature of Their Own, 1977.

Texts

Alcott, Louisa May. Flower Fables. H. M. Caldwell, 1854.

Alcott, Louisa May. Hospital Sketches. Redpath, 1863.

Stern, Madeleine B., and Louisa May Alcott. “Introduction”. The Journals of Louisa May Alcott, edited by Joel Myerson et al., Little, Brown, 1989, pp. 3-39.

Alcott, Louisa May. “Introduction”. Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers, edited by Madeleine B. Stern, Northeastern University Press, 1995, p. xi - xxix.

Alcott, Louisa May. Jo’s Boys. Roberts Brothers, 1886.

Alcott, Louisa May, and May Alcott Nieriker. Little Women. Roberts Brothers, 1868.

Alcott, Louisa May. Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers. Editor Stern, Madeleine B., Northeastern University Press, 1995.

Alcott, Louisa May, and Madeleine B. Stern. The Journals of Louisa May Alcott. Editors Myerson, Joel and Daniel Shealy, Little, Brown, 1989.