Amos Bronson Alcott

LMA was born in Germantown near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, on this day, which was also her father 's thirty-third birthday. She was the second of four girls.

Her father, Amos Bronson Alcott , was an idealistic abolitionist, suffragist, teacher and social reformer whose philosophical interests contributed to his family's precarious financial situation. His schools in Philadelphia and Boston failed by the early...

MF 's circle of friends and associates included many of the of the pre-eminent thinkers and writers of her day. She maintained a vision of friendship that demanded total loyalty and sought integrity, sensitivity, and...

In the USA HM became a good friend of Margaret Fuller , although differences developed between them after Martineau published Society in America, which she saw as objecting to Fuller's gorgeous pedantry and disregard...

She established a friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne through an early, enthusiastic letter, in which she described the delight of her first encounters with his work. She nevertheless felt that he always stood somewhat aloof from...

LMA wrote to please both her parents. Her father suggested she should write simple books about the lives of children, as she did. He also suggested a book about his own childhood, which suggestion she...

Berrytown, set in an eponymous utopian community (whose name irresistibly recalls Fruitlands, the brainchild of Amos Bronson Alcott ), satirizes progressivism through the parallel stories of a domestic woman and a New Woman...

Following her father's sudden death in 1835, MF abandoned her plans for travel, and turned to teaching as a means of supplementing the family's income (she had initially attempted to make money through writing, but...

In the Conversations, Fuller covered topics including education, ethics, poetry, and the Classics, typically beginning with a lecture before a group discussion. Members paid for their attendance, and MF was able to support herself and...

In 1834, LMA and her family moved to Boston, Massachusetts. They moved frequently around Massachusetts for several years after that. In 1843 they lived briefly at Fruitlands, a utopian but ultimately disastrous commune co-founded...

The novel is set in an unnamed manufacturing city in Indiana, but draws on RHD 's own upbringing in Wheeling, West Virginia. Pfaelzer suggests that its male protagonist is shaped by RHD

She achieves this in Bits of Gossip in a series of scattered remembrances of my own generation which included vivid portraits of some of the most prominent men and women of the American nineteenth century...