Louisa May Alcott

Once you examine Louisa May Alcott's life story, the inspirations for her writing become clear. But while she had some things in common with her most famous heroine, a lot sets her apart from Jo March. Read the show notes here.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from Hooks
dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm tracybe
Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. So just after Christmas, Uh,
I guess last year. Now I've got to go to
Orchard House. I'm jealous, I know. Uh. For those of

(00:26):
you who do not know, that is one of the
many homes that Louisa May Alcott lived in, and it's
also where she wrote the first half of the book
Little Women. It's where a lot of that book was set.
It was in such poor condition when the Alcotts bought
it that it came for free with the land that
it was sitting on. But it's actually still standing, thanks
in part to a massive restoration job that involved shoring

(00:49):
up the back of the house and then hand digging
a foundation out from under it because it had never
had one. It had managed to stay upright for more
than a hundred years with no foundation underneath it. So
during this visit, the house was decorated for Christmas, and
the tour guide top told us all about Luisa may
Alcott and her sisters and her family and the lives

(01:10):
that they lived in the house. Uh and then because
it was an unseasonably warm day since New England's terrible
winter had not said in yet. But we took a
walk down to conquered Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, which is where
the family grave site is, as well as the grave
sites of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David the Row, and the
Emerson family including Ralph Waldo Emerson. So this is really

(01:33):
a trip that I took for fun, but naturally it
had to become a podcast episode. It's actually going to
become too podcast episodes. There's the ones today on Luisa
may Alcott uh, and also there will be one a
little later about some of the other Alcotts, because they
had their own stories in our own notable contributions to
the world in which they lived. Um. Kind of a

(01:55):
weird note. I don't know if you do this, Holly.
Every time I'm working on an episode, I sort of
think about out to how to refer to the person
we're talking about, like what name to use. Uh. Luisa
may Alcott herself was kind of a prickly person. I
don't I don't feel entirely comfortable calling her Luisa. I

(02:16):
actually understand that because I don't think I would be
comfortable with just her first name. Problem is, there are
so many Alcotts were talking about this entire time that
trying to call her just Alcott became extremely confusing. Uh
So I feel like I just need to apologize to
her in advance. Were being overly familiar week and I

(02:37):
was just calor l m A the whole time. I'm
sure she would have loved that in any case. Luisa
May Alcott was born on November twenty nine, eight thirty two,
in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and her mother, Abigail May Alcott, who
went by Abba, was a social worker and an activist
in addition to taking care of the household duties that

(02:58):
would typically fault to way Ben at the time. Uh.
The father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was a teacher and an
educational reformer. Some of Little Women is specifically patterned after
Luisa May Alcott's young life. She really did have three sisters.
Anna was the oldest and became Meg in the books.
She and Louisa were actually the only two who were

(03:20):
born yet when the family moved from Pennsylvania to Boston
while Louisa was still a toddler. The next sister was Elizabeth,
who was known to the family as Lizzie and who
became Beth in the books. The youngest sister May became
Amy in the books, and her first name was really
Abigail after their mother Uh and Luisa, and her sisters

(03:41):
grew up very, very poor. Her parents were both idealistic
in a way that meant they perpetually had almost no money. Uh.
They were both activists, although each in different ways. Bronson
had revolutionary ideas about how children should be educated, which
he wanted to put into action, and Abigail wanted to
fight against injustice wherever she saw it. Neither of these

(04:03):
are terribly lucrative enterprises, and although Abigail's family was relatively prominent,
her father was not supportive of Bronson's wilder schemes, and
he actually took pains to keep his money from funding them.
Bronson Alcot's philosophies of teaching were also really controversial, and
this is something that we are going to discuss in
another episode in Mord's Tail, but it did apply to

(04:23):
both what he taught and how he taught it. This
was an era in which school was mostly about memorizing
things by rote, and he really thought that children should
participate in their education and a sort of Socratic question
and answer process. He also thought physical education should be
part of children's course of study. Yeah, if anybody's ever

(04:45):
read Eight Cousins, which is my absolute favorite Luisa mailcop book,
and I sometimes joked that it was my third parent
growing up. Uncle Heleck is very clearly based on these
ideas that her father uh put forth, and we're really
quite influential to me reading them as a young key
where I was like, Yeah, women should be out doing
exciting things and not just sitting and reading quietly. Uh

(05:06):
So these ideas are not strange at all today, but
at the time they were really revolutionary, and Bronson rubbed
parents as well as other educators the wrong way more
than once. His most successful school endeavor, which we were
going to talk about in the other episode that Tracy
is preparing, only stayed open a few years. He was
off and out of work, and sometimes this loss of

(05:27):
work also came along with a huge debt thanks to
the money that he would put into these projects in
the first place. So the Alcott family moved a lot,
nearly thirty times before they settled into the now famous
Orchard House. The family's idealism also made their lifestyle generally
more expensive than it might have been otherwise. At times,

(05:49):
Bronson was determined to live off the land, and when
he did this sometimes he was actually pretty successful at
bringing in enough food to keep the family fed, but
it didn't really leave anything extra for them to live on. Plus,
they often had extra mouths to feed. They would shelter
runaway slaves, or they would offer hospitality to other Transcendentalist

(06:09):
thinkers and educators in the area. And on top of that,
they did things in a way that was generally more expensive.
For example, they would pay more money to buy linen
rather than cotton for all of their clothing because cotton
was picked by slaves and they refused to have any
tie to that. And in terms of their upbringing, the

(06:29):
girls were taught at home by their father or at
a school where he taught if he had one to
teach at, and sometimes they were tutored by other educators
who worked with their father. Their days were divided into
quote an order of indoor duties which outlined meals, rest, studies,
and recreation in the morning, for noon, noon, afternoon, and evening,
and this order of duties also outlined how the girls

(06:52):
were to behave, including giving quote prompt, cheerful, unquestioning obedience.
Those probably sounds really strict, but at the same time,
the girls were given ample rain to learn and to
express themselves creatively. May who was the budding artist in
the family, was allowed to draw on the walls of
her room, for example, and Luisa was allowed to read

(07:13):
and write as much as she wanted. They were all
encouraged to become independent and to think for themselves, although
at the same time, while they were growing up, they
were doing so under guidelines that were set down by
an often very domineering father. And before we talk about
some of the specifics that shape Luisa may alcotts outlook

(07:34):
in her writing, UH, let's have a word from one
of our fabulous sponsors. So to get back to Luisa
may Alcott. Uh. For those of our listeners who have read,
or watched, or maybe just talked about or heard of
Little Women, Joe March is sort of lovably difficult. She
is a lot of reader's favorite character, especially when it

(07:56):
comes to girls who are kind of tomboyish and want
to grow up to be independent and kind of free spirited.
But for many of her early years. Louisa may Alcott
herself was not lovably difficult, She was just difficult. She
she was stubborn to the point of being obstinate, and
the extremes of her mood were so drastic that some

(08:16):
biographers today theorized that she had a mood disorder. She
was wild and difficult enough that her mother actually sent
her away while she was pregnant with one of her
younger sisters. She'd actually had a miscarriage while Bronson's school
was failing, and this was something she was afraid was
going to happen again, so she wanted to remove one
of the big sources of stress from her life for

(08:37):
a little while. And this was one of the very
few separations that happened while Louisa was growing up. Because
both of her parents thought that their family was more
important than them as individuals, so Abigail was for many
years unconditionally supportive of Bronson's plans, even if they seem
doomed to failure. As one example, Bronson and an English

(08:59):
reformer named Charles Lane tried to start a trans and
dentalist commune together in Harvard, Massachusetts. The family moved there
when Louisa was ten, and she later wrote about it
in a satire called transon Dentalist wild Oats. Unsurprisingly, if
you have also listened to our episode on the Brook
Farm community, this commune did not work out, but Abigail

(09:20):
supported this plan until Charles Lane's philosophy started to threaten
the structure of their family. He wanted to live in
the style of the Shakers, with the men and women
separated from one another. I can't remember if we talked
about this in the Brook Farm episode. Uh, but Bronson
Alcott actually wanted to join Brook Farms specifically, but he
didn't have the money to do it, which is why

(09:41):
they tried to start their own thing. Um. Apart from
this constant poverty that they were living in and moving
around over and over and over, the family had a
number of other struggles on top of that. When Louisa
May Alcott was young, they all got smallpox while living
in overcrowded conditions in Boston in the early eighteen fifties,

(10:01):
and kind of miraculously they all survived it. All of
these various failures in his life made Bronson at sometimes
kind of a conquered laughing stock. They were constantly being
rescued through the charity of their friends, including Ralph Waldo Emerson,
who just kept bailing Bronson out in one way or another,

(10:21):
and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who at one point bought a house
they had owned for enough money that it let them
pay off some of Bronson's debts. However, being in conquered Massachusetts,
which was home to many of the best writers and
thinkers of that era in the United States, meant that
some of those same people became close friends of the Alcots.
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Threau were neighbors, and

(10:43):
Luisa was extremely fond of both of these men. She'd
leave anonymous bunches of wild flowers on Emerson's door, and
it's widely speculated that Thorreaux was one of the inspirations
for the character of Laurie, although there are others which
we will talk about later. Lece Luisa was old and
to be out on her own, she moved to Boston
by herself for a while, but she came back in

(11:04):
the late eighteen fifties when her sister Lizzie was extremely
sick with scarlet fever. The rest of the family had
by that point moved into Orchard House, which was, as
we alluded to earlier, extremely dilapidated. It was so run
down that Luisa called it Apple Slump, the apple part
of the name coming from the orchard that her father

(11:25):
planted there. Lizzie died on March fourteenth of eighteen fifty eight,
and Luisa and the rest of the family were, of
course heartbroken. This was made worse a couple of months
later when Anna announced that she was engaged to John Pratt.
Rather than thinking of this is a happy time, Luisa
and Abigail both felt like this was a further destruction
of their family, so Luisa moved into Orchard House so

(11:48):
her mother wouldn't feel like she was losing three daughters.
The United States Civil War started in eighteen sixty one,
and Luisa pretty much immediately volunteered to be a nurse.
On December eleventh, eighteen sixty two, she got a letter
that ordered her to report for duty at Union Hotel
Hospital in Washington, d C. As its name suggests that

(12:09):
as a hotel that the army had taken over to
use of the hospital. She only worked as a nurse
for six weeks, though, because she got pneumonia, and while
sick with pneumonia, she also got typhoid. The Alcotts had
mostly treated themselves when they were sick, using homeopathy and rest,
and although there's little evidence to suggest that homeopathy is

(12:29):
effective in treating most diseases, this was probably better than
the treatments advocated by mainstream medicine at the time. This
was definitely true when it came to Luisa may Alcott's
own treatment for pneumonia and typhus. She was treated with mercury,
so in addition to the effects of pneumonia and typhus,
she had mercury poisoning to deal with. The mercury treatments

(12:51):
caused nerve and muscle damage that she never really recovered from.
Hannah Ropes, who was another nurse that had gotten sick
at the same time as Louisa did, died and when
that happened, the hospital sent for Bronson. It took days
before Louisa was well enough to travel back to Conquered
and once she did, she continued to be desperately sick

(13:12):
for weeks, and at one point she was advised to
shave her head to try to combat the combat the illness,
which she did and this may have been h an
inspiration for a later cutting off of Joe Marcha's hair
and Little Women to sell during the Civil War, kind
of a twisting of what really happened in real life.

(13:33):
Although she did recover her health somewhat, for about the
next ten years, Luisa may Alcott experienced pain, she had headaches,
she had dizziness, and her health was never really strong again,
and over the years she had several seeming relapses in
which she once again became critically ill. She did recover
enough to be able to travel, though apart from that

(13:55):
one trip to Washington, d C. During the Civil War,
she had never been outside of New England, and that
changed in her early thirties when she was hired to
be a nurse to a young girl named Anna Weld
and to accompany her on a tour of Europe. This
was actually supposed to be a year long post, but
Louisa only made it for ten months. She got really
exasperated with her young charge, who didn't particularly want to

(14:19):
do a whole lot, while Louisa may Alcott naturally wanted
to explore and go do things, and write and be
active and see this place that she had traveled, so
she quit. It was on this trip to Europe that
she meant one of the other major influences for the
character Lori Latis laws wi Niewski, a chronically ill young
man from Poland, and after Louisa quit her post with

(14:42):
Anna Well, the two of them traveled to Paris alone.
And exactly what the nature of their relationship was continues
to be a bit of a source of speculation among biographers.
That is, it's a wide range of the speculation that
comes up. There's the nothing happened and speculation, and then
there's the they were in love with each other but

(15:03):
they knew that it would never work out speculation, and
then there's that they were just friends speculation like, but
nobody really widely disparate the theories and what went on there.
Luisa had actually started writing as a young girl, and
she wrote extensively during this tour around Europe, but it
was after she got home that she really started an

(15:25):
earnest effort to write for money. She had tried to
earn money to help her family in several different ways,
including sewing and teaching, but writing was what she liked
the best out of those three, and it seemed as
though she had the potential to generate some real income
that way. So we'll talk about how that went after
another brief break for a word from a sponsor. So

(15:47):
Luisa May Alcott had started publishing her work in eighteen
fifty four at the age of twenty two, so about
ten years before the strip to Europe that we just
talked about. Her first book was called Flower Fables, and
it came out in eighteen fifty five. Much of her
earlier work came out under a pseudonym. She published prose
and poetry under the name Flora Fairfield, and a number

(16:10):
of plays which came out in Boston, which were published
under the name A. M. Bernard. It seemed like she
wanted to publish so she could make money, but she
also wanted to save her real name for the things
that she was really proud of. She finished her first novel,
which was called Moods, in eighteen sixty one, and even
though she had become pretty well known as a writer

(16:30):
by this point, she had trouble finding a publisher for it.
James T. Fields told her, stick to your teaching, miss Alcott,
you can't write. However, thankfully, Louisa May Alcott was extremely stubborn,
and being told to stick to her teaching seems to
have made her all that much more determined to make
a living as a writer. She published Moods after rewriting

(16:52):
it to make it significantly shorter, in eighteen sixty four,
and it received mixed reviews. She rewrote it yet again
and republished it eight eight two, and at that point
she was such a well known writer that it sold
very well. Happening at the same time as her rewriting
and trying to find a publisher for Moods. She also
published Hospital Sketches, which came out in eighteen sixty three

(17:15):
and was kind of a fictionalized memoir based on her
time as a Civil War nurse. In the fall of
eighteen sixty seven, Alcott's publisher, Thomas Niles, asked her to
write a book for girls, and she really didn't want
to do it. She didn't think she was qualified to
write such a book at all. She had no children
of her own, and as a girl she had not
been particularly girlish, and even though her three sisters were

(17:38):
more typically feminine than she was, she didn't think their
relatively unusual life would have a wide enough appeal. But
she said she'd try, and she did start, but it
did not go well and she put it a sign.
That same year, she became a contributing editor of Mary's Museum,
which was a magazine for children. She was paid five
hundred dollars a year to do this, and she moved

(18:00):
to Boston so that she could take the job for
a little while. Her sister May also lived with her.
It's possible that this did give her a little bit
more experience in the world of writing for children, which
might have helped her a little later on. And then
the following spring, her father sat down with Niles to
talk about what she should do next. Bronson Alcott was

(18:22):
there to suggest that she write a book of fairy tales,
but what Niles really still needed was a book for
juvenile readers, so it was back to his original request.
He wanted a book for girls, and Luisa still didn't
really want to do it. However, now told her that
he would publish a book of philosophy that her father

(18:42):
was writing if she wrote the book for girls that
he was asking for. So, continuing to be dutiful to
her father and her family, that's what Luisa May Alcott did.
She resigned from Mary's Museum and she moved back to
Orchard House so that she could really focus on writing,
and she wrote Little Women at a desk that her

(19:02):
father built for her in her room in Orchard House,
basing it on her own upbringing but setting it there,
and it took her ten weeks to write it. It
was just the first part of the book as we
know it today, which takes place while Mr March is
away fighting the Civil War, and she really expected everyone
to hate it. Thomas Niles thought it could sell though.

(19:23):
She had the option of taking a one thousand dollar
flat payment, which would be you know, twice her annual
salary at Mary's Museum for a book that it had
only taken her ten weeks to write, or she could
get three dollars up front, followed by a six point
six six percent royalty per book. And she chose the
latter option and that worked out very very well for her.

(19:45):
Little Women sold out its first print run and a
second had to be ordered, and the publisher asked for
a sequel, in which Louisa made it very very clear
that she would not marry Joe to Lorie for anything.
It really got on her nerves how many people asked
her who the Little Women married? That just rankled her extremely.

(20:06):
She was like, what what did you take away from
this book? Who you get married to? Was not the
be all end all of everything. She had like very
clear opinions on that. It was extremely frustrating to her.
So she wrote the second part of Little Women in
Boston and it was even more successful than the first
half had been. It led to further sequels, and these

(20:26):
books made her financially independent. They let her payoff all
of her father's debts. It gave her family financial security.
Monetary contributions became a big way that she showed love
to the rest of her family, and the sales of
her books also funded a grand tour of Europe for
Louisa and May and their friend Alice Bartlett. This trip

(20:48):
was particularly important to May's development as an artist, which
we were going to talk about in the Alcotts episode
that we have brewing. Let's for Itself was also just
the fact that it existed, uh, pretty notable. Like the
it was three unmarried women who were traveling unaccompanied, arranging
the whole thing themselves, adjusting their arrangements based on various

(21:09):
wars and conflicts that broke out while they were in Europe,
so that the fact that they did this was a
un characteristically independent for what was expected of women at
the time. Sadly, a series of tragedies struck the Alcott
family later on in Louise's life. John Pratt died in
eighteen seventy, which left Anna and the two boys behind,

(21:30):
and this was part of what prompted Louisa to right
little men. That was to make sure that Anna and
her children would have enough money to live on. And
then Abigail Alcott died in eighteen seventy seven. May went
back to Europe and she got married there in eighteen
seventy eight. The following year, on November the eight she
had a baby who she named Louisa May after her sister,

(21:53):
and they nicknamed the baby Lulu. Although Lulu was healthy,
May never recovered from the delivery, and she died on
December eighteen seventy nine. She specified that Luisa would be
the one to raise Lulu, so after some arrangements were made,
May's husband, Ernest Nicker, and his sister traveled with the
baby to Massachusetts to bring her to Luisa, and Luisa

(22:17):
had become extremely close to me during their travels together.
So she was of course devastated by her death, as
she had been when Lizzie died when she was much younger.
But she loved Lulu. She raised her until her own
failing health meant she could no longer do so. She
also started taking care of her father after he had
a terrible stroke near the end of his life. Luisa

(22:39):
went to visit her father, who was at that point
really in failing health, on March one. According to her
sister Anna, her father said to Luisa, I am going
up come with me, and Luisa replied, oh, I wish
I could. Her father then told her to come soon.
And it's really the only the come soon part that

(23:01):
appears in Louisa's own journals and Bronson Alcott died three
days later on March fourth. Word didn't make it to
Louisa before she fell into a coma about a day later,
after she had been complaining of a headache and a
weight on her chest. She died on March sixth. As
The New York Times wrote in her obituary quote, there

(23:23):
was probably no writer among women better loved by the
young than she, and before her death she had sold
more than a million books, and her fiction had earned
her more than two hundred thousand dollars. This is an
astronomical about an amount of money at that time. All
of these books, if you've never read Little Women or
any of the other things, they're all in the public

(23:44):
domain now and you can basically read all of them
on the internet for free. Yeah, a lot of them
are available through book sites for free as free downloads.
They're everywhere, which is how I I re picked up
uh eight Cousins a few years ago when it was
offered as a free download, and I would just remember

(24:05):
marveling and going like, Okay, I always knew this book
was super influential on me. This book was super influential.
Like it kind of put in sharp contrast just how
much I had kind of taken away from it. Yeah,
it should. It should come as a surprise to nobody
that all of the books about young tomboyish women who

(24:25):
wanted to be writers appealed to me extremely as a child,
So uh yeah that you you might not be surprised if,
at some point in the future there is some other
trip I make to some other writer's house, but I
do for front and then becomes an episode. We just
try to make sure they're not too close together. Do

(24:46):
you also have some listener mail to wrap up with?
I do. Before we get to it, we that there
is going to be an upcoming episode soon. It might
not be the very next one that we do, but
soon that we'll talk more about, especially Brinson Alcott and
Um and may Alcott, because they each had very fascinating
stories and contributions of their own, which I think become

(25:07):
overshadowed in the Luisa may Alcott story a lot. And
I do have listener mail, and it is about our
recent episode about Dr Vera. Peters Um and it is
from Joan. Joan says, Dear Tracy and Holly, I've listened
to your podcast for a few years now, but I'm
writing for the first time. I am an emergency medicine
physician in St. Louis and a St. Louis native, although

(25:29):
I did my medical school training in Dublin, Ireland. Towards
the end of your show on Dr Peters, one of
you mentions a concern over a scientific paper with two
authors in which the male author was referred to as
doctor and the female is miss There are three possible
reasons for this one sexism highly likely to the woman
was possibly a medical student or full time researcher and

(25:52):
not yet a medical doctor when she did the work
on the paper. I'm gonna pause real quickly. Those are
the two options that we knew about ther Uh in
the show, and the thing that leads me to read
this letter is now option three. She was a surgeon
from outside the US or Canada to explain three. All
over the world today, medical school graduates are given the

(26:12):
title doctor. Back in the days before proper sterilization and
an esthetic techniques allowed for complex surgeries, however, surgeons were
considered to be lower on the totem pole than physicians.
Surgeons typically did shorter training programs which involved mainly amputations
and simple procedures, and as their training and expertise were
considered inferior to that of physicians, they were called mr

(26:34):
rather than doctor. And the modern era, surgery has advanced
significantly and became a very respected field within medicine. The
US and Canada began referring to all physicians and surgeons
as doctor, and much of the rest of the world. However,
surgeries less auspicious beginnings are now mark of pride, and
they actually prefer to be called Mr. Or miss, and

(26:54):
in fact will often get very testy with you, especially
if you are one of their lowly medical students, if
you make the mistake of calling them doctor. Currently, when
medical students graduate in Europe, for example, they are called doctor,
although once those who choose surgery as a career complete
their surgical training they go back to being Mr. Or miss.
My default don't get yelled at maneuver. When I was

(27:15):
in school in Ireland and uncertain if the attending slash
consultant was a physician or surgeon, was to call him
or her professor, because even if they weren't a professor,
this would be considered a compliment. After this whole explanation, though,
it's highly possible that the publisher of the paper you
read was simply being condescending in sexist. Despite that, I
thought both. I thought you both would like knowing that

(27:37):
there are other completely plausible and benign explanations that might
be true as well. Thanks very much and keep up
the great podcasts. Joan. We got a couple of notes
alluding to this disparity and how people refer to surgeons
in different parts of the world. And it also came
up on the podcast Sawbones right at the same time
as all of this was happening, so I wanted to

(27:58):
UH to read this letter. It also cracks me up
that she has a default don't get yelled at, because
we have some of those two on the show. The
default don't get yelled at many rus I like to
not be yelled at. UH. I actually that. So this
paper was UH from during a time when sexism was
extremely common in the medical field, but it also was

(28:21):
written by someone in Great Britain, so it's entirely possible
that option three was the actual correct option in this UH.
And one last thing before we close out the show,
I want to thank the folks at Bully Pulpit Games
for sending us a copy of The Night which is
game which we talked about in our Night which is episode.
I have not gotten to play it yet, but I
was extremely thrilled when I walked into the office one

(28:43):
day and there it was in an envelope waiting for me.
Thank you so much for sending that to us. UH.
We have talked about maybe we should have a House
Stuff Works Podcasters game session sometime in the relatively near future,
but I do definitely have it on my soon to
be played list. Um. If you would like to write
to us about this or any other episode, we're at

(29:04):
History Podcast at how stuffworks dot com. We're also on
Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss in history and
on Twitter at miss in History. Our tumbler is missed
in History dot tumbler dot com, and we are also
on Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash miss in History.
If you would like to learn more about, for example,
medicine in the past, you can come to our website,
which is how stuff works dot com that is where

(29:26):
our parent company is located. Or you can come to
our site, which is missed in History dot com, where
you will find an archive of all episodes at share
notes and some other cool blog posts and whatnot. You
can do all that and a whole lot more at
how stuff works dot com or missed in History dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics

(29:48):
because it has to works. Dott six