Little women when was it written

Alcott originally was not interested in writing the semi-autobiographical story of the four March sisters. Similar to the March family, the Alcotts were poor. So young Louisa turned to writing stories as a source of income for the family. Stern found the evidence in a correspondence between Alcott and her publisher.

She was reluctant to do so, saying in her journal entry of May Alcott's third sister, the gentle Lizzie Elizabeth , contracted scarlet fever from a poor family she was helping, and died two years later, weakened despite her recovery, like her fictional counterpart Beth March.

She was just The youngest, May Abigail , was an ambitious artist like Amy. And Alcott herself was a tomboy, a writer, an independent woman, like Jo March. But it was Alcott, not her father, who went to the Civil War; she enlisted as a nurse, but sadly, contracted typhoid fever during her service, and was plagued with health problems long attributed to the mercury compound used to treat her illness, but in more recent years, speculated to be from the autoimmune disease lupus for the remainder of her life.

So I plod away, though I don't enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it. She settled in Paris, married Swiss businessman Ernest Nieriker in and moved to the Paris suburbs, where she gave birth to a baby girl the next year. Lulu went to live in Switzerland with her father. She was shy in real life, and Alcott apparently talked about her the least in her diaries.

She loved kittens, sewing and spending time with her family. As in the book, she does catch scarlet fever after holding an infected baby belonging to a poor family to whom she delivered a care package. She initially recovered, but died two years later in at the age of He risked his job for doing what he saw as the right thing.

All in all, the family had moved nearly 30 times in the same number of years before moving into Orchard House in when he became Superintendent of Schools in Concord. About 10 years after Little Women came out, Louisa helped him fulfill his dream of opening the Concord School of Philosophy, thought to be one of the first adult education schools in the country, in his study in Orchard House.

Her father and sister Anna would also theorize that the character was based on a family friend who boarded with them, Frederick Llewellyn Hovey Willis, and on Julian Hawthorne, who lived next door to Orchard House. Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia. By Olivia B. Get our History Newsletter.

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