LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

Louisa received education from her father, who was strict. She also received some instruction from writers and educators such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, Julia Ward Howe o Ralph Waldo Emerson, all of whom were family friends.

In Boston, Louisa worked as a teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic helper and writer. She sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard, under which she wrote novels for young adults that focused on spies, revenge, and cross-dressers.

Louisa was an abolitionist who hid fugitive slaves and a feminist. She always fought for women’s suffrage and she was the first woman to register her name as a voter in Concord (Massachusetts).

During the American Civil War, Louisa served as a nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown. While exercising her work she contracted typhoid pneumonia and had to return home. (It is likely that the mercurous chloride with which she was treated contributed to her early death.)

After the war, Louisa traveled to Europe with Anna Weld for a short visit to see the sites she had read about as a girl. She had a romance while in Europe with the young Polish Man Ladislas "Laddie" Wisniewski, but she remained unmarried throughout her life.

She had a surprising personality, humanitarian impulses and protector of many good causes.

Louisa had legally adopted her widowed sister Anna's son, John Pratt.

Louisa moved at last to a Roxbury nursing home. Her father Bronson Alcott died on March 4, 1888; and she died in Boston two days later at the age of fifty-six.

She was buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, in "Author's Ridge", near Thoreau and Emerson. A Civil War veteran's marker graces her gravestone.

During her lifetime, she produced almost three hundred literary works.

Her Boston home is featured on the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail. Her childhood home Orchard House is now a museum that pays homage to Louisa May Alcott and her family.

In 1996 Alcott was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

MONTSE CARDIEL - English for Fun 3A