Born on November 29, , Louisa May Alcott led a fascinating life. Besides enchanting millions of readers with her novel Little Women , she worked as a Civil War nurse, fought against slavery, and registered women to vote. Here are 10 facts about the celebrated author.
Louisa's parents, Bronson and Abigail Alcott, raised their four daughters in a politically active household in Massachusetts. Although her family was always poor , Alcott had access to valuable learning experiences. As a teenager, Alcott worked a variety of teaching and servant jobs to earn money for her family. For reasons that are unclear, Alcott used a pen name —Flora Fairfield—rather than her real name, perhaps because she felt that she was still developing as a writer.
But in at age 22, Alcott used her own name for the first time. In , at the beginning of the U. Civil War, Alcott sewed Union uniforms in Concord and, the next year, enlisted as an army nurse. In a Washington, D. Jo abandons her literary pursuits at least for a while and becomes domestic. Super domestic, actually—she has two biological children and adopts 18! But "Aunt March" didn't fund her three long trips to Europe—Alcott did. As opposed to Alcott, Abigail May tried to have a career and a family.
In Paris, she was a well-respected artist and travel writer. However, tragedy struck when she died seven weeks after giving birth to a baby girl, Louisa. May was 39 years old. After Abigail May died in , her daughter Louisa called Lulu was sent to Boston to live with her wealthy aunt. Alcott published a story called "Lu Sing" for her beloved niece. When Alcott died in , Lulu's father brought her to Switzerland. She remained in Europe until her death in at the age of As Alcott predicted in "Lu Sing," Lulu really did live happily ever after, despite a tumultuous childhood.
In , the state of Massachusetts granted women the right to vote—but with limits. They were allowed to vote in towns, only on issues regarding school committees.
Continuing her mother's work as a Suffragette, Alcott was proudly the first of 20 women to vote that day in Concord. For more ways to live your best life plus all things Oprah, sign up for our newsletter! Your Best Life. Type keyword s to search. Culture Club Getty Images. Louisa May Alcott is most famous for her novel Little Women , which has remained in print since its publication. Little Women is based on Alcott's childhood experiences—but there's a lot she left out.
She published under the androgynous pseudonym A. 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 the schools and communities that he established quickly failed. His most famous project was Fruitlands, a utopian community that he founded with a friend in the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, in This was to be a new Eden, one that eschewed the sins that got humankind kicked out of the old one.
The communards would till the soil without exploiting animal labor. Needless to say, they ate no animals, but they were vegetarians of a special kind: they ate only vegetables that grew upward, never those, like potatoes, which grew downward. They had no contact with alcohol, or even with milk.
It belonged to the cows. They took only cold baths, never warm. Understandably, people did not line up to join Fruitlands. The community folded after seven months. His ideas were interesting as ideas, but, in action, they came to little. Nor did he have any luck translating them into writing. Even his loyal friend Emerson said that when Bronson tried to put his ideas into words he became helpless. And so Bronson, when he was still in his forties, basically gave up trying to make a living.
Sometimes—did he notice? Emerson was a steady donor. By the time Louisa, the second-oldest girl, was in her mid-twenties, the family had moved more than thirty times.
Eventually, Louisa decided that she might be able to help by writing stories for the popular press, and she soon discovered that the stories that sold most easily were thrillers. Only in , when an enterprising scholar, Madeleine B.
Soon, however, a publisher, Thomas Niles, sensed something about Louisa. Or maybe he just saw a market opportunity. Girls liked reading more than boys did. This is still true. But her family was terribly strapped, so what she did was write a novel about the few girls she knew, her sisters, and her life with them. Rioux goes on from the book to the plays and the movies. It was soon followed by two silent movies, in and Both are lost. Between and , there were forty-eight radio dramatizations.
Ronan seems made to be Jo. And those are just the big-screen versions. In , there was a forty - eight -episode anime version in Japan. The chapter on the adaptations is a lot of fun. First, it teaches you the problems that face filmmakers adapting famous novels.
June Allyson was thirty-one when she played the fifteen-year-old Jo. Then, partly because the actors are worried that they are too old, they accentuate everything to death. Poor, sickly Beth is almost always sentimentalized; Marmee is often a bore. Whole hunks of the plot may be left out, because this is a twenty-seven-chapter book being squeezed into what is usually a movie of two to three hours. Rioux apparently finished her book before she could see the most recent entry, a three-hour BBC miniseries directed by a newcomer, Vanessa Caswill.
0コメント