Louisa Alcott: Little Women

1857 The Alcott family returns to Concord; with money from friends, including Emerson, they purchase Orchard House (where Alcott will later write Little Women).

1858 Elizabeth Alcott dies of scarlet fever. Anna announces her engagement to John Pratt, whom she will marry in 1860. Alcott is greatly unsettled by the loss of her two sisters.

1859 Bronson becomes superintendent of schools in Concord, receiving a salary of $100 per year. Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species is published.

1860 Alcott writes her novel Moods. The Boston Theater Company produces her play Nat Bachelor’s Pleasure Trip. Abraham Lincoln becomes president of the United States. Publication begins of Dickens’s Great Expectations.

1861 Alcott starts work on an autobiographical novel, tentatively titled Success (it will be published in 1873 as Work: A Story of Experience). The American Civil War begins.

1862 Henry David Thoreau dies, and Alcott writes the poem “Thoreau’s Flute” in his honor. At the end of the year she travels to Washington, D.C., to serve as a Union Army nurse.

1863 Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper anonymously serializes Alcott’s story, “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” and awards her a prize of $100. After working as a nurse for only six weeks, Alcott becomes seriously ill with typhoid; she returns to Con cord where she receives treatment with calomel, a medicine containing mercury that permanently damages her health. While convalescing, Alcott reworks her wartime letters to her family into a collection titled Hospital Sketches; it is serialized in the Boston Commonwealth, an abolitionist paper, and published in book form later in the year to great praise. Alcott receives almost $600 from writing this year. Over the next several years she will write many gothic stories, either anonymously or under a pseudonym.

1864 The Rose Family: A Fairy Tale and On Picket Duty, and Other Tales are published in January. In December Moods is published but is not well received. Horatio Alger publishes his first boys’ book, Frank’s Campaign.

1865 Bronson leaves his superintendent post. Anna and John give birth to a child, who will become Alcott’s heir. Alcott travels to Europe as an assistant to an invalid, Anna Weld; there she meets Ladislas Wisniewski, the inspiration for Laurie in Little Women. The Confederates surrender at Appomattox, marking the end of the Civil War. Lincoln is assassinated on April 14. Lewis Carroll publishes Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

1867 Alcott accepts editorship of the children’s magazine Merry’s Museum for $500 per year.

1868 She moves from Boston to Concord to care for her family while continuing her editorship; she will continue to move back and forth between the two cities until her death. Thomas Niles of the publisher Roberts Brothers commissions Alcott to write a book for girls; she completes the first part of Little Women in six weeks, and it is published to great acclaim. Bolstered by its success, she writes an equally popular second part at the rate of a chapter per day.

1869 The second part of Little Women is published under the title Good Wives. Alcott travels to Canada and Maine to recover her health, compromised by the rapid pace with which she wrote Little Women. She receives $8,500 in royalties and pays all her family’s debts.

1870 Her novel An Old-Fashioned Girl is published. Alcott travels to Europe with her sister May. Anna’s husband, John Pratt, dies. Charles Dickens dies.

1871 Still in Europe, Alcott writes Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys, a sequel to Little Women published this year. She and May return to Boston later in the year. Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There is published.

1872 Publication begins in the Christian Union of Alcott’s autobiographical novel Work. Alcott will publish copiously until her death, producing, among other volumes, many short-story collections.

1873 Alcott attends the debates on suffrage in Boston with her father.

1875 She attends Vassar’s tenth anniversary and the Women’s Congress in Syracuse, New York. Her novel Eight Cousins is published in book form. She travels to New York City for Christmas, visiting the Tombs, the Newsboys’ Home, and the Randall’s Island orphanage, where she draws experience for her novel Rose in Bloom. May returns to Europe.

1876 Alcott protests the centennial celebrations at Concord because women are prohibited from participating. Rose in Bloom is published. Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer appears.

1877 Alcott’s A Modern Mephistopheles is published anonymously as part of the Roberts Brothers No Name series. Alcott and her sister Anna purchase the Thoreau house in Concord, where they move with their father and ailing mother; later this year Abba Alcott dies.

1878 May marries Ernest Nieriker in London, but the Alcotts can not attend the wedding. Alcott’s Under the Lilacs is published in book form.

1879 Alcott becomes the first woman to register to vote in Concord. Her sister May dies of complications from childbirth.

1880 Alcott undertakes the care of her namesake, May’s infant daughter, Louisa May Nieriker, called Lulu. She ceases work on the novel Diana and Persis (published posthumously in 1978). Her novel Jack and Jill and the revised Moods are published. Bronson Alcott founds the Concord School of Philosophy. Too sick to write extensively, Alcott authorizes publication of many collections of previously published stories over the next several years.

1882 Ralph Waldo Emerson dies. Bronson suffers a stroke and gives up teaching. Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are born.

1884 Alcott’s health begins to decline severely, a result of the mercury treatment she had received for her typhoid in 1863; she seeks medical treatment throughout the Northeast. Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published.

1885 D. H. Lawrence, Sinclair Lewis, and Ezra Pound are born.

1886 Alcott publishes the sequel to Little Men, the feminist novel Jo’s Boys, and How They Turned Out, which took her great effort to write. Henry James’s The Bostonians is published.

1888 Alcott visits her father, who is near death. Bronson Alcott dies on March 4. Louisa May Alcott dies on March 6 and is buried with her parents.

1893 A collection of Alcott’s plays, Comic Tragedies Written by “Jo” and “Meg” and Acted by the “Little Women,” is published. Anna Alcott Pratt dies.

On March 22, 1927, the New York Times printed the results of a poll of high-school students who had been asked, “What book has interested you most?” The respondents overwhelmingly chose Little Women as their favorite, as the book that had most influenced them, surpassing even the Bible, which stalled at the number two position. Pause a moment to absorb this: Fifty-eight years after its publication in full, Louisa May Alcott’s domestic novel Little Women bore more influence on the lives and thought processes of American high-school students than did the Bible. Little Women, as John Lennon would claim of the Beatles forty years later, was more popular than Jesus. Although one may want to interpret this poll primarily as an indication of the increasingly secular interests of twentieth-century American youth, one must allow that, with all the other choices of reading matter available, beating out the Bible is clearly a tremendous feat. As related proof of Little Women’s influence, John Bunyan’s unusual 1684 religious allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress— which is the March family’s favorite book and guide to life in Little Women, and which provides an organizing framework for Alcott’s novel—came in at number three in the poll. I do believe Bunyan must thank Louisa May Alcott for his book’s second wind.