Louisa May Alcott: A Life from Beginning to End

Louisa May Alcott was everything a woman in the nineteenth century shouldn’t be—uninterested in marriage, financially independent, and a tomboy. Even as a young child, Louisa May was exposed to the leading radical minds of her time, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both of whom became her lifelong friends. Louisa May Alcott had to help support her family from an early age and was both proud of her ability to do so and frustrated by her family’s perpetual poverty.


Her most famous novel, Little Women, was a semi-biographical version of her life with her three sisters and how they grew up. While her father, the educator Amos Bronson Alcott, could make her life exasperating, her beloved mother, Abigail, always supported her daughters’ right to chart their own course in life, whether society approved or not.


An early feminist, Louisa May Alcott fought for women’s rights throughout her life and became the first woman in Concord, Massachusetts to register to vote.