Louisa May Alcott was born November 29, 1832 and died at the age of fifty-five on March 6, 1888. An American novelist, she is best known for the novel Little Women, published in 1868. This novel is loosely based on her childhood years with her three sisters in Concord, Massachusetts. Part two, also known as Good Wives, (1869) followed the March sisters into adulthood and their respective marriages. Little Men (1871) detailed Jo’s life at the Plumfield School that she founded with her husband Professor Bhaer at the conclusion of Part Two of Little Women. Jo’s Boys (1886) completed the “March Family Saga.”
Although the Jo character in Little Women was based on Louisa May Alcott, she, unlike Jo, never married. In 1879 her younger sister, May, died. Alcott took in May’s daughter, Louisa May Nieriker (“Lulu”), who was two years old. The baby was named after her aunt, and was given the same nickname. In her later life, Alcott became an advocate of women’s suffrage and was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts in a school board election. Despite worsening health, Alcott wrote through the rest of her life, finally succumbing to the after-effects of mercury poisoning contracted during her American Civil War service: she had received calomel treatments for the effects of typhoid. She died in Boston on March 6, 1888 at age 55, two days after visiting her father on his deathbed. Her last words were “Is it not meningitis?”
