Alcott, Louisa May (1832-1888)

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Louisa May Alcott, the daughter of Transcendentalist reformer A. Bronson Alcott, was born in Germantown, Philadelphia, on 29 November 1832 and died in Boston on 6 March 1888. Her mother was the social activist Abigail Alcott (neé May). Louisa May Alcott is most famous for her novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels. The setting of the novel, Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts, was her home for many years, with such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne among the Alcotts' neighbors. Margaret Fuller was also a family friend. Alcott was educated at home by her father and Thoreau also served as her teacher. Like her parents, Alcott was a social reformer, Abolitionist, and feminist, advocating for Temperance and women's suffrage. Although in her writing she does not explicitly advocate for a veg*n diet, she returns consistently to the ethics of animal welfare, criticism of the suffering to which animals are subjected, and the corrupting influence of consuming animal flesh.

In the sketch “Transcendental Wild Oats” (1873), she gently satirized the family's relatively brief experience at Fruitlands, a Utopian community founded on ethical vegan values and organized according to anarcho-communist principles. Louisa May was eleven years old when she lived at Fruitlands, and her fictional account describes the everyday routines of a life lived in refusal of animal exploitation, including a fully vegan diet, and the renunciation of any animal products and animal labor. Much of her children's fiction is based on her own childhood experiences and originated as stories and tales for her younger sisters, the children of the Concord neighborhood such as Ellen Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson's daughter, and her niece. In addition to her stories and novels for children, Alcott also published a sizable volume of Gothic and sentimental fiction for adults, often anonymously or under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. She suffered years of ill health after contracting typhoid pneumonia during her service as a Civil War nurse and, at the age of 55, she died of a stroke just two days after the death of her father.

 

 

Last updated on February 10th, 2024

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