The Complete Works of Louisa May Alcott: Novels, Short Stories, Plays & Poems (Illustrated Edition) E-Book
Louisa May Alcott
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'The Complete Works of Louisa May Alcott: Novels, Short Stories, Plays & Poems (Illustrated Edition),' readers are treated to an expansive collection that encapsulates the diverse literary contributions of one of America's most cherished authors. This volume showcases Alcott's signature blend of realism and Romanticism, featuring well-loved classics such as 'Little Women' alongside lesser-known stories that reflect her engagement with themes of gender, social reform, and the complexities of family dynamics. The illustrated edition enhances the reading experience, inviting readers to visually engage with Alcott's narratives as they traverse her richly crafted worlds. Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), a trailblazer in feminist literature, wrote with an intimate understanding of the struggles faced by women in the 19th century. Growing up in a progressive household influenced by her father's Transcendentalist beliefs, Alcott embraced themes of independence and equality in her writings. Her experiences as a working woman, combined with her personal battles and social activism, strongly informed her literary voice, shaping her into a powerful advocate for women's rights and education. This complete collection is a must-read for anyone interested in American literature, feminism, or the intersection of social issues and storytelling. Alcott's timeless narratives continue to resonate with contemporary audiences, making this edition a valuable addition to any literary library. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Complete Works of Louisa May Alcott: Novels, Short Stories, Plays & Poems (Illustrated Edition)
Table of Contents
Introduction
This comprehensive volume presents the full compass of Louisa May Alcott’s artistry, uniting her complete novels with an ample range of short fiction, dramatic works, and poetry, and framing them with a substantial biographical account drawn from letters and journals. The collection’s purpose is to offer readers a single, coherent access point to Alcott’s major achievements and lesser-known ventures alike, revealing the breadth of a writer who addressed children and adults with equal energy. Gathered here are the domestic classics that shaped American reading habits alongside experiments in sensation, mystery, and moral parable, all arranged to illuminate the evolution and versatility of her craft.
The contents encompass multiple literary modes. Readers will find novels for young and adult audiences; story cycles and anthologies that range from domestic tales to seasonal narratives; individual short stories and novelettes published in periodicals; dramatic pieces for the stage; and a selection of poems. A biographical volume, composed from personal letters and journal entries, supplements the literary work with first-hand testimony. Several texts, such as Hospital Sketches, blend reportage and narrative, while collections like Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag and Spinning-Wheel Stories assemble shorter forms into thematic sets. Together, these varied genres display Alcott’s command of plot, voice, and moral reflection.
Across genres, Alcott’s hallmark concerns remain clear: the dignity of work, the claims of conscience, the formation of character, and the sustaining force of family and friendship. Her prose balances brisk pacing with candid moral commentary, and often pairs humor with earnest purpose. Whether she portrays parlors, workshops, schoolrooms, or shadowed corridors, she writes with an eye for the practical tests by which ideals are proved. Her characters face choices about education, vocation, charity, and independence; her narratives prize energy, ingenuity, and community. The staying power of these works rests in their invitation to ethical seriousness without loss of warmth, play, or narrative surprise.
The sequence beginning with Little Women situates a New England family at the center of American domestic realism. It follows sisters as they discover talents, measure ambition, and negotiate responsibilities within home and society. Good Wives extends these questions into adulthood, while Little Men and Jo’s Boys broaden the world to a schoolhouse and its growing circle. The cycle’s enduring appeal lies in its intimate scale and capacious moral horizon: daily economies and private creativity acquire historical weight. Comedy, mischief, and literary aspiration coexist with sober attention to duty and self-discipline, creating a portrait of growth that continues to guide readers across generations.
Kindred domestic novels explore youth, guardianship, health, and social polish with distinctive textures. An Old-Fashioned Girl contrasts metropolitan charm with sturdier rural virtues. Eight Cousins and its sequel, Rose in Bloom, trace education within an extended family, studying wealth, responsibility, and wholesome training. Under the Lilacs finds friendship and resourcefulness in modest circumstances, while Jack and Jill examines recovery, play, and perseverance after disruption. Little Men also belongs here, celebrating experimental pedagogy and community life. Each volume prizes cheerful industry and thoughtful reform in small matters, suggesting that moral and physical well-being depend on habits of generosity, self-restraint, and active kindness.
Alcott also tested the edges of popular taste through psychological romance, mystery, and sensation. Moods probes temperament, choice, and social expectation. Behind a Mask, The Abbot’s Ghost, and A Modern Mephistopheles dramatize performance, temptation, and the instability of identity, often within constrained domestic or aristocratic settings. Pauline’s Passion and Punishment and The Mysterious Key and What It Opened draw suspense from secrets, misread motives, and the uses of power. These works retain the author’s moral focus yet adopt heightened plots, swift reversals, and theatrical scenes. They disclose a writer alert to contemporary magazines’ appetite for bold designs and unsettling questions.
Her short story collections display impressive range. Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag gathers brief tales told in a genial, confiding voice; Spinning-Wheel Stories revives the shared pleasures of hearthside narration; A Garland for Girls and Silver Pitchers shape exemplary narratives around charity, independence, and civic feeling; and A Merry Christmas & Other Christmas Stories contributes enduring holiday reading. Lulu’s Library and Flower Fables address younger audiences with imaginative verve. On Picket Duty includes wartime sketches; Jimmy’s Cruise in the Pinafore, and An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, offer nautical and seasonal color. Across these volumes, Alcott refines concise storytelling, clear moral lines, and lively portraits of everyday heroism.
The collection’s independent tales and novelettes further expand her palette. Hospital Sketches records experiences from a military hospital with candor and compassion. Perilous Play and A Whisper in the Dark experiment with risk, secrecy, and perception; Lost in a Pyramid explores curiosity and consequence in an archaeological setting. A Modern Cinderella adapts a familiar pattern to contemporary domestic realities. Stories such as A Country Christmas, Aunt Kipp, Debby’s Debut, My Red Cap, Nelly’s Hospital, Psyche’s Art, The Brothers, and Marjorie’s Three Gifts trace social comedy, artistic vocation, charity, and coming-of-age across varied milieus, reflecting Alcott’s close engagement with magazine readerships and topical concerns.
Alcott’s poetry, though more occasional, complements her prose with distilled feeling and commemorative force. Pieces such as A. B. A., A Little Grey Curl, To Papa, and In Memoriam capture familial affection, remembrance, and the turning points of private life. The verse favors direct sentiment and clarity, often shaped by the same ethical sensibility that animates the fiction. While brief, these poems chart a continuum with her stories: labor and love, loss and consolation, appear in measured stanzas rather than scenes, underscoring her interest in how language can console, instruct, and delight without ornament beyond what truth and tenderness require.
Her dramatic writings reveal an instinct for concentrated conflict and stageable effect. Bianca, Captive of Castile, Ion, Norna; or, The Witch’s Curse, The Greek Slave, and The Unloved Wife deploy heightened emotion, moral testing, disguise, and romantic peril within compact acts and decisive turns. The plays’ brisk dialogue and emphatic situations show Alcott’s sensitivity to audience attention and the expressive possibilities of performance. Though different in tone from the domestic novels, they share core concerns: virtue under pressure, the claims of loyalty and honor, and the cost of deception. They testify to a writer fluent in multiple narrative registers.
Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals accompanies the creative work with primary materials that trace her habits, commitments, and changing prospects. Letters and diary entries illuminate the strenuous discipline behind her productivity, her devotion to family, and her responsiveness to readers and editors. The biographical narrative contextualizes experiences that surface in the fiction and sketches, including service in a military hospital and sustained attention to the livelihoods of women. Read alongside the novels and stories, this volume clarifies not only the timeline of composition but also the values that anchor Alcott’s engagement with labor, charity, and art.
Taken together, these writings show a career animated by practicality and hope, skilled at turning private trials and public currents into memorable forms. The domestic realism that made Alcott a household name sits productively beside her ventures into darker or more adventurous modes, demonstrating a coherent vision across shifting genres. This illustrated edition invites renewed attention to the textures of her world—kitchens, schoolrooms, parlors, workshops, and imagined chambers of intrigue—where character is proved by action and sympathy. It offers both a reliable compendium for study and a companionable treasury for readers who seek courage, wit, and humane insight.
Author Biography
Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) was an American author whose work helped shape nineteenth-century domestic realism and the literary representation of girls’ and women’s lives. Best known for Little Women, she wrote fiction for both children and adults, ranging from moral tales and realist novels to sensational stories published under a pseudonym. Her prose blends humor, ethical inquiry, and keen observation of everyday experience, reflecting the ferment of New England intellectual life in her era. Alcott also engaged in social reform and wartime service, experiences that informed her writing. Today she is regarded as a central figure in American letters, especially in the development of the coming‑of‑age novel for girls.
Alcott was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Massachusetts, spending formative years in Boston and Concord amid the Transcendentalist movement. Her education was largely at home, shaped by rigorous reading, self-discipline, and exposure to progressive ideas about learning and morality. Through the family’s intellectual circle, she encountered figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, whose libraries, conversations, and example encouraged her literary ambitions and interest in nature, ethics, and reform. Financial necessity meant she worked from a young age—teaching, sewing, and doing domestic service—experiences that sharpened her sympathy for working women and later supplied material for fiction concerned with labor, dignity, and self-reliance.
Alcott began publishing in the 1850s, contributing poems and stories to periodicals and issuing her first book, Flower Fables, a collection of fairy tales written originally for children in her circle. She experimented across genres, writing lively sketches, moral tales, and dramas. To supplement her income and stretch her craft, she also produced sensational thrillers under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, exploring disguise, power, and transgression with brisk plotting and theatrical flair. This dual track—domestic realism under her own name and dark romance under a pen name—revealed both commercial acumen and artistic range, while honing the narrative economy and character insight that would later distinguish her most celebrated work.
During the American Civil War, Alcott volunteered as a nurse in Washington, D.C. The experience proved formative: the physical and emotional toll of hospital life, combined with her acute eye for character, resulted in Hospital Sketches, published in the early 1860s. Drawn from letters and notes, the book offered brisk, unvarnished portraits of patients and caregivers, balancing compassion and wit. It was a critical and popular success, establishing her as a writer capable of realism infused with moral seriousness. Although she fell ill during her service and endured lasting health effects, the episode deepened her commitment to service and sharpened her interest in practical reform and women’s public roles.
In the late 1860s Alcott wrote Little Women, a novel about sisterhood, work, and artistic aspiration that quickly became a bestseller and cultural touchstone. Readers praised its recognizable domestic world, ethical complexity, and spirited humor. She followed it with a continuation often published as the second part of Little Women, and later extended the milieu with Little Men and Jo’s Boys. Across these books she developed a sustained portrait of education, creativity, and community, while negotiating the expectations of a broad audience. The sequence secured her financial independence and international readership, and it anchored her reputation as a writer who dignified ordinary lives without sentimental excess.
Alcott’s wider oeuvre underscores her versatility. An Old-Fashioned Girl, Work: A Story of Experience, Eight Cousins, and Rose in Bloom explore autonomy, vocation, class, and the ethics of care. She also published sharp satirical and sensational pieces, including Behind a Mask (as A. M. Barnard), and a reflective sketch of a short-lived utopian experiment, Transcendental Wild Oats. Publicly, she advocated abolition and women’s rights, aligning her fiction’s emphasis on self-mastery and education with contemporary reform movements. In Massachusetts she supported early school suffrage for women and encouraged civic participation. Her essays, lectures, and charitable efforts complemented a career that treated literature as both entertainment and instrument of moral inquiry.
In later years Alcott contended with chronic illness, likely exacerbated by treatments received after she became sick during wartime service, but she continued to write, edit, and manage the growing demands of her readership. She died in Boston in the late 1880s. Her legacy is unusually durable: Little Women remains widely read around the world, studied for its artistry and its nuanced vision of female ambition and community. Scholars also attend to her bifurcated career, tracing connections between the domestic realism that made her famous and the subversive energy of the sensation tales. Adaptations on stage and screen have refreshed her visibility, ensuring a continual reengagement with her themes and voice.
Historical Context
Louisa May Alcott’s career (1832–1888) unfolded across decades of American transformation: the market revolution, abolitionist ferment, civil war, Reconstruction, industrial capitalism, and the emergence of organized womanhood. Born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and reared in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts, she wrote across genres—novels, tales, poems, and plays—while supporting her family through the literary marketplace. Her works track shifts in reading habits as magazines multiplied, juvenile publishing specialized, and illustrated gift books flourished. From early fairy tales to late reform-minded fiction, and from domestic realism to gothic experiments, Alcott’s corpus registers the moral ideals, anxieties, and aspirations that shaped nineteenth-century New England and the broader United States.
The Concord circle placed Alcott within the intellectual currents of American Transcendentalism. Her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, a reform educator of Temple School fame in Boston (1834–1837), and neighbors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau modeled ethical self-culture, simple living, and social conscience. The family’s brief 1843 agrarian experiment at Fruitlands, in Harvard, Massachusetts, dramatized the period’s utopian zeal and economic precarity. This environment seeded Alcott’s recurring interest in character formation, moral self-reliance, and communal experiment, themes refracted across home-centered narratives and schoolhouse utopias alike. Concord’s woods, parlors, and lecture rooms furnished settings, mentors, and debates that informed her depictions of work, study, and domestic life.
Abolitionism and the Civil War left indelible marks on Alcott’s imagination and livelihood. The Alcott household in Concord sheltered freedom seekers and contributed to antislavery fairs. In late 1862 Alcott served as a nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., encountering army bureaucracy, battlefield trauma, and makeshift sanitary regimes under the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Typhoid fever and mercurial treatment scarred her health but launched her national reputation when her sketches appeared in 1863. War stories, soldier charities, and relief work recur in later juvenile pieces, where patriotism, sacrifice, and reconstructionist hope mingle with critiques of martial glory and sober attention to the costs of conflict.
Women’s rights and labor reform supplied a durable framework for Alcott’s plots and public actions. As family breadwinner after 1868, she negotiated contracts, retained copyrights, and demonstrated authorship as remunerative work. In 1879, after Massachusetts granted women school suffrage, Alcott organized Concord women to register and vote for the school committee, signaling her alliance with Lucy Stone’s American Woman Suffrage Association. Temperance activism, dress reform, and physical culture animate girls’ health regimens, vocational aspirations, and philanthropic clubs in her fiction. Across household, workshop, and schoolroom, Alcott’s protagonists test the boundaries of the “separate spheres” ideal, arguing through narrative for education, wages, and civic participation.
Alcott’s path mapped directly onto the professionalization of American publishing. She apprenticed in periodical culture—placing works in the Atlantic Monthly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and youth magazines—before consolidating with Boston house Roberts Brothers. Editor Thomas Niles encouraged a girls’ book in 1867, catalyzing her turn to multi-volume family chronicles. She also exploited anonymity and pseudonymity: early sensation tales appeared under “A. M. Barnard,” while a darker novel entered Roberts Brothers’ No Name Series in 1877. Her contract savvy, regular output, and responsiveness to editors’ serial needs reveal a writer attuned to deadlines, seasonal markets, and the nineteenth-century appetite for sequels and companion collections.
A burgeoning juvenile market shaped Alcott’s themes and formats. Sunday-school presses, the Youth’s Companion, and later St. Nicholas encouraged morally inflected, action-rich narratives for young readers. Alcott’s first book, Flower Fables (Boston, 1854), distilled tales once told to Ellen Emerson, announcing a lifelong interest in imaginative instruction. The later miscellanies—Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, Lulu’s Library, Spinning-Wheel Stories—adapted to short attention spans, holiday gift cycles, and the parlor reading aloud tradition. Their prefatory voices—editor-mothers, aunts, and mentors—mirror the period’s child-centered pedagogy, while their plots balance play with practical skill, presenting domestic economies and outdoor exercise as twin routes to character and competence.
Domestic realism, anchored in New England households, became Alcott’s signature mode and the foundation of her fame. Composed at Orchard House in Concord in 1868–1869, her family saga drew upon Alcott home theatricals, town charities, and sibling intimacies, recasting biography as exemplary fiction. The series model it established—followed by school, marriage, and next-generation volumes—mirrored readers’ life stages and the postbellum hunger for continuity amid social change. Illustrators such as Hammatt Billings in early editions and Frank T. Merrill in the 1880s helped codify characters’ appearances, while Boston and Concord place-names, lightly veiled, gave geographic specificity to a literature of sentiment, striving, and restraint.
Education was both subject and method in Alcott’s art. Bronson Alcott’s experiments in conversational pedagogy and moral suasion at the Temple School, and later discussions at the Concord School of Philosophy (1879–1888), furnished models for her fictional academies. Her schools reject rote discipline for project learning, gardening, and crafts, echoing Pestalozzian and Froebelian currents then gaining American adherents. Magazines of pedagogy and household management popularized such reforms, and Alcott’s classrooms dramatize the tensions between obedience and independence, punishment and persuasion. She repeatedly links education to citizenship, insisting that reading, manual skills, and arts training prepare boys and girls alike for remunerative, ethical adulthood.
Travel sharpened Alcott’s cosmopolitan lens. After the war she visited Europe in 1865–1866 and again in 1870–1871, the latter journey accompanying her artist sister May Alcott Nieriker to London, Paris, and Switzerland. Steamship routes and expanding rail networks made such trips feasible for middle-class Americans, even as the Franco-Prussian War unsettled itineraries. Letters and sketches from these tours fed travelogues and city episodes in fiction, where cafés, galleries, and pension houses test American manners against continental mores. May’s studies at the École des Beaux-Arts milieu and marriage in Europe tightened transatlantic ties that reappear in plots about art training, expatriate marriages, and return migration.
Victorian fascination with the hidden self and the theatricality of social roles underwrote Alcott’s forays into sensation and gothic modes. Mid-century readers consumed tales of governesses, mesmerists, forged identities, and fatal secrets, an appetite stoked by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and American magazine culture. Alcott’s masked heroines, chemically altered adventures, and haunted country houses register contemporary interests in spiritualism, phrenology, and the expanding discourse of psychology. These experiments share a moral vocabulary with her domestic fiction, yet stage it in heightened arenas of deception and desire, interrogating class performance, gender constraint, and the costs of ambition in a rapidly stratifying society.
Global curiosities and science news also seeped into Alcott’s shorter works. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, museum acquisitions, and newspaper accounts of desert excavations fed an American Egyptological vogue that made mummies, amulets, and tomb curses familiar motifs. Popular lectures in Boston and collections that later formed the Museum of Fine Arts (incorporated in 1870) broadened audiences for such subjects. Alcott’s adoption of archaeological intrigue and travel peril reflects a readership eager for exotic learning filtered through moral parable. The resulting hybrids fold suspense into didactic ends, domesticating distant wonders while warning against reckless appropriation, dilettantism, and the seductions of novelty.
Holiday publishing cycles shaped Alcott’s output and reception. Winter gift books, Christmas numbers of magazines, and Thanksgiving-themed miscellanies proliferated after the 1850s, reinforcing a culture of parlor festivity and charitable giving. New England harvest rituals and hearth scenes became seasonal staples, especially around the 1876 Centennial that revived colonial nostalgia. Alcott’s holiday tales braid feast-day merriment with gentle reform, urging readers toward temperance, neighborly aid, and simple pleasures over conspicuous display. The short forms—carols, tableaux, and linked sketches—suited family readings and amateur theatricals, continuing a Concord tradition in which homemade entertainments served both as moral instruction and as communal celebration.
Industrial Boston and its environs supplied the social canvas for Alcott’s studies of wage labor and charity. The city’s workshops, boardinghouses, and reform clubs mirrored changes wrought by mechanization, immigration, and widening class divisions after the 1860s. Women’s paid work—sewing, teaching, domestic service, shop and factory labor—moved from necessity to subject, aligning with debates about equal pay and vocational education. Philanthropic associations, from sewing circles to Soldiers’ Aid Societies, appear as training grounds for civic competence. Alcott’s narratives chart peril and possibility alike: the precarity of illness and unemployment, the moral economies of neighborhood care, and the dignity of skill acquired outside elite institutions.
The stage—professional and amateur—was central to Alcott’s craft and community. Concord parlors hosted private theatricals in the 1840s and 1850s, and the Concord Dramatic Union, founded in 1856, offered young writers and actors roles in classical and popular repertory. Alcott composed and acted in melodramas and historical pieces, adapting Greek and Spanish plots to domestic performance conventions. In this milieu, female authorship and stage presence rubbed against Victorian anxieties about respectability, even as they taught confidence, teamwork, and public speech. Her plays preserve the gestures, stock types, and moral tableaux of the era’s theater, a lexicon she later redeployed in narrative set pieces.
Health, medicine, and mourning thread through Alcott’s oeuvre and life. The death of her sister Elizabeth ("Beth") in 1858, her own chronic illness after calomel treatment for typhoid in 1863, and the era’s high child mortality shaped attitudes toward grief and care. Nursing manuals, sanitary reform tracts, and hospital reports circulated new professional vocabularies that her sketches translated for lay audiences. Poems of remembrance, dedications to parents—Abigail May Alcott in particular—and memorial episodes participate in broader nineteenth-century sentimental culture, where bereavement became an ethical crucible. Alcott’s scenes of convalescence and hospice fold pathos into practical advice, linking emotion to community duty.
Alcott’s financial acumen and philanthropy illustrate authorship as enterprise. The runaway success of her 1868–1869 domestic novel enabled debts to be cleared, houses purchased, and family education funded, including May Alcott’s European training. She negotiated royalties with Roberts Brothers and leveraged illustrations and sequels to stabilize income. Her earnings helped build the Hillside Chapel for the Concord School of Philosophy in 1879, supporting Bronson Alcott’s adult-education venture. She also fostered younger kin: after May’s death in 1879, Louisa cared for her niece, Lulu, inspiring late children’s volumes. These intertwined obligations and institutions kept her writing program tethered to concrete civic and familial projects.
By the time Ednah D. Cheney edited Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals in 1889, two days after Bronson and shortly before Louisa’s own death in Boston in March 1888, readers perceived an author who had chronicled and shaped an age. The corpus—domestic chronicles, school tales, travel sketches, reformist essays, gothic intrigues, juvenile libraries, poems, and plays—constitutes a social history of New England ideals under the pressure of war, industry, and women’s claims to public life. Its historical context is a web: Concord’s parlors and classrooms, Boston’s presses, transatlantic steamers, holiday markets, and reform platforms where narrative met citizenship.
Synopsis (Selection)
Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals
A documentary portrait of Alcott’s life assembled from her correspondence and diary entries, tracing her family circle, reform commitments, Civil War nursing, and literary career.
Little Women
The March sisters grow up during the Civil War, navigating work, art, and family duty as they seek purposeful, compassionate lives.
Good Wives
Continuing the March saga, the sisters face adulthood’s choices—marriage, vocation, and loss—testing their ideals in a wider world.
Little Men
At Jo’s school, Plumfield, a lively band of boys learn responsibility, kindness, and self-mastery through mischief, mentorship, and work.
Jo’s Boys
The grown students of Plumfield and the extended March family confront careers, temptations, and reformist causes as they define their futures.
Moods
A psychologically shaded domestic novel in which impetuous Sylvia Yule’s conflicting temperaments and hasty choices entangle love, loyalty, and self-knowledge.
The Mysterious Key and What It Opened
A sensation-tinged family mystery unfolds around a hidden key and long-buried secrets that reshape a household’s fate.
An Old-Fashioned Girl
Country-bred Polly Milton contrasts simple integrity with city fashion as she carves an independent path and gently reshapes a wealthy family’s values.
Work: A Story of Experience
Christie Devon’s search for livelihood carries her through varied jobs and trials, charting a woman’s self-reliance, friendship, and social conscience after the war.
Eight Cousins; or, The Aunt-Hill
Orphaned Rose Campbell is guided by an unconventional guardian and seven boisterous cousins toward health, education, and character.
Rose in Bloom: A Sequel to Eight Cousins
As a young heiress, Rose evaluates love, wealth, and service while her cousins come of age, emphasizing generosity and principled choice.
Under the Lilacs
A runaway circus boy is welcomed into a New England community, where friendship, steady work, and kindly guidance offer a new start.
Jack and Jill: A Village Story
After a sledding accident, two children and their circle spend a year in recovery and improvement through creative lessons and neighborly care.
Behind a Mask, or a Woman's Power
A governess with a shadowy past expertly manages a wealthy household, probing themes of performance, class, and female agency.
The Abbot's Ghost, or Maurice Treherne's Temptation
A holiday house party turns eerie as a family legend and concealed wrongs press on a troubled heir, blending romance with gothic suspense.
A Modern Mephistopheles
An ambitious writer falls under the sway of a worldly patron whose temptations lead to moral compromise in a dark, Faustian tale.
Pauline's Passion and Punishment
A woman scorned orchestrates a calculated revenge within society’s drawing rooms, a brisk sensation drama of pride and power.
Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag
A miscellany of brief, often true-to-life tales—travel pieces, character sketches, and moral anecdotes—told in Aunt Jo’s friendly voice.
Shawl-Straps
Three American women tour Europe with wit and mishap, offering lively travel episodes about independence, friendship, and cultural encounter.
Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore, Etc.
Juvenile adventures—headed by a nautical daydream—celebrate pluck, play, and practical virtue in short, entertaining pieces.
An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc.
New England holiday and hearthside stories where mishaps, thrift, and good humor kindle family solidarity.
Lulu's Library
Late-career fairy and instructive tales for children, blending imaginative whimsy with gentle moral lessons.
Flower Fables
Early fairy stories of elves and talking blossoms that allegorize kindness, humility, and the rewards of goodness.
On Picket Duty, and other tales
Civil War–era sketches and domestic episodes depict courage, sacrifice, and homefront resilience with brisk realism and sentiment.
Spinning-Wheel Stories
Framed by winter gatherings, elders spin historical and domestic yarns that pass on memory, craft, and character to the young.
A Garland for Girls
Stories of young women embracing useful work, philanthropy, and integrity over vanity or ease.
Silver Pitchers: and Independence, a Centennial Love Story
Temperance- and reform-themed tales paired with a centennial courtship, balancing civic spirit with personal resolve.
A Merry Christmas & Other Christmas Stories
Seasonal tales of generosity, reconciliation, and modest festivity that prize service over splendor.
War and Hospital Tales (Hospital Sketches; The Brothers; Nelly’s Hospital)
From a nurse’s vivid Civil War memoir to a charged encounter between estranged brothers and a child’s make-believe infirmary, these pieces examine suffering, duty, and compassion in times of crisis.
Gothic and Sensation Novelettes (Perilous Play; A Whisper in the Dark; Lost in a Pyramid)
Parlor experiments and exotic expeditions turn perilous, and a young woman faces coercion and confinement, blending psychological tension with adventure and early horror motifs.
Domestic and Holiday Stories (Marjorie's Three Gifts; A Modern Cinderella; A Country Christmas; Aunt Kipp; Debby’s Debut; My Red Cap; Psyche’s Art)
Lively sketches of modest heroism, charity, and self-respect—ranging from a modernized fairy-tale to first balls, stubborn relatives, artistic ambition, and festive country visits—underscore everyday virtue.
A. B. A.; A Little Grey Curl; To Papa; In Memoriam
Selected poems of occasion and remembrance that honor loved ones, mark loss, and reflect personal affection in a plain, tender register.
Bianca
A compact domestic tragedy in which jealousy and loyalty collide, testing a heroine’s courage and constancy.
Captive of Castile
A historical melodrama of honor, hidden identity, and daring escape set against Spanish intrigue.
Ion
A classical-style tragedy—after popular models—in which a virtuous hero confronts fate, duty, and sacrificial choice.
Norna; or, The Witch's Curse
A romantic-gothic drama where superstition and prophecy entangle lovers and a community until truth breaks the spell.
The Greek Slave
Inspired by themes of bondage and dignity, a heroine endures captivity with steadfast virtue and strives for freedom.
The Unloved Wife
A domestic drama of a neglected bride who asserts self-respect and seeks a more equitable, sincere partnership.
The Complete Works of Louisa May Alcott: Novels, Short Stories, Plays & Poems (Illustrated Edition)
Biography:
Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals
CHAPTER I.GENEALOGY AND PARENTAGE.
TO LOUISA MAY ALCOTT.
BY HER FATHER.
When I remember with what buoyant heart,Midst war's alarms and woes of civil strife, In youthful eagerness thou didst depart,At peril of thy safety, peace, and life, To nurse the wounded soldier, swathe the dead,–How piercèd soon by fever's poisoned dart, And brought unconscious home, with wildered head,Thou ever since 'mid langour and dull pain, To conquer fortune, cherish kindred dear,Hast with grave studies vexed a sprightly brain, In myriad households kindled love and cheer,Ne'er from thyself by Fame's loud trump beguiled, Sounding in this and the farther hemisphere,–I press thee to my heart as Duty's faithful child.
LOUISA ALCOTT was the second child of Amos Bronson and Abba May Alcott. This name was spelled Alcocke in English history. About 1616 a coat-of-arms was granted to Thomas Alcocke of Silbertoft, in the county of Leicester. The device represents three cocks, emblematic of watchfulness; and the motto is Semper Vigilans.
The first of the name appearing in English history is John Alcocke of Beverley, Yorkshire, of whom Fuller gives an account in his Worthies of England.
Thomas and George Alcocke were the first of the name among the settlers in New England. The name is frequently found in the records of Dorchester and Roxbury, and has passed through successive changes to its present form.
The name of Bronson came from Mr. Alcott's maternal grandfather, the sturdy Capt. Amos Bronson of Plymouth, Conn. "His ancestors on both sides had been substantial people of respectable position in England, and were connected with the founders and governors of the chief New England colonies. At the time of Mr. Alcott's birth they had become simple farmers, reaping a scanty living from their small farms in Connecticut."
Amos Bronson Alcott, the father of Louisa, was born Nov. 29, 1799, at the foot of Spindle Hill, in the region called New Connecticut. He has himself given in simple verse the story of his quaint rustic life in his boyhood, and Louisa has reproduced it in her story of "Eli's Education" (in the Spinning-Wheel Stories), which gives a very true account of his youthful life and adventures. He derived his refined, gentle nature from his mother, who had faith in her son, and who lived to see him the accomplished scholar he had vowed to become in his boyhood. Although brought up in these rustic surroundings, his manners were always those of a true gentleman. The name of the little mountain town afterward became Wolcott, and Louisa records in her journal a pilgrimage made thither in after years.
Louisa Alcott's mother was a daughter of Col. Joseph May of Boston. This family is so well known that it is hardly necessary to repeat its genealogy here. She was a sister of Samuel J. May, for many years pastor of the Unitarian church at Syracuse, who was so tenderly beloved by men of all religious persuasions in his home, and so widely known and respected for his courage and zeal in the Antislavery cause, as well as for his many philanthropic labors.
Mrs. Alcott's mother was Dorothy Sewall, a descendant of that family already distinguished in the annals of the Massachusetts colony, and which has lost nothing of its reputation for ability and virtue in its latest representatives.
Mrs. Alcott inherited in large measure the traits which distinguished her family. She was a woman of large stature, fine physique, and overflowing life. Her temper was as quick and warm as her affections, but she was full of broad unselfish generosity. Her untiring energies were constantly employed, not only for the benefit of her family, but for all around her. She had a fine mind, and if she did not have large opportunities for scholastic instruction, she always enjoyed the benefit of intellectual society and converse with noble minds. She loved expression in writing, and her letters are full of wit and humor, keen criticism, and noble moral sentiments. Marriage with an idealist, who had no means of support, brought her many trials and privations. She bore them heroically, never wavering in affection for her husband or in devotion to her children. If the quick, impatient temper sometimes relieved itself in hasty speech, the action was always large and unselfish.
It will be apparent from Louisa's life that she inherited the traits of both her parents, and that the uncommon powers of mind and heart that distinguished her were not accidental, but the accumulated result of the lives of generations of strong and noble men and women.
She was well born.
Mr. Alcott to Colonel May.
Germantown, Nov. 29, 1832.
Dear Sir,–It is with great pleasure that I announce to you the birth of a second daughter. She was born at half-past 12 this morning, on my birthday (33), and is a very fine healthful child, much more so than Anna was at birth,–has a fine foundation for health and energy of character. Abba is very comfortable, and will soon be restored to the discharge of those domestic and maternal duties in which she takes so much delight, and in the performance of which she furnishes so excellent a model for imitation. Those only who have seen her in those relations, much as there is in her general character to admire and esteem, can form a true estimate of her personal worth and uncommon devotion of heart. She was formed for domestic sentiment rather than the gaze and heartlessness of what is falsely called "society." Abba inclines to call the babe Louisa May,–a name to her full of every association connected with amiable benevolence and exalted worth. I hope its present possessor may rise to equal attainment, and deserve a place in the estimation of society.
With Abba's and Anna's and Louisa's regards, allow me to assure you of the sincerity with which I am
Yours,A. Bronson Alcott.
The children who lived to maturity were–
Anna Bronson Alcott,Louisa May Alcott,Elizabeth Sewall Alcott,Abba May Alcott.
CHAPTER II.CHILDHOOD.
TO THE FIRST ROBIN.
Welcome, welcome, little stranger, Fear no harm, and fear no danger; We are glad to see you here, For you sing "Sweet Spring is near."
Now the white snow melts away; Now the flowers blossom gay: Come dear bird and build your nest, For we love our robin best.
Louisa May Alcott.Concord.
MR. ALCOTT had removed to Germantown, Penn, to take charge of a school, and here Louisa was born, Nov. 29, 1832. She was the second daughter, and was welcomed with the same pride and affection as her elder sister had been. We have this pleasant little glimpse of her when she was hardly a month old, from the pen of one of her mother's friends. Even at that extremely early age love saw the signs of more than usual intelligence, and friends as well as fond parents looked forward to a promising career.
Extract from a Letter by Miss Donaldson.
Germantown, Penn., Dec. 16, 1832.
I have a dear little pet in Mrs. Alcott's little Louisa. It is the prettiest, best little thing in the world. You will wonder to hear me call anything so young pretty, but it is really so in an uncommon degree; it has a fair complexion, dark bright eyes, long dark hair, a high forehead, and altogether a countenance of more than usual intelligence.
The mother is such a delightful woman that it is a cordial to my heart whenever I go to see her. I went in to see her for a few moments the evening we received your letter, and I think I never saw her in better spirits; and truly, if goodness and integrity can insure felicity, she deserves to be happy.
The earliest anecdote remembered of Louisa is this: When the family went from Philadelphia to Boston by steamer, the two little girls were nicely dressed in clean nankeen frocks for the voyage; but they had not been long on board before the lively Louisa was missing, and after a long search she was brought up from the engine-room, where her eager curiosity had carried her, and where she was having a beautiful time, with "plenty of dirt."
The family removed to Boston in 1834, and Mr. Alcott opened his famous school in Masonic Temple. Louisa was too young to attend the school except as an occasional visitor; but she found plenty of interest and amusement for herself in playing on the Common, making friends with every child she met, and on one occasion falling into the Frog Pond. She has given a very lively picture of this period of her life in "Poppy's Pranks," that vivacious young person being a picture of herself, not at all exaggerated.
The family lived successively in Front Street, Cottage Place, and Beach Street during the six succeeding years in Boston. They occasionally passed some weeks at Scituate during the summer, which the children heartily enjoyed.
Mrs. Hawthorne gives a little anecdote which shows how the child's heart was blossoming in this family sunshine: "One morning in Front Street, at the breakfast table, Louisa suddenly broke silence, with a sunny smile saying, 'I love everybody in dis whole world.'"
Two children were born during this residence in Boston. Elizabeth was named for Mr. Alcott's assistant in his school,–Miss E. P. Peabody, since so widely known and beloved by all friends of education. A boy was born only to die. The little body was laid reverently away in the lot of Colonel May in the old burial-ground on the Common, and the children were taught to speak with tenderness of their "baby brother."
When Louisa was about seven years old she made a visit to friends in Providence. Miss C. writes of her: "She is a beautiful little girl to look upon, and I love her affectionate manners. I think she is more like her mother than either of the others." As is usually the case, Louisa's journal, which she began at this early age, speaks more fully of her struggles and difficulties than of the bright, sunny moods which made her attractive. A little letter carefully printed and sent home during this visit is preserved. In it she says she is not happy; and she did have one trying experience there, to which she refers in "My Boys." Seeing some poor children who she thought were hungry, she took food from the house without asking permission, and carried it to them, and was afterward very much astonished and grieved at being reprimanded instead of praised for the deed. Miss C. says: "She has had several spells of feeling sad; but a walk or a talk soon dispels all gloom. She was half moody when she wrote her letter; but now she is gay as a lark. She loves to play out of doors, and sometimes she is not inclined to stay in when it is unpleasant." In her sketches of "My Boys" she describes two of her companions here, not forgetting the kindness of the one and the mischievousness of the other.
Although the family were quite comfortable during the time of Mr. Alcott's teaching in Boston, yet the children wearied of their extremely simple diet of plain boiled rice without sugar, and graham meal without butter or molasses. An old friend who could not eat the bountiful rations provided for her at the United States Hotel, used to save her piece of pie or cake for the Alcott children. Louisa often took it home to the others in a bandbox which she brought for the purpose.
This friend was absent in Europe many years, and returned to find the name of Louisa Alcott famous. When she met the authoress on the street she was eagerly greeted. "Why, I did not think you would remember me!" said the old lady. "Do you think I shall ever forget that bandbox?" was the instant reply.
In 1840, Mr. Alcott's school having proved unsuccessful, the family removed to Concord, Mass., and took a cottage which is described in "Little Women" as "Meg's first home," although Anna never lived there after her marriage. It was a pleasant house, with a garden full of trees, and best of all a large barn, in which the children could have free range and act out all the plays with which their little heads were teeming. Of course it was a delightful change from the city for the children, and here they passed two very happy years, for they were too young to understand the cares which pressed upon the hearts of their parents. Life was full of interest. One cold morning they found in the garden a little half-starved bird; and having warmed and fed it, Louisa was inspired to write a pretty poem to "The Robin." The fond mother was so delighted that she said to her, "You will grow up a Shakspeare!" From the lessons of her father she had formed the habit of writing freely, but this is the first recorded instance of her attempting to express her feelings in verse.
From the influences of such parentage as I have described, the family life in which Louisa was brought up became wholly unique.
If the father had to give up his cherished projects of a school modelled after his ideas, he could at least conduct the education of his own children; and he did so with the most tender devotion. Even when they were infants he took a great deal of personal care of them, and loved to put the little ones to bed and use the "children's hour" to instil into their hearts lessons of love and wisdom. He was full of fun too, and would lie on the floor and frolic with them, making compasses of his long legs with which to draw letters and diagrams. No shade of fear mingled with the children's reverent recognition of his superior spiritual life. So their hearts lay open to him, and he was able to help them in their troubles.
He taught them much by writing; and we have many specimens of their lists of words to be spelled, written, and understood. The lessons at Scituate were often in the garden, and their father always drew their attention to Nature and her beautiful forms and meanings. Little symbolical pictures helped to illustrate his lessons, and he sometimes made drawings himself. Here is an example of lessons. A quaint little picture represents one child playing on a harp, another drawing an arrow. It is inscribed–
FOR LOUISA.
1840.
Two passions strong divide our life,– Meek, gentle love, or boisterous strife.
Below the child playing the harp is–
Love, Music,Concord.
Below the shooter is–
Anger, Arrow,Discord.
Another leaflet is–
FOR LOUISA
1840.
Louisa loves–What?(Softly.)Fun.Have some then,Fathersays. Christmas Eve, December, 1840.Concordia.
FOR ANNA. 1840. Beauty or Duty,– which loves Anna best? A Question from her Father. Christmas Eve, December, 1840. Concordia.
A letter beautifully printed by her father for Louisa (1839) speaks to her of conscience, and she adds to it this note: "L. began early, it seems, to wrestle with her conscience." The children were always required to keep their journals regularly, and although these were open to the inspection of father and mother, they were very frank, and really recorded their struggles and desires. The mother had the habit of writing little notes to the children when she wished to call their attention to any fault or peculiarity. Louisa preserved many of them, headed,–
[Extracts from letters from Mother, received during these early years. I preserve them to show the ever tender, watchful help she gave to the child who caused her the most anxiety, yet seemed to be the nearest to her heart till the end.–L. M. A.]
No. 1.–My Dear Little Girl,–Will you accept this doll from me on your seventh birthday? She will be a quiet playmate for my active Louisa for seven years more. Be a kind mamma, and love her for my sake.
Your Mother.Beach Street, Boston, 1839.
From her Mother.
Cottage in Concord.
Dear Daughter,–Your tenth birthday has arrived. May it be a happy one, and on each returning birthday may you feel new strength and resolution to be gentle with sisters, obedient to parents, loving to every one, and happy in yourself.
I give you the pencil-case I promised, for I have observed that you are fond of writing, and wish to encourage the habit.
Go on trying, dear, and each day it will be easier to be and do good. You must help yourself, for the cause of your little troubles is in yourself; and patience and courage age only will make you what mother prays to see you,–her good and happy girl.
Concord, 1843.
Dear Louy,–I enclose a picture for you which I always liked very much, for I imagined that you might be just such an industrious daughter and I such a feeble but loving mother, looking to your labor for my daily bread.
Keep it for my sake and your own, for you and I always liked to be grouped together.
Mother.
The lines I wrote under the picture in my journal:–
TO MOTHER.
I hope that soon, dear mother,You and I may be In the quiet room my fancyHas so often made for thee,–
The pleasant, sunny chamber,The cushioned easy-chair, The book laid for your reading,The vase of flowers fair;
The desk beside the windowWhere the sun shines warm and bright: And there in ease and quietThe promised book you write;
While I sit close beside you,Content at last to see That you can rest, dear mother,And I can cherish thee.
[The dream came true, and for the last ten years of her life Marmee sat in peace, with every wish granted, even to the "grouping together;" for she died in my arms.–L. M. A.]
A passage in Louisa's story of "Little Men" (p. 268) describes one of their childish plays. They "made believe" their minds were little round rooms in which the soul lived, and in which good or bad things were preserved. This play was never forgotten in after life, and the girls often looked into their little rooms for comfort or guidance in trial or temptation.
Louisa was very fond of animals, as is abundantly shown in her stories. She never had the happiness of owning many pets, except cats, and these were the delight of the household. The children played all manner of plays with them, tended them in sickness, buried them with funeral honors, and Louisa has embalmed their memory in the story of "The Seven Black Cats" in "Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag."
Dolls were an equal source of pleasure. The imaginative children hardly recognized them as manufactured articles, but endowed them with life and feeling. Louisa put her dolls through every experience of life; they were fed, educated, punished, rewarded, nursed, and even hung and buried, and then resurrected in her stories. The account of the "Sacrifice of the Dolls" to the exacting Kitty Mouse in "Little Men" delights all children by its mixture of pathetic earnestness and playfulness. It is taken from the experience of another family of children.
Miss Alcott twice says that she never went to any school but her father's; but there were some slight exceptions to this rule. She went a few months to a little district school in Still River Village. This was a genuine old-fashioned school, from which she took the hint of the frolics in "Under the Lilacs." Miss Ford also kept a little school in Mr. Emerson's barn, to which the children went; and Mary Russell had a school, which Louisa attended when eight or nine years old. These circumstances, however, had small influence in her education.
During this period of life in Concord, which was so happy to the children, the mother's heart was full of anxious care. She however entered into all their childish pleasures, and her watchful care over their moral growth is shown by her letters and by Louisa's journals.
The youngest child, Abba May, who was born in the cottage, became the pet of the family and the special care of the oldest sister, Anna.
Louisa's childish journal gives us many hints of this happy life. She revised these journals in later years, adding significant comments which are full of interest. She designed them to have place in her autobiography, which she hoped to write.
From three different sources–her journals, an article written for publication, and a manuscript prepared for a friend,–we give her own account of these childish years. She has not followed the order of events strictly, and it has not been possible, therefore, to avoid all repetition; but they give the spirit of her early life, and clearly show the kind of education she received from her father and from the circumstances around her.
Sketch of Childhood, by herself.
One of my earliest recollections is of playing with books in my father's study,–building houses and bridges of the big dictionaries and diaries, looking at pictures, pretending to read, and scribbling on blank pages whenever pen or pencil could be found. Many of these first attempts at authorship still remain in Bacon's Essays, Plutarch's Lives, and other works of a serious nature, my infant taste being for solid literature, apparently.
On one occasion we built a high tower round baby Lizzie as she sat playing with her toys on the floor, and being attracted by something out-of-doors, forgot our little prisoner. A search was made, and patient baby at last discovered curled up and fast asleep in her dungeon cell, out of which she emerged so rosy and smiling after her nap that we were forgiven for our carelessness.
Another memory is of my fourth birthday, which was celebrated at my father's school-room in Masonic Temple. All the children were there. I wore a crown of flowers, and stood upon a table to dispense cakes to each child as the procession marched past. By some oversight the cakes fell short, and I saw that if I gave away the last one I should have none. As I was queen of the revel, I felt that I ought to have it, and held on to it tightly till my mother said,–
"It is always better to give away than to keep the nice things; so I know my Louy will not let the little friend go without."
The little friend received the dear plummy cake, and I a kiss and my first lesson in the sweetness of self-denial,–a lesson which my dear mother beautifully illustrated all her long and noble life.
Running away was one of the delights of my early days; and I still enjoy sudden flights out of the nest to look about this very interesting world, and then go back to report.
On one of these occasions I passed a varied day with some Irish children, who hospitably shared their cold potatoes, salt-fish, and crusts with me as we revelled in the ash-heaps which then adorned the waste lands where the Albany Depot now stands. A trip to the Common cheered the afternoon, but as dusk set in and my friends deserted me, I felt that home was a nice place after all, and tried to find it. I dimly remember watching a lamp-lighter as I sat to rest on some doorsteps in Bedford Street, where a big dog welcomed me so kindly that I fell asleep with my head pillowed on his curly back, and was found there by the town-crier, whom my distracted parents had sent in search of me. His bell and proclamation of the loss of "a little girl, six years old, in a pink frock, white hat, and new green shoes," woke me up, and a small voice answered out of the darkness,–
"Why, dat's me!"
Being with difficulty torn from my four-footed friend, I was carried to the crier's house, and there feasted sumptuously on bread-and-molasses in a tin plate with the alphabet round it. But my fun ended next day when I was tied to the arm of the sofa to repent at leisure.
I became an Abolitionist at a very early age, but have never been able to decide whether I was made so by seeing the portrait of George Thompson hidden under a bed in our house during the Garrison riot, and going to comfort "the poor man who had been good to the slaves," or because I was saved from drowning in the Frog Pond some years later by a colored boy. However that may be, the conversion was genuine; and my greatest pride is in the fact that I lived to know the brave men and women who did so much for the cause, and that I had a very small share in the war which put an end to a great wrong.
Another recollection of her childhood was of a "contraband" hidden in the oven, which must have made her sense of the horrors of slavery very keen.
I never went to school except to my father or such governesses as from time to time came into the family. Schools then were not what they are now; so we had lessons each morning in the study. And very happy hours they were to us, for my father taught in the wise way which unfolds what lies in the child's nature, as a flower blooms, rather than crammed it, like a Strasburg goose, with more than it could digest. I never liked arithmetic nor grammar, and dodged those branches on all occasions; but reading, writing, composition, history, and geography I enjoyed, as well as the stories read to us with a skill peculiarly his own.
"Pilgrim's Progress," Krummacher's "Parables," Miss Edgeworth, and the best of the dear old fairy tales made the reading hour the pleasantest of our day. On Sundays we had a simple service of Bible stories, hymns, and conversation about the state of our little consciences and the conduct of our childish lives which never will be forgotten.
Walks each morning round the Common while in the city, and long tramps over hill and dale when our home was in the country, were a part of our education, as well as every sort of housework,–for which I have always been very grateful, since such knowledge makes one independent in these days of domestic tribulation with the "help" who are too often only hindrances.
Needle-work began early, and at ten my skilful sister made a linen shirt beautifully; while at twelve I set up as a doll's dressmaker, with my sign out and wonderful models in my window. All the children employed me, and my turbans were the rage at one time, to the great dismay of the neighbors' hens, who were hotly hunted down, that I might tweak out their downiest feathers to adorn the dolls' headgear.
Active exercise was my delight, from the time when a child of six I drove my hoop round the Common without stopping, to the days when I did my twenty miles in five hours and went to a party in the evening.
I always thought I must have been a deer or a horse in some former state, because it was such a joy to run. No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race, and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences, and be a tomboy.
My wise mother, anxious to give me a strong body to support a lively brain, turned me loose in the country and let me run wild, learning of Nature what no books can teach, and being led,–as those who truly love her seldom fail to be,–
"Through Nature up to Nature's God."
I remember running over the hills just at dawn one summer morning, and pausing to rest in the silent woods, saw, through an arch of trees, the sun rise over river, hill, and wide green meadows as I never saw it before.
Something born of the lovely hour, a happy mood, and the unfolding aspirations of a child's soul seemed to bring me very near to God; and in the hush of that morning hour I always felt that I "got religion," as the phrase goes. A new and vital sense of His presence, tender and sustaining as a father's arms, came to me then, never to change through forty years of life's vicissitudes, but to grow stronger for the sharp discipline of poverty and pain, sorrow and success.
Those Concord days were the happiest of my life, for we had charming playmates in the little Emersons, Channings, Hawthornes, and Goodwins, with the illustrious parents and their friends to enjoy our pranks and share our excursions.
Plays in the barn were a favorite amusement, and we dramatized the fairy tales in great style. Our giant came tumbling off a loft when Jack cut down the squash-vine running up a ladder to represent the immortal bean. Cinderella rolled away in a vast pumpkin, and a long black pudding was lowered by invisible hands to fasten itself on the nose of the woman who wasted her three wishes.
Pilgrims journeyed over the hill with scrip and staff and cockle-shells in their hats; fairies held their pretty revels among the whispering birches, and strawberry parties in the rustic arbor were honored by poets and philosophers, who fed us on their wit and wisdom while the little maids served more mortal food.
