There are also many unusual items in the collection.
The general catalog contains 163 entries listing her novels, stories, and poetry in numerous editions, including many rare and historic volumes, from a first edition of her first published book, Flower Fables, to the last novel she published in her lifetime, Jo’s Boys, and How They Turned Out. 15 “They all drew to the fire, mother in the big chair, with Beth at her feet.”)The New York Public Library’s holdings of material by and about Louisa May Alcott are extensive. Alcott delved into all aspects of female emancipation in her letters to Woman’s Journal, and it was a source of great pride to her that, towards the end of the decade, when Concord allowed women to vote in local elections, she was the first to register. Critic Elizabeth Janeway, in a New York Times book review, singled out Jo as the only young woman in nineteenth-century fiction “who maintains her individual independence, who gives up no part of her autonomy as payment for being born a woman-and who gets away with it.” 1 In the later juvenile novel Rose in Bloom, the theme of women’s rights is interwoven throughout the lives of its characters. Jo March of Little Women is the ultimate portrait of an independent young woman. Many of the thrillers feature subversive sexual power struggles in which female slaves overcome their male masters. Much of her writing is of a strong and, for its time, surprisingly feminist nature. Edwin Elwell., Digital ID 495414, New York Public LibraryAlcott was always a strong advocate for social reforms, including abolition, prison reform, and temperance, but her primary efforts were directed towards the cause of women’s suffrage. Stern and published in the anthology, Behind a Mask, revealing an author whose life and work were richer and more complex than had been suspected. There was a resurgence of interest in Alcott in the mid-1970s when her often anonymous or pseudonymous thrillers were rediscovered through the bibliographic detective work of Madeleine B. Her best-known work, Little Women, has never been out of print, and has been adapted numerous times for the stage, film, and television. She even took time to edit a juvenile periodical, Merry’s Museum, which was crammed with many of her own anecdotes and stories. Her tremendous productivity, conscious experimentation with form and genre, and exploitation of various literary techniques assured Alcott’s place as one of the most popular authors of the nineteenth century.
In all she would produce more than two hundred stories, sketches, poems, and serials that were published in over forty periodicals. Her first published book, Flower Fables, was written for Emerson’s daughter when the author was only sixteen. In an era when women had few options for earning money, Alcott determined to overcome her family’s poverty through her prolific writing. Burd (P.164 “Jo assumed an indifferent air as she rumpled up the brown brush.”) The fiery-spirited Jo was, of course, modeled on Louisa herself. Her three sisters, Anna, Lizzie, and May, served as the source for their March family counterparts Meg, Beth, and Amy.
This setting provided much of the autobiographical background for Little Women. As the daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, Transcendental philosopher and educational reformer, and Abigail May Alcott, one of the first paid social workers in Massachusetts, her days were spent in a progressive intellectual environment which included such family friends as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Alcott, author of 'Little Women'., Digital ID 495422, New York Public LibraryAlcott’s early life in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts was colored by her family’s high-minded idealism but also by an often-acute poverty. She wrote realistic accounts of her service as a Civil War nurse, fairy stories and fables specifically for children, letters in the Woman’s Journal on all aspects of women’s rights, and perceptive adult novels such as her first, Moods, a probing analysis of the extremes of love. In addition to the novels of sentiment and domesticity for which she is best known, she also possessed a darker, more subterranean strain which produced lurid gothic tales combining elements of madness, violence, and perversity. Louisa May Alcott led a remarkable, multi-faceted literary life.
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