Little woman

She wrote her masterpiece, "Little Women", in a two-month writing marathon in 1868, with little food or sleep. She originally hated the idea of writing a book for "young girls", but did it to help her father get his own deal with the publisher. It made her the most popular writer in America. John Matteson, in the magazine Humanities, explores the life and career of Louisa May Alcott, touching on the unusual bond she developed with her father.

After books like Little Women, An Old-Fashioned Girl, and Little Men had banished economic distress from her life forever, Louisa May Alcott could only look back with bemusement on the peculiar path she had followed, to becoming for a time the most popular author in America. “Life,” she told her journal in 1874, “always was a puzzle to me, and gets more mysterious as I go on. I shall find it out by and by and see that it’s all right, if I can only keep brave and patient to the end.” When that end came fourteen years later, it came no less strangely than anything that had gone before. Bronson, who had long since set aside all his early disapproval of Louisa and had at last embraced her as “Duty’s Faithful Child,” suffered a massive stroke in 1882. He was fading rapidly at the start of March 1888, when Louisa came to see him for the last time. Observing a smile on his face, Louisa asked about its cause. “I am going up,” her father replied. He then added a macabre invitation: “Come with me.” Louisa answered, “I wish I could.” On March 4, Bronson Alcott died. The same day, without having learned of her father’s passing, Louisa lay down for a nap and only briefly regained consciousness. Her doctor diagnosed an apoplexy. Two days later, on the day of her father’s funeral, she did, indeed, “come up.”