Invincible Louisa by Cornelia Meigs, 1933.

This is the story of Louisa May Alcott, the famous 19th century author who wrote Little Women and other books for children.

The book begins with Louisa May Alcott’s birth on November 29, 1832 in Pennsylvania and explains about her parents’ backgrounds. When Louisa’s mother, Abba (short for Abigail), had first become engaged to her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, people advised her not to go through with the marriage because Bronson didn’t seem like a very practical man and nobody really expected that he would amount to much. However, Abba genuinely loved him and understood him. They shared similar ideals, including Abolitionism and the practice of service and charity to others, although they didn’t agree about everything. Bronson was a scholarly man who worked as a teacher, although he struggled to get an education himself when he was young because he was born to a family of poor farmers. As a young man, he had worked as a traveling salesman and had seen much of life across the country. He was good at talking to people and was very good at speaking to children, which led him to eventually settle down to teaching.

The Alcott family was happy where Bronson Alcott was teaching in Germantown, but the death of his school’s patron was a heavy blow. Without his patron’s backing, the school didn’t last, so the Alcott family left Germantown and moved to Boston. Little Louisa enjoyed the busy city of Boston, but the book also describes a harrowing situation in which she almost drowned after falling into Frog Pond. This incident was a traumatic memory for Louisa, but it wasn’t just the trauma that left a mark on her. The person who rescued her from drowning was a black boy. (The book uses the word “Negro.”) Louisa never knew the boy’s name, but her gratitude toward her rescuer influenced her feelings toward black people for the better at a time when the country was heading toward Civil War over the issue of slavery.

The Alcott family had ties to some important people. Her father was friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Elizabeth Peabody, who was instrumental in the development of kindergarten education in the United States, worked at his school in Boston. Her mother’s elderly aunt, known as the formidable Aunt Hancock, had been the wife of the famous John Hancock. However, in spite of connections, Bronson met with opposition to his teaching when parents of the students learned that he was an Abolitionist. A friend of his, William Lloyd Garrison, was almost lynched by an angry mob for airing his views about ending slavery. When Bronson admitted a black boy as a student to his school, it was the last straw, and many parents withdrew their children. Louisa later remembered discovering that her parents helped to hide runaway slaves when she was young, but it isn’t clear at which of their homes they were doing this.

After his school in Boston closed, he moved the family to Concord. He didn’t have the heart to open another school, so he supported this family through farming. They were poor and lived very simply, but they enjoyed living in the countryside. However, her father did maintain some scholarly contacts and was involved with the Transcendentalist movement. In 1843, the family moved yet again to join a community of Transcendentalists, experimenting with a more isolated lifestyle. (A footnote in the book, added decades after the original writing, compares it to the communes of the 1960s and 1970s.) However, the community was not a success. When one of the leaders of the community suggested that Bronson give up his wife and daughters to live in the style of Shakers, Bronson discussed the situation with his family, and they all came to the conclusion that this community was asking too much. Giving up on his experimental lifestyle was difficult for Bronson, but Abba’s brother understood the situation and helped the family move to a new home. Eventually, the family resettled in Concord.

Compared to her sisters, Louisa was a boisterous and temperamental child. She loved running wild in the countryside, and her curiosity and impulsiveness sometimes got her into scrapes. She wasn’t as good at housework as her older sister, Anna. However, she was always imaginative. When the family returned to Concord, Louisa was able to have a room to herself for the first time, and she used her new privacy for writing stories. She created plays for her and her sisters to perform.

As she grew up, Louisa became increasingly aware of her family’s poverty and her father’s lack of understanding for the ways of the world. Her mother was frequently worn out from trying to make do and take care of the four girls in the family. She began making plans early that she would find a way to provide for her parents and her sisters when she got older.

At Concord, her family continued their friendships with Thoreau and Emerson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson allowed Louisa to read books from his library, She developed a kind of hero-worship of him as a teenager. The Alcott girls also attended a regular school for the first time. Louisa often felt awkward because she was taller than the other girls at school, but she was also very athletic. She frequently wished that she had been born a boy instead of a girl.

At age 16, Louisa began her professional life, giving lessons to Emerson’s children. She was a good teacher, although as an active person, she found quiet study and teaching for extended periods difficult. Her mind often wandered to ideas for romantic stories, and she wrote a collection of little stories for Ellen Emerson. However, the family was badly in need of money, and they had to leave Concord and return to Boston, where they would live with her mother’s brother.

In Boston, Louisa continued teaching and found work as a governess. She also picked up other odd jobs to help support her family. One of them, a job as a live-in companion for an invalid, turned out especially badly because the job had been misrepresented and turned out to be hard labor. She was paid very little for it, too. It was during this time that her father discovered the little stories that Louisa had written for Ellen Emerson. He took one of them to a publisher he knew, and the story was published. Encouraged, Louisa and her father had the rest of the stories published in a collection called Flower Fables, Louisa’s very first book.

This did not bring her instant success as a writer, though. The family’s lives were filled with ups and downs, and they moved house multiple times. Louisa left her family to pursue an independent living for a time, although she made very little money, taking teaching jobs, sewing, and anything she could find. It was during this time that Louisa’s two younger sisters became ill with scarlet fever while the family was engaging in their usual charity work. Elizabeth had it particularly badly, and her health was never good after that. Louisa rejoined the family when they once again returned to Concord, where Elizabeth passed away. Elizabeth’s death was reflected in Louisa’s semi-autobiographical Little Women with the death of Jo’s sister Beth.

The Alcotts had been such a tight-knit family that separations of the sisters were bitterly painful, but every family experiences change over time. After Elizabeth’s death, Anna became engaged to marry John Pratt. It upset Louisa because it felt like she was losing another sister. Louisa once again set out to try to make her own living, but for a long time, it seemed like nothing would go right for her. It was difficult for her to find work, and opportunities seemed to disappear when she was about to take them. At one point, she was in such despair that she even considered suicide. Fortunately, after hearing an uplifting sermon about girls who were in her position, she renewed her determination to succeed, and she received a job offer from someone she had worked for before. Meanwhile, her father was finally starting to have some success with his educational lectures, and he even became superintendent of schools in Concord.

During all of these trials and tribulations for Louisa and the Alcott family, the country was headed toward Civil War. The Alcotts were still Abolitionists, and Louisa’s father had even been involved in a riot in Boston where a mob of citizens had tried to rescue a runaway slave who was about to be returned to the slave owner. After the war started, Louisa felt the urge to do something to help the side of the Union, so she volunteered as a nurse. Conditions were rough at the hospital where she worked, and she was put to work immediately with no training. She had some talent for nursing and a good bedside manner, having nursed Elizabeth through her final illness, but nothing could have prepared her for dealing with the war wounded. It was difficult and often heart-wrenching work, and it took a toll on her own health. After only about a month of working there, she caught typhoid, and her father was summoned to come and take her home.

Louisa eventually recovered from her illness. She felt like a failure for not being able to complete the full term she had originally promised to the hospital, but her nursing experiences helped further her writing career. The letters that she had written to her family about the people she met and her experiences at the hospital were so interesting that they had them published as “Hospital Sketches”, and they were extremely popular. So many people had friends or family who had gone away to war that they were anxious to know as much as they could about what was happening to them and others like them. The success of the “Hospital Sketches” led publishers to ask Louisa for further writings.

When Louisa recovered further, she felt restless, so she accepted a position as a nurse/companion to a friend’s daughter, who was unwell but wanted to go on a trip to Europe. Traveling as a nurse/companion didn’t give Louisa all of the freedom she would have liked to see and do everything she wanted, but she did get to see many things in Europe. She was able to visit the home of the German philosopher Goethe, and she attended a public reading by Charles Dickens. During their travels, she also met the young man who would be the inspiration for Laurie in Little Women.

She started writing Little Women after she returned home from Europe, at the suggestion of her publisher, who thought that she should write books for girls. When her publisher read it, he wasn’t sure that it would be successful at first because its tone was different from the popular children’s books for girls at the time. He tested it out by giving copies to his niece and some other girls who were about the same age, and they all loved it, so he went ahead and published it. It was so successful that it provided Louisa and her parents with financial stability for the first time, and readers wanted more! Much of the story was based on Louisa’s own life with her sisters and on people they knew, but she changed some parts for the sake of the story. Since the real Louisa never married, she made up a fictional husband for her story counterpart, Jo. In the story, Jo marries a German professor, and in the sequel, she and her husband start a school for boys based on Louisa’s father’s theories about the ideal school. Many of her father’s theories about education were very progressive for the time, and since he never got the chance to try all of them, Jo and her husband did in the story.

Even though she never fully recovered her health after having typhoid, she continued to write books for children, and she visited schools to speak to children. The book explains how these other books were also inspired by aspects of Louisa’s life. She and her youngest sister, May, took another trip to Europe together. May always had a talent for art, and Louisa funded her further travels and studies in Europe. May eventually married, but sadly, she died not long after the birth of her only child, a daughter named after Louisa. In accordance with her wishes, May’s infant daughter was brought to Louisa to raise, and Louisa treated her like her own daughter, calling her Lulu as a nickname. The book ends with Louisa’s death, mentioning that she made one of Anna’s sons her heir to perpetuate her copyrights. In the back of the book, there is a chronology of events from Louisa May Alcott’s life.

The book is a Newbery Medal winner. It is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

I bought my copy of this book at a Scholastic Book Fair back in the 1990s, but I didn’t notice until I was an adult that the book was originally published in the early 1930s. I think part of the reason why the author was interested in doing a biography of Louisa May Alcott at that particular time was that it was around the 100th anniversary of her birth. I appreciated how later reprintings of this book also tried to keep it up-to-date and relevant for modern readers, including the addition of the footnote in the book about communes of the 1960s and 1970s.

Something that shows how 19th century society was different from modern society is the qualifications required for certain types of jobs. In the past, there were relatively few professional and educations qualifications required for teachers and nurses. In the 21st century, both teachers and nurses are required to have college degrees and relevant certifications to apply for their jobs. Nobody in the 21st century gets those jobs without having the requisite professional credentials (with the exception of homeschooling families, where the teachers are the parents). It would be useless to apply for such careers without having all of the education and certification required. In the 19th century, it was sometimes more important to just find someone willing to do the job, whether they had any particular qualifications to do it or not. Where the need was sufficiently great, like in the hospitals tending to the war wounded, they would take almost anyone who showed up and was willing to take the job with the hardships and blood involved. (There is one episode where Louisa witnesses an applicant being turned down because, while this person wanted to help the war effort, they didn’t have the stomach or stamina for the demands of the job. Next to that, medical knowledge was less important.) I explained dame schools when I reviewed Going to School in 1776, and the concept still applied in the mid-19th century. Dame schools were informal schools set up by people, often women, who were simply willing to take on the job of teaching local children. They got the jobs chiefly because they were the people who were willing to do them in the area. The quality of education these informal teachers could provide varied drastically, depending on the individual teacher. Some of them were actually well-read individuals with a gift for teaching (this is what Louisa and her father were like, in spite of their relative lack of formal education), while others provided little more than day care while the children’s parents worked. In the section of this book that explains Bronson Alcott’s history, there is some discussion of how education levels and quality varied across the country in the mid-1800s.

Parts of this book and the lives of the Alcott family also offer a different perspective on what it means to be successful in life. Through most of their lives, the family has little money, and Louisa and her father often struggle to find jobs and get recognition for their work. Louisa May Alcott is famous now, but early in her life, she felt like a failure. She struggled to find and keep jobs and had health problems that interfered with her ability to find and keep work. In the end, it wasn’t having money that made her famous but her talent and perseverance. There were times when she wanted to give up, and she even felt suicidal at one point, but she kept going in spite of everything. Even her father eventually managed to carve out a career for himself that suited his real talents. Their early problems didn’t mean that they were worthless or incapable. Their talents were just unusual, and they needed time to find their proper niche in life, the right circumstances to demonstrate what they could do, and the right people to recognize and appreciate their abilities.