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life tied to her family, but not as a hothouse society belle. She was more like an itinerant family coordinator. Her father, Bronson, founder of free-form progressive schools in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts, was never fully able to keep the family—his wife, Abigail, Louisa, and her three sisters—solvent and moved them frequently. They lived in a house, Hillside, in Concord, where Louisa would recall taking nature walks with Henry David Thoreau. For a while they lived in a communal village in Harvard called Fruitlands. (She wrote about their life there years later, in Transcendental Wild Oats.) They lived in New Hampshire and recurrently in Boston, in each place the Alcott girls spending much of their time trying to earn extra money to help their father. When Louisa was in her twenties, she published a novel, Flower Fables (her first novel, written at seventeen, would not be published for decades). And the next time her father announced a move, Louisa said no; she was staying in Boston to pursue her literary career, seamstressing on the side. Alone for the first time, she began to work on a series of stories called “Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy,” the characters who would become the March sisters of Little Women . Ultimately, when her publishers demanded, she would complete the novel in two and a half months. But for a time she put it aside.
    One of her younger sisters had died suddenly at twenty-two. Her older sister had married. Louisa felt she had no choice but to move back to Concord, where the family had resettled, to help her mother. As the more levelheaded of the two remaining daughters, Louisa and her mother shared the endless duties of running Orchard House. (The March family in Little Women would live in a fantasy version of her childhood Hillside; Louisa May would write it seated in Orchard House).
    For an aspiring writer, it was a grueling, at times unbearable life—baking, washing, mending, ironing, jobs that at the time could last for days. In 1858 she wrote to her married sister, “If I think of my woes, I fall into a vortex of debt, dishpans and despondency awful to see…so I say, every path has its puddle and I trust to play gaily as I can…in my puddle…while I wait for the lord to give me a lift.”
    For “economic salvation” she considered marriage. She considered it all of one day, coming to the same conclusion that Susan B. Anthony reached on behalf of an undecided niece: “Marriage. It is an all absorbing profession.” Instead, she worked as a seamstress, a paid companion. She took teaching jobs at her father’s school and argued with him about his plans to leave her the school (she didn’t want it). As her mother aged, more of the housework fell to Louisa and her less-than-enthusiastic youngest sister. She had to get out. The Civil War was on, and she wrote in her diary: “November—30 years old. Decided I must go to Washington as a nurse, if I would find a place. Help is needed and I love nursing and MUST LET OUT MY PENT UP ENERGY in some way. I want new experiences…. So I’ve sent my name in if they will have me.”
    In Washington she worked diligently as a nurse-in-training at the Union Hotel Hospital, where she treated thousands of injuries, witnessed terrifying operations and many deaths. For a woman who’d spent most of her life indoors, it was an astonishing experience and she afterward reworked her letters home into a book called Hospital Sketches (1868).
    She never really went “home” after the war. Living but not slaving in Concord, she became the editor of a children’s magazine, Merry’s Museum, and worked continuously for the suffrage movement. (She was the first woman to register to vote in Concord after Massachusetts passed its state suffrage law.) She wrote ten novels and two volumes of nonfiction. When her youngest sister died, she adopted her niece, Lulu, who’d been named for her, and took her to Boston, where she established a new family compound.
    Louisa