James Baquet

    The book “Little Women” by the American author Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was widely considered a “girl’s book” when I was a young reader. Perhaps that’s why, though I was a few meters from the house where she wrote it (and where the story is set) in Concord, Massachusetts a couple of months ago, I took a pass.

    You see, Alcott grew up in an extremely literate time and place. Her neighbors included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau (all of whose houses we visited — or at least the site of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond). She played with Emerson’s and Hawthorne’s children, and was briefly tutored by Thoreau.

    In fact, her own family were literati: both parents wrote, one sister was a teacher and painter, and though the family was poor (often to the point of hunger) life at Orchard House seems to have been the lively setting for “theatricals” and discussions on abolitionism, women’s suffrage, and various other social reform movements. Alcott’s father A. Bronson Alcott even started the “Concord School of Philosophy” on the property, and the garden provided food for the family’s vegetarian diet. (He also started the short-lived “Fruitlands” utopian community to spread his ideas.)

    Louisa Alcott began writing partially to support the family, a task which her idealistic father seemed to find difficult. (She later said that she had written “Little Women” “in record time for money.”) She was the second of four girls, who were the models for the “little women” of the book’s title. Her character was named “Jo;” in fact the second sequel to the book was named “Jo’s Boys,” about the students at a school run by Jo and her husband. Between those two books was “Little Men,” where the boys’ story begins; but in fact Alcott never married. The three books together are called the “March Family Saga.”

    Alcott died at age 55 in Boston two days after her father’s death, and is buried on “Authors’ Ridge” in Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, near Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau.

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. taught privately

    2. intellectuals, people literary attainment

    3. able to read, moreover, showing great knowledge of literature

    4. amateur theater productions

    5. decided not to do (something), forewent

    6. living arrangement designed to uphold high ideals

    7. accepted enthusiastically

    8. place where something is or was located

    9. the right to vote