Louisa May Alcott

Prepare the report about one of the famous people mentioned in the letter.

Pay attention to the underlined passage.

Tasks

Introduction

UNITE I

Read the extract from Judy’s letter.

19th December

Dear Daddy-Long-Legs,

…

9.45 p.m.

I have a new unbreakable rule: never, never to study at night no matter how many written reviews are coming in the morning. Instead, I read just plain books--I have to, you know, because there are eighteen blank years behind me. You wouldn't believe, Daddy, what an abyss of ignorance my mind is; I am just realizing the depths myself.

The things that most girls with a properly assorted family and a home and friends and a library know by absorption, I have never heard of.

For example:

I never read Mother Goose or David Copperfield or Ivanhoe or Cinderella or Blue Beard or Robinson Crusoe or Jane Eyre or Alice in Wonderland or a word of Rudyard Kipling. I didn't know that Henry the Eighth was married more than once or that Shelley was a poet. I didn't know that people used to be monkeys and that the Garden of Eden was a beautiful myth. I didn't know that R. L. S. stood for Robert Louis Stevenson or that George Eliot was a lady.

I had never seen a picture of the `Mona Lisa' and (it's true but you won't believe it) I had never heard of Sherlock Holmes.

Now, I know all of these things and a lot of others besides, but you can see how much I need to catch up. And oh, but it's fun! I look forward all day to evening, and then I put an `engaged' on the door and get into my nice red bath robe and furry slippers and pile all the cushions behind me on the couch, and light the brass student lamp at my elbow, and read and read and read one book isn't enough. I have four going at once. Just now, they're Tennyson's poems and Vanity Fair and Kipling's Plain Tales and - don't laugh - Little Women. I find that I am the only girl in college who wasn't brought up on Little Women. I haven't told anybody though (that WOULD stamp me as queer). I just quietly went and bought it with $1.12 of my last month's allowance; and the next time somebody mentions pickled limes, I'll know what she is talking about!

(Ten o'clock bell. This is a very interrupted letter.)

…

Goodbye, Daddy, I hope that you are feeling as happy as am.

Yours ever,

Judy

What do you know about the author of “Little Women”?

Do you know all the names mentioned in the letter? If not, look them up in the Encyclopedia.

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888). Now best remembered for her classic tale “ Little Women”, Alcott was a prolific and varied writer who did much to promotethe cause of women's suffrage.

Louisa May Alcott was born on 29 November, 1832; her father's (the prominent transcendentalist, Amos Branson Alcott) thirty-third birthday. She was the second of Amos and his wife Abba May's four daughters, and was brought up in Concord, Massachusetts. Educated at home, Louisa was fascinated by books and from an early age recalls 'playing with books in my father's study... looking at pictures, pretending to read, and scribbling on blank pages whenever pen or pencil could be found'. As she grew older she devoured the books in the family library, reading widely from both American and European authors. She also found great intellectual stimulation in the men in her father's circle, eminent figures such as Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne. Her father's strong anti-materialism, coupled with his complete financial ineptitude, often meant that the family found it difficult to make ends meet, and from an early age all the children were expected to help out b y taking in sewing, teaching or doing domestic service. After the death of her sister Lizzie in 1858 and her sister Anna's marriage, Louisa became more involved with her writing, often contributing ar­ticles, short stories and poems to periodicals. Alcott never married ('I'd rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe'), and many of her essays explore the possibilities of a single life for women. In 1862 she volunteered as a nurse in a Civil War army hospital in Washington but after only six weeks she contracted typhoid fever and was forced to return home. The break from her family and her ex­periences gave her the material for her first successful book, “ Hospital Sketches”. During the next few years, as her writing became more profitable, she was able to give up her other jobs and write full-time. Alcott experimented with several different styles of writing and pseudonyms, at one time calling herself Flora Fairfield. She also wrote several lurid thrillers under the ambiguous pen-name 'A. M. Barnard', and of these “ Behind a Mask” is probably the best known. The success of “ Little Women” in 1868 brought both fame and the financial security she had so long de­sired for her family and she went on to write other stories in the same vein: “ An Old-Fashioned Girl” (1870), “ Little Men” (1871), “Eight Cousins” (1875), “Rose in Bloom” (1876), “Jo's Boys ” (1886) and others. In 1871 Alcott visited Europe and on her return to Boston became involved with women's suffrage and temperance movements. Alcott died in Boston in 1888, the same day her father was buried.

“Little Women” was originally published in two volumes (October 1868 and April 1869), the first entitled “ Little Women, or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy” and the second simply known as 'Part Second'. In England, however, the second volume was given the title “ Good Wives”, a decision Alcott played no part in. The sisters in the book are modelled on Alcott's own siblings, May, Elizabeth and Anna, who ap­pear respectively as Amy, Beth and Meg; Alcott herself is the model for Jo.

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