Moods, Louisa May Alcott’s first novel was published in 1864, four years before the best-selling Little Women. The novel unconventionally presents a ‘little woman, ‘ a true-hearted abolitionist spinster, and a fallen Cuban beauty, their lives intersecting in Alcott’s first major depiction of the ‘woman problem.’
Sylvia Yule, the heroine of Moods, is a passionate tomboy who yearns for adventure. The novel opens as she embarks on a river camping trip with her brother and his two friends, both of whom fall in love with her. These rival suitors, close friends, are modeled on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Daniel Thoreau. Aroused, but still ‘moody’ and inexperienced, Sylvia marries the wrong man. In the rest of the novel, Alcott attempts to resolve the dilemma she has created and leave her readers asking whether, in fact, there is a place for a woman such as Sylvia in a man’s world.
In 1882, eighteen years after the original publication, Alcott revised and republished the novel. Her own literary success and the changes she helped forge in women’s lives now allowed her heroine to meet, as Alcott said, ‘a wiser if less romantic fate than in the former edition.’
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Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 29, 1832. She and her three sisters, Anna, Elizabeth and May were educated by their father, philosopher/ teacher, Bronson Alcott and raised on the practical Christianity of their mother, Abigail May.
Louisa spent her childhood in Boston and in Concord, Massachusetts, where her days were enlightened by visits to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s library, excursions into nature with Henry David Thoreau and theatricals in the barn at Hillside (now Hawthorne’s ‘Wayside’).
Like her character, Jo March in Little Women, young Louisa was a tomboy: ‘No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race, ‘ she claimed, ‘ and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences….’
For Louisa, writing was an early passion. She had a rich imagination and often her stories became melodramas that she and her sisters would act out for friends. Louisa preferred to play the ‘lurid’ parts in these plays, ‘the villains, ghosts, bandits, and disdainful queens.’
At age 15, troubled by the poverty that plagued her family, she vowed: ‘I will do something by and by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!’
Confronting a society that offered little opportunity to women seeking employment, Louisa determined ‘…I will make a battering-ram of my head and make my way through this rough and tumble world.’ Whether as a teacher, seamstress, governess, or household servant, for many years Louisa did any work she could find.
Louisa’s career as an author began with poetry and short stories that appeared in popular magazines. In 1854, when she was 22, her first book Flower Fables was published. A milestone along her literary path was Hospital Sketches (1863) based on the letters she had written home from her post as a nurse in Washington, DC as a nurse during the Civil War.
When Louisa was 35 years old, her publisher Thomas Niles in Boston asked her to write ‘a book for girls.’ Little Women was written at Orchard House from May to July 1868. The novel is based on Louisa and her sisters’ coming of age and is set in Civil War New England. Jo March was the first American juvenile heroine to act from her own individuality; a living, breathing person rather than the idealized stereotype then prevalent in children’s fiction.
In all, Louisa published over 30 books and collections of stories. She died on March 6, 1888, only two days after
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