Theme: Louisa May Alcott- her life and work

Her time as a servant used to be harrowing. Not solely used to be the work itself extraordinarily difficult—she used to be as soon as sexually stressed by way of her employer. “I was as soon as to serve his needs, soothe his sufferings, and sympathize with his sorrows—be a galley slave, in fact,” Alcott wrote. She cease the job rapidly after.

Alcott received a lifelong empathy for women in the domestic sphere. Hannah, the March's servant in Little Women, is a third-dimensional discern and section of the family.

She witnessed the horrors of the Civil War firsthand.

Hospital Sketches (Annotated)

In 1861, Alcott volunteered to be a nurse at a Union clinic in Washington, D.C. "As I cannot fight, I will content material myself with working with those who can," she wrote to her friend, Alf Whitman (an thought for Laurie), per Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women.

But Alcott fully lasted at the fitness facility for six weeks. The tireless 12-hour shifts, the terrifying sights, and the tough residing prerequisites proved to be an insurmountable combination. Two months after arriving, in January 1862, Alcott came down with typhoid pneumonia and was once as soon as dealt with with calomel, a toxic mercury.

Though she recovered, she was as soon as weakened permanently. Alcott died of a stroke at the young age of 55.

In 1863, Alcott posted her recollections of these six weeks in a e e book for teenagers referred to as Hospital Sketches.

Alcott wrote racy fiction underneath a pen name.

Alcott should now not face up to a nom de plume. Her first-ever published work, a poem, used to be once posted underneath the pseudonym Flora Fairfield. In 1854, when she used to be 22, Alcott posted a collection of fairy memories valuable of her real name.

Before writing Little Women, Alcott posted racy (and lucrative) Gothic thrillers below the identify A.M. Bernard. According to the Los Angeles Times, the "blood and thunder" memories have been characterised thru "hashish, transvestitism, sadomasochism, violence and feminism." This darker facet to Alcott's literary profession used to be solely positioned in 1942, when student Leona Rostenberg unearthed letters from a Harvard library with factor out of the name.