LOUISA MAY ALCOTT—DAUGHTER OF UTOPIA.

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT—DAUGHTER OF UTOPIA. Louisa May Alcott was the daughter of the Utopian, Bronson Alcott. I find it chilling that her mother told Louisa when Louisa was ten or eleven that Louisa would have to support the family. Louisa shouldered the burden until her death. Starting at about the age of 15, Louisa worked variously as reader to invalids, teacher, seamstress and servant. She mended and washed laundry. Louisa’s writing first brought in money when she was about 20, and she became a professional writer, writing a number of “blood and thunder tales.” She achieved her first great success with LITTLE WOMEN when she was 36. She wrote about the experience of her father’s project in “TRANSCENDENTAL WILD OATS”, in which, according to this wikipedia article, the character based on her father is portrayed as “feckless” and “impractical.” As an example, a storm threatens the grain crop and the farm, and, to quote from TRANSCENDENTAL WILD OATS, “About the time the grain was ready to house, some call of the Oversoul wafted all the men away.” Even after her success, Louisa continued writing to pay off her father’s heavy debts. Alison Lurie wrote in the New York Review of Books (November 3, 2005): “As Bronson Alcott told everyone proudly, and in some critics’ view rather smugly, she had become ‘The Child of Duty.'”