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Louisa May Alcott: This Pilgrim's Progress

© Susan Jensen

Reading Little Women always filled me with a sense of regret. Although my girlhood was also full of family, warmth and love, it was not characterized by endless patience and charity. We didn't always love each other. We didn't always shoulder our burdens faithfully. In short, we were a typical family.

Readers today often dismiss Little Women as sentimental, preachy, and unrealistic. While Louisa May Alcott drew upon her own family life to create Little Women, she did not present it in its truest form. The novel presents Alcott's ideal family, not necessarily the one in which she grew up.

Like the March girls, Alcott grew up in poverty. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was an intellectual fanatic. He spent his days studying, philosophizing, and ruining most of the opportunities that came to him. Bronson did not believe in accepting menial work simply to support his family. To pay the rent and support the family, Louisa, her mother, and her sisters sought employment. Louisa worked as a seamstress, a teacher, a nurse, and a companion to bring in money for her family. She also began to write.

Louisa's first stories were romantic tales, tailored to the tastes of readers of that time period. She was writing frantically, trying to earn money. Eventually, she became an established writer and provided financial security for her family.

In her attempts to earn money and to fill her desire for adventure, Louisa volunteered to nurse soldiers wounded in the Civil War. Although the position provided her with material for her writing, it also damaged her health. She fought illness throughout her life. She also endured many personal losses.

Although her own family was not as "picture-perfect" as the Marches', it taught her values that she explores in her work, especially Little Women. Louisa, like Jo, was raised on The Bible and Pilgrim's Progress. She had to shoulder her own burdens and resist personal temptation. These values of goodness, hard work, faith, and faithfulness to family are apparent in the lives of the March girls.

Because Little Women has been seen as preachy or sentimental, some readers tend to think that Alcott must also be this way. While she certainly espoused honorable causes and lived a Christian life, her imagination often ran wild. In stark contrast to Little Women are her thrillers. These newly-discovered texts present a completely different side of Alcott. Many of these stories were written for financial reasons. Louisa knew what sold at that time, and she wrote what her readers and editors wanted.

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