The Journals of Louisa M.Alcott

by Daniel Shealy (Contributor), Daniel Shealy (Contributor), Louisa M. Alcott (Author), Madeleine B. Stern (Introduction), Joel Myerson (Editor)

New
Paperback
1997
$46.21

From her eleventh year to the month of her death at age 55, Louisa May Alcott kept copious journals. She never intended for them to be published, but the insights they provide into her remarkable life are invaluable. Alcott grew up in a genteel but impoverished household, surrounded by the literary and philosophical elite of 19th-century New England, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Like her fictional alter ego, Jo March, she was a free spirit who longed for independence, yet she dutifully supported her parents and three sisters with her literary efforts. In the journals are to be found hints of Alcott's surprisingly complex persona as well as clues to her double life as an author not only of high literature but also of serial thrillers and Gothic romances. This unabridged edition of Alcott's private diaries serves as a companion volume to The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott , offering a record of the life of an extraordinary woman.

Synopsis

From her eleventh year to the month of her death at age 55, Louisa May Alcott kept copious journals. She never intended for them to be published, but the insights they provide into her remarkable life are invaluable. Alcott grew up in a genteel but impoverished household, surrounded by the literary and philosophical elite of 19th-century New England, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Like her fictional alter ego, Jo March, she was a free spirit who longed for independence, yet she dutifully supported her parents and three sisters with her literary efforts. In the journals are to be found hints of Alcott's surprisingly complex persona as well as clues to her double life as an author not only of high literature but also of serial thrillers and Gothic romances. This unabridged edition of Alcott's private diaries serves as a companion volume to The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott , offering a record of the life of an extraordinary woman.

$46.21

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10 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 400
Edition: Revised ed.
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 31 Oct 1997
ISBN 10: 0820319503
ISBN 13: 9780820319506

Media Reviews

It's a credit to Louisa May Alcott's timeless storytelling abilities that her thoughts on woman suffrage, slavery, and even berry picking are nevertheless illuminating.

--New York Times Book Review

The bubbling young woman who said she was 'born with a boy's spirit under [her] bib and tucker' was always a lively, charming writer, never more so than in her record of her own struggles and adventures.

--Choice

Alcott's journals offer a literate, poignant, often humorous portrait of a singular woman.

--Publishers Weekly

Author Bio

Louisa May Alcott (Author)
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT (1832-1888), a novelist and poet, is perhaps known as the author of the Little Women trilogy: Little Women, Little Men, and Jo's Boys. She was a committed abolitionist and feminist throughout her adult life.

Joel Myerson (Editor)
JOEL MYERSON is Carolina Distinguished Professor Emeritus of American Literature at the University of South Carolina.

Daniel Shealy (Editor)
DANIEL SHEALY is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He is the editor of Alcott in Her Own Time and has also been involved in numerous publications related to Alcott's fiction, letters, and journals.