3/31/25, 10:12 PM Louisa May Alcott - Wikipedia

Popular culture
Alcott appears as the protagonist in the Louisa May Alcott Mystery series, written by Jeanne Mackin
under the pseudonym Anna Maclean.[267] In book one, Louisa and the Missing Heiress, Louisa is
living in Boston in 1854[268] and writing her sensation stories.[269] She finds the dead body of a
fictional friend who recently returned from a honeymoon and solves the mystery.[270] Louisa and the
Country Bachelor follows Louisa as she visits cousins in Walpole, New Hampshire, in the summer of
1855 and discovers the dead body of an immigrant bachelor.[271] Louisa decides to solve what she
suspects is a murder.[272] In Louisa and the Crystal Gazer, the third and final book in the series, she
solves the murder of a divination woman in Boston in 1855.[273]

The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott by Kelly O'Connor McNees takes place in Walpole in 1855 and
follows Louisa as she finds romance.[274] Louisa falls in love with a fictional character named Joseph
Singer but chooses to pursue a profession as a writer instead of continuing her relationship with
Singer.[275] In Only Gossip Prospers by Lorraine Tosiello, Louisa visits New York City shortly after
publishing Little Women. During her trip, Louisa seeks to remain anonymous because of an
unrevealed circumstance from her past.[276] The Revelation of Louisa May Alcott by Michaela
MacColl takes place in 1846; young Louisa solves the murder of a slave catcher.[277] Patricia O'Brien's
The Glory Cloak tells of a fictional friendship between Louisa and Clara Barton, Louisa's work in the
Civil War, and her relationships with Thoreau and her father.[278] The epistolary novel The Bee and
the Fly: The Improbable Correspondence of Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson, by Lorraine
Tosiello and Jane Cavolina, follows a fictional correspondence between Louisa and Dickinson, which
Dickinson initiates in 1861 by asking Louisa for literary advice.[279]

Influence
Various modern writers have been influenced and inspired by Alcott's work, particularly Little
Women. As a child, Simone de Beauvior felt a connection to Jo and expressed, "Reading this novel
gave me an exalted sense of myself.[280] Cynthia Ozick calls herself a "Jo-of-the-future", and Patti
Smith explains, "[I]t was Louisa May Alcott who provided me with a positive view of my female
destiny."[280] Writers influenced by Louisa May Alcott include Ursula K. Le Guin, Barbara Kingsolver,
Gail Mazur, Anna Quindlen, Anne Lamott, Sonia Sanchez, Ann Petry, Gertrude Stein, and J. K.
Rowling.[281] U. S. president Theodore Roosevelt said he "worshiped" Louisa May Alcott's books.
Other politicians who have been impacted by her books include Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Hillary Clinton,
and Sandra Day O'Connor.[282] Louisa May Alcott was inducted into the National Women's Hall of
Fame in 1996.[283]

Works

The Little Women series

Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868)
Good Wives (1869)
Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boys (1871)

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Jo's Boys and How They Turned Out: A Sequel to "Little Men"
(1886)

Novels
The Inheritance (1849, unpublished until 1997)
Moods (1865, revised 1882)
An Old Fashioned Girl (1870)
Will's Wonder Book (1870)
Work: A Story of Experience (1873)
Beginning Again, Being a Continuation of Work (1875)
Eight Cousins, or The Aunt Hill (1875)
Rose in Bloom: A Sequel to Eight Cousins (1876)
Under the Lilacs (1878)
Jack and Jill: A Village Story (1880)
Bust of Louisa May Alcott
As A. M. Barnard
A Marble Woman; or, The Mysterious Model (1865)
Behind a Mask, or a Woman's Power (1866)
The Abbot's Ghost, or Maurice Treherne's Temptation (1867)
A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866; first published 1995)

Published anonymously
A Pair of Eyes, or Modern Magic (1863)
A Modern Mephistopheles (1877)

Novellas
Hospital Sketches (1863)
Pauline's Passion and Punishment (1863)
My Contraband, first published as The Brothers (1863)
A Whisper in the Dark (1863)
The Freak of a Genius (1866)
The Mysterious Key and What It Opened (1867)
La Jeune; or, Actress and Woman (1868)
Countess Varazoff (1868)
The Romance of a Bouquet (1868)
A Laugh and A Look (1868)
Transcendental Wild Oats (1873)
Silver Pitchers, and Independence: A Centennial Love Story (1876)
The Fate of the Forrests
A Double Tragedy: An Actor's Story
Ariel, A Legend of the Lighthouse
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A Nurse's Story

Short story collections

Flower Fables (1854)
On Picket Duty, and other tales (1864)
Morning-Glories and Other Stories (1867)
Kitty's Class Day and Other Stories (Three Proverb Stories) (1868)
Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag (1872–1882). (66 short stories in six volumes)
1. "Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag"
2. "Shawl-Straps"
3. "Cupid and Chow-Chow"
4. "My Girls, Etc."
5. "Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore, Etc."
6. "An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc."
Proverb Stories (1882)
Spinning-Wheel Stories (1884)
Lulu's Library (1886–1889)
A Garland for Girls (1887)

Short stories
"The Rival Painters: A Tale of Rome" (1852)
"Love and Self-Love" (1860)
"Enigmas" (1864)
"The Skeleton in the Closet" (1867)
"My Mysterious Mademoiselle" (1869)
"Lost in a Pyramid; or, The Mummy's Curse" (1869)
"Perilous Play" (1876)
"The Candy Country" (1885)
"Which Wins?"
"Honor's Fortune"
"Mrs. Vane's Charade"

As A. M. Barnard
"V.V., or Plots and Counterplots" (1865)

Published anonymously
"Doctor Dorn's Revenge" (1868)
"Fatal Follies" (1868)
"Taming a Tartar"
"Fate in a Fan"

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Poems
"Sunlight" (1851)
"My Kingdom" (written 1845, published 1875)
"The Children's Song" (written 1860, published 1889)
"Young America" (1861)
"With A Rose That Bloomed on the Day of John Brown's Martyrdom" (1862)
"Thoreau's Flute" (1863)
"In the Garret" (1865)
"The Sanitary Fair" (1865)
"Come, Butter, Come" (1867)
"What Shall the Little Children Bring" (1884)
"Oh, the Beautiful Old Story" (1886)
"The Fairy Spring" (1887)

Posthumous
"Recollections of My Childhood" (1888)
Comic Tragedies (1893)
Morning-Glories and Queen Aster (1904)
Diana and Persis (1978, incomplete manuscript)
The Brownie and the Princess (2004)

References
1. Cullen-DuPont 2000, pp. 8–9.
2. MacDonald 1983, p. 1.
3. Alcott 1988, pp. x–xi.
4. Delamar 1990, p. 6; Matteson 2007, p. 48
5. Reisen 2009, p. 15; Matteson 2007, pp. 9, 49–50
6. Delamar 1990, p. 7; Reisen 2009, pp. 25–27; MacDonald 1983, p. 1; Meigs 1968, pp. 27–28
7. Matteson 2007, p. 49.
8. New York Times 1888
9. National Park Service.
10. Richardson 1995, pp. 245–251.
11. Alcott 1988, p. xi.
12. Alcott 1988, p. xiii; Elbert 1987, p. 52; McFall 2018, pp. 24–26
13. McFall 2018, p. 24; Keyser 1993, pp. xvi–xvii
14. Saxton 1995, pp. 82, 87.
15. Elbert 1987, p. 34.
16. Delamar 1990, p. 10
17. Freeman 2015.
18. Delamar 1990, p. 10.
19. Reisen 2009, p. 37.

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