Louisa May Alcott: An Outstanding 'Little Woman' Quiz

Answer: False

During most of her childhood and early adulthood, until she herself earned money from her teaching and writing, Louisa's family lived in poverty, according to the non-materialistic ideals of her father. Between June 1843 and January 1844, the Alcotts lived communally in a utopian community called The Fruitlands which Louisa's father had co-founded "to enable himself and his followers to live in perfect harmony with his transcendental ethics." [from http://www.alcott.net]

Answer: Henry David Thoreau

Louisa's father and Thoreau were contemporaries and friends. Another famous advocate of Transcendentalism and friend of both these men was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Others who lived near the Alcotts and had some influence on Louisa were Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Lloyd Garrison, John Greenleaf Whittier, Margaret Fuller, and Julia Ward Howe. [mentioned in her obituary, "The New York Times" March 7, 1888].

Answer: Germantown, PA

Though she was raised in New England and is often thought of as a quintessential New Englander, Louisa was born in Germantown, PA, which today is part of greater Philadelphia. Her father had begun another one of his less-than-successful attempts at founding his own private school there. All of his other failed schools were in New England, but from 1831 to 1833, the Alcotts lived in Pennsylvania.

Wolcott is the small Connecticut township in which Louisa's father was born and Boston is the city where her mother was born and Louisa later lived. Clayville is a very small village in upstate NY (renamed in the 1800's in honor of Henry Clay) where your humble author was born (please forgive the self-indulgence).

Answer: True

Samuel May was her maternal uncle, and her middle name "May" was in reference to her mother's family name. She was also a descendant on her mother's side of the prominent Sewall, Quincy and Hancock families of Massachusetts.

Answer: Gothic potboilers

Published under the pseudonym of A. M. Barnard, works such as "Behind a Mask, or a Woman's Power" and "The Abbot's Ghost, or Maurice Treherne's Temptation" were a bit shocking for their time and were dismissed as "gothic potboilers." They were also known as "blood-and-thunder tales" and Louisa's penchant for them can be seen in the type of story that Jo March is most fond of writing. [info from http://www.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddess/lma.htm]

Answer: False

"Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag" is still lengthy, but it is only six volumes long. Louisa's editors often criticized her for not being concise enough -- she was forced to cut the original submission of her novel "Moods" by almost one-half.

Answer: "Sung Under the Silver Umbrella"

"Eight Cousins" was written in 1875 and "Rose in Bloom" is the sequel, written in 1876. "Lulu's Library" was written for the niece Louisa helped raise after her youngest sister died in 1879. The author of "Sung Under the Silver Umbrella: Poems for Young Children" is Dorothy Pulis Lathrop.

Answer: school committee

The fact that so few women voted "disgusted" Louisa, who felt more women should have participated in using such a hard-fought right. In her time, Louisa considered herself a "women's rights advocate", but of a less radical stripe than Susan B. Anthony. According to an article published in an abolitionist newspaper called "The Radical" [May 1868], Louisa (along with Elizabeth Stoddard, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Anne Moncure Crane) was considered one of the handful of women authors "to address women's issues in a modern and candid manner."

Answer: She was an Army nurse, tending wounded soldiers

Although her nursing training was quite limited, she served as a nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, near Washington, D.C., for six weeks in 1862 and 1863. The letters she wrote about this experience were edited and published in the magazine "Commomwealth" in 1863, which gave Louisa her first nationwide audience and and won critical acclaim.

Answer: "Is it not meningitis?"

This according to http://www.vu.union.edu/~mcguirem/lastwords.html and others. Although most sources list the cause of Louisa's death as mercury poisoning, her "New York Times" obituary in 1888 stated (probably in error) that she had died of spinal meningitis.

Ever since her war service, Louisa had not been well, suffering from the effects of the mercury poisoning which she had contracted when she had received calomel treatments to treat typhoid fever. She had a great fear of most diseases, especially those which might impair her ability to write and therefore earn a living, so her inquiring about meningitis does not seem out of place.