Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, on her father’s thirty-third birthday. Bronson Alcott was a teacher and philosopher of grand ideas and no practical sense, and the family was almost always poor. They moved more than twenty times, at one point to a short-lived farm commune called Fruitlands, before settling in Concord, Massachusetts, where their neighbors included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Louisa borrowed books from Emerson’s library.

From her teens she worked to support the family, as a seamstress, a governess, a teacher and a household servant. She also wrote, and for money. Under the name A. M. Barnard and anonymously, she turned out lurid thrillers for popular magazines, full of revenge, drugs, disguise and dangerous women. These stories were only identified as hers in the 1940s, and they surprised her readers.

In 1862, during the Civil War, she volunteered as a nurse at a Union hospital in Washington. Within weeks she caught typhoid pneumonia and nearly died, and the mercury she was given as treatment damaged her health for the rest of her life. Her letters home became Hospital Sketches (1863), her first real success.

In 1867 her publisher asked her to write a book for girls. She was not keen. “I plod away,” she wrote, “though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing.” She drew on her own family, she and her three sisters, and wrote the first part of Little Women in about ten weeks. It came out in 1868, and readers demanded more. In the second part, they wanted Jo to marry the boy next door, Laurie. Alcott, who never married, refused to give them that, and married Jo to a German professor instead.

The book made the family secure at last. Alcott went on writing, supported her parents, sisters and nieces, and campaigned for women’s right to vote; in 1879 she became the first woman to register to vote in Concord, for a school election. She died in 1888, two days after her father.