This was an extremely detailed and informative look at Louisa May Alcott's life. The writing style was a bit confusing at times and it was a slow read. It helped that I have been reading multiple other biographies of Alcott so I already had a pretty good framework of her life. From what I understand the author was instrumental in uncovering the writings that Alcott had done under a pseudonym, so it was very cool to read her perspective.

THE Alcott biography to read.

Authoritative biography of Alcott's life

Exhaustively researched and scrupulously devoted to its subject, but at times the circumscribed adherence to reporting only what can be verified in the historical record makes it difficult to get a sense of Alcott as a full person.

This is a thorough and engaging biography! I read it while writing my senior thesis on Alcott’s novel Work and found it very useful. Stern is one of my favorite Alcott scholars!

Although Stern's prose is more like a stream-of-consciousness novel than a biography (which takes quite a while to get used to) and although she assumes the reader has extensive knowledge of the mid-19th century and Concord's various literary lions, I enjoyed this book very much. The real Louisa Alcott captures your affections as easily as Jo March does, and you can't help but admire her determination to support her unusual family and to make a name for herself in a man's world.

I was inspired to read this biography when I visited Alcott's home in Concord, Mass over the Christmas break. I didn't know much about her life so it's been quite enjoyable. The narrative style makes it seem like a novel instead of a biography, so that took a little getting used to. I'm enjoying the book so far, especially seeing the parallels between Lousia's life & that of Jo March in "Little Women" (which is in my top 5 of all time!). I would recommend it to others who enjoy Louisa May Alcott's work.

One of my favorite from my late teen years!

This is a great biography if you want to get a feel for Alcott the person since Stern's approach is to try to create the feelings and experiences as Alcott lived them. If, however, as many people are, you are invested in knowing details like dates, this is not the biography for you. There are a few dates sprinkled though the book, but they are few and far between, leaving the reader wondering when particular events are taking place. The book does progress logically though Alcott's experiences, but a few more dates would be helpful pegs on which to hang the events of her life.
This said, Stern does communicate who Alcott is and creates the feeling of living her life. Stern addresses Alcott's influences, but does not allow them to overwhelm the subject herself, who emerges as a very real woman, with all of her strengths and her flaws. A very readable biography of a very famous and influential woman.

I've had this on my shelves for a long time. I'm guessing I started it at some point and then gave up. Having finished it, I understand why. I've read a LOT of biographies so I feel like I have a good sense of which are good and which are not. This one is not. It is probably factually precise which you want a biography to be but you also want a bit of insight in the psychology of the subject which requires a certain amount of speculation. It's okay to do that as long as it is done skillfully and transparently. It helps to have a lot of quotes from the subject's own writing which, if the subject was a writer, should be available. There are very few quotes from LMA included in this book in spite of the fact that she was a prolific author, letter writer and diarist.

As an example of how the book reads overall, here's how it ends. LMA dies of something vaguely resembling a stroke or meningitis. The. End. No discussion of what her family does or of her legacy or how history remembers her. Nada. Just, her deathbed. No quotes from her obituaries which there certainly would have been given her celebrity.

This was just so dry I can't believe it's considered the seminal work on LMA.

Louisa May Alcott: From Blood & Thunder to Hearth and Home
by Madeleine B. Stern

Collection of Madeleine Stern's essays and lots of Alcott's letters, written from 1943 to 1995. The story of the fascinating discover of Alcott's A.M. Barnard pseudonym is here, along with a more sympathetic view of how she came to be known as "The Children's Friend" author. The biography of Alcott that I read gave me the mistaken view that after many frustrations making a living as a serious writer, she came to write a Girls' book as an unwilling favor to a publisher. Not true at all.

The only essay I didn't enjoy wholeheartedly was the one where she attempted to link certain episodes in Alcott's career to passages in her children's books. Her acting episodes in the early years, yes--almost every book had an amateur play or wannabe actress. But I don't think it's fair to imply that direct quotes from her books had a direct parallel in her own life.

Louisa May Alcott really was an amazing woman. I knew her only from the four books about the March family (given that a fair majority of South African books are obtained from British publishers/printers we have Good Wives, rather than two parts of Little Women). I knew that she'd written some other books, but I'd never read any and hadn't much interest in them. I had some vague knowledge that she'd been a nurse in the civil war and that Little Women was semi-autobiographical. I wanted to go to Orchard House because it was mentioned in the adaptation I have of Little Women (the Winona Ryder version).

So, when my partner and I were in Boston, we hopped up to Concord (Massachusetts, not the one in New Hampshire or whatever it is further to the north) and visited Orchard House. There I learnt more about her writing, the importance of her father and the society in which they lived. I was more than ready to read her biography - this apparently being one of the best biographies of Louisa May Alcott ever written. It is well written without appearing at all like a biography in any way. It's written more like a historical novel, though one knows that all the events and facts that are dramatised on the page are actual events written about in the family journal and letters.

This is a highly recommended read.