Louisa May Alcott | 1832-1888 Louisa May Alcott published literature for children under her own name, but she used pseudonyms for her numerous Gothic thrillers. Such a distinction suggests the constraints imposed on women in 19th-century America -- even on a woman such as Alcott, who came from a tradition of abolitionists, temperance activists, and education reformers. Alcott herself was the first woman in Concord, Massachusetts, to register to vote when the state granted women school, tax, and bond suffrage; one of her many biographers has her going door to door to urge other women to do the same. Jo March, the heroine of the best-selling Little Women, was beloved for her spirit of rebellion and individuality (in fact, the adult Jo herself was the author of a number of thrillers). In Alcott's early diaries, she appeared to be very much like Jo: determined to make her own way (and in Alcott's case, to ease her family's perpetually strained circumstances) and to have other people know that. While Alcott owed her fortune primarily to the success of Little Women, the many melodramatic thrillers she wrote also contributed to her income. Yet to "own" those sensation novels, with their dark themes of sexuality and betrayal, by attaching her name to them would be an act of defiance that would very likely endanger the lucrative career and proper reputation of the equally prolific author of stories for girls. This lucrative career began quietly, with the publication in 1854 of Flower Fables, a collection of fairy tales she originally wrote for her neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson's daughter. In 1863 Hospital Sketches, Alcott's account of her service as a Civil War nurse in Washington, D.C., brought her name to a larger audience. Throughout the 1860s, she continued to write for adults (Gothic thrillers) and for children (poems and stories), and in 1867, she became the editor of a children's magazine, Merry's Museum. It was the publisher of this magazine who asked her to write a story for girls, and that story for girls turned into Little Women. All of Alcott's writing for children, and especially Little Women, presented girls with a new kind of heroine, not a cardboard moral example but a lively and engaged personality. Schooled as she was by her father, whose radical theories of education stressed the child's emotional and physical well-being and a dialogue between teachers and students, it is no wonder that Alcott created characters who were intellectually curious and intensely individualistic. But dependent as she was for her income on the society for whom these theories came as a shock, it is also no wonder that Alcott could not entirely shake off 19th-century America's bonds of propriety.