Other Sites of Interest

Here are links to interesting sites about Louisa May Alcott.

Keep up with Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House blog

Links and photos of Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House
and Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

A sampling of Louisa May Alcott’s poetry

The Louisa May Alcott Resource Page
Lesson plans, free ebooks, poetry, photos . . . this site has a treasure trove of resources.

Pictures of Louisa May Alcott
Michelle Andrew’s Pinterest page

Louisa May Alcott Filmography
Any and all films from the big and little screen related to Louisa’s books

Louisa May Alcott website in French (use your browser to translate)

Louisa May Alcott website in Spanish (use your browser to translate)

Louisa May’s recipe for Apple Slump
(courtesy of Miss Party’s Blog)

Take a tour of Louisa May Alcott’s Beacon Hill in Boston

For antique books by the Concord authors, The Barrow Bookstore in Concord, MA has the best collection. Books are right by the door of the shop, making titles super easy to find. The Barrow also has a YouTube channel called the Barrow Bookstore Audio Series: readings of short stories and works by Concord Authors and beyond.

Brief Biographical Accounts

• The Literature Network
• Unitarian Universalist Historical Society
• Empireszine.com
• Enotes.com – biography and links to resources and criticism

List of Louisa May Alcott’s Works

• Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) Selective Annotated Bibliography
• Classicauthors.net

Commentary

• Enotes.com Louisa May Alcott 1832-1888 – literary criticism
• Enotes.com Louisa May Alcott 1832-1888 – short story criticism
• Smothered Fire
  Behind her cheerfulness and sentimentality, the author of Little Women hid searing anger and a wicked wit
  by Jane Hamilton
• Plots and counterplots: the defense of sensational fiction in Louisa May Alcott’s “Behind a Mask”
  by Sara Hackenberg

Reviews from Contemporaries

• Louisa May Alcott: the contemporary reviews by Beverly Lyon Clark

Critical Essays

• BookRags – 17 Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott
  by Madeleine Stern, Daniel Shealy, Angela M. Estesa and Katheen M. Lant, Sarah Elbert and more
• Literary History – Louisa May Alcott Literary Criticism
• Bringing Up Jo: Little Women, Female Rhetorical Activity, and the Nineteenth Century American Conduct Book
  Tradition essay examining how Jo Alcott’s behavior in Little Women fits into the 19th century genre of the Etiquette conduct manual
• Transcendental Actress: Louisa May Alcott And The Roles of a Lifetime.
  This is a Master’s Thesis, and as such, is a rather long piece. It has chapters on Alcott’s most pivotal work, Little Women,as well as a chapter on “Transcendental Wild Oats” and four of Alcott’s pseudonymously published gothic thrillers. The final chapter is a discussion of the various film versions of Little Women.
• “Like a Wild Creature in its Cage, Paced that Handsome Woman”: The Struggle Between Sentiment and Sensation in the Writings of Louisa May Alcott.
  Paper explores Alcott’s two types of writing. Concludes that her subversive sensational stories not only defied nineteenth-century values of womanhood, but also rebelled against the teachings of her father, Bronson Alcott, who believed in traditional “femininity” and sentimentalism, in a search for human perfectionism.
• The Makings Of A Mom: The Maternal Voice Of Louisa May Alcott.
  This paper examines Alcott’s handling and perceptions of motherhood– in various works as well as in her personal life. A biographical critique that sheds light on how a “spinster” like Alcott could write such great mothering roles.
• Blood, Guts And Glory: Soldiers And Nurses in The Civil War.
  This paper deals briefly with Alcott’s Civil War story, “Hospital Sketches.” It has a number of excellent quotations from soldier & nurse’s personal accounts of the war, and though it isn’t totally about one of our Domestic Goddesses, it makes good reading for an understanding of the context that many of these writers were writing in.
• A Guide to Research: Louisa May Alcott a research/bibliographic guide to works by and about Louisa May Alcott.
  An excellent place to start any research project on Alcott, this lists major critical works on LMA, plus sources for texts online.
• Critical essays on Louisa May Alcott and other women authors (Domestic Goddesses)

News Articles

• New York Times archives

Sites for scholarly research

• Google Scholar
• JSTOR (you need to be affiliated with a participating university or public library in order to be able to access  – if you’re not part of a university or library, applying for an online library card could give you access. Here’s their list of participating colleges, universities and public libraries.
• Harvard University Library Search (Houghton Library has the Alcott materials) – you need to sign up in order to use this search, but you can see what is available at Houghton (or any of the other Harvard libraries)

Emerson and Thoreau

• How to properly teach Thoreau to students of all ages
• An Online Exhibition of Walden Pond Images – Offered by the Concord Free Public Library in Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Publication of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden in 1854
• http://www.ray-a.com/ThoreauPlaceNames.pdf – by Raymond Angelo. “Place Names of Henry David Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts” – Presented here will be an attempt to pinpoint as many of Henry David Thoreau’s place names in Concord and Lincoln, Massachusetts as possible using latitude and longitude coordinates in a format usable with Google Maps

Miscellaneous sites of interest

• • Interview with Richard Francis about Fruitlands in Failture Magazine — includes one of the best explanations of Bronson Alcott’s philosophy that I’ve seen
  • A Life Reading: this one’s in French but Google Chrome will translate it into English. Great pictures!
  • A Room of One’s Own – one of my favorites!
  • Berberis patchwork et broderie: this one too is in French but Google Chrome will translate. Beautifully made quilts!
  • Forgottenbooks.org: This is a wonderful site for public domain books. You might say, “Sure, I can find these books on Google Books or archive.org” but you won’t find them as nicely formatted as these. Forgottenbooks.org presents a clean, new edition of the book in various formats supporting the Kindle, Nook and PC (although for the Nook you can only get a PDF version unfortunately). Books can also be read online and you can copy portions of the text for research purposes – you’re just asked to cite the particular book and Forgotten Books. I really like this feature as I cannot do this on my Nook. The site is well organized, offering many different book categories. You can keep your own personal library on the site. There is also an image search. I started my membership by downloading Elegant Affinities by by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe and have been enjoying reading the PDF version on my Nook. The site offers instructions on how to put your books onto your devices. There are various levels of membership from free (reading the online versions) to paid (downloading up to 10 or 100 books per month). There’s a lot more to this site that I haven’t looked at yet, but I encourage you to visit Forgottenbooks.org if you’re interested in public domain books in a clean, readable format.
  • Her Book Self – Lisa’s Literary Life: this blog covers a wide range of books from a true read-a-holic.
  • In the Bookcase: reviews of various, and interesting books PLUS a yearly Louisa May Alcott Reading Challenge!

• Light, Bright and Sparkling: This is author Diana Birchall’s blog. She has a fascinating post with lots of pictures on Mark Twain’s 70th birthday. Her grandmother is one of the guests!
• Literary Ladies Guide to the Writing Life, Nava Atlas, based on her wonderful book of the same title. Some of my posts on Louisa appear on this terrific site featuring prominent women authors and their advice on writing
• List of books and articles related to dress and fashion reform
• Musings of a Bookworm: several great posts about our favorite author on this blog.
• Reading, Writing, Working, Playing: wonderful literary blog
• Silver Threads: Books, Silver, Slide Shows: This blogger reads a lot and offers very intelligent commentary on what she reads. Here’s what she wrote on Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals, edited by Ednah D. Cheney
• Women, Words, and Wisdom Powerful truths in women’s voices: a blog dedicate to women writers
• Yet Another Journal: an interesting potpourri of “Nostalgia, DVDs, old movies, television, OTR, fandom, good news and bad, picks, pans, cute budgie stories, cute terrier stories, and anything else I can think of.” The budgie stories I’d like to see!

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