Louisa May Alcott Quiz

Louisa didn't meet Mark Twain. Nathaniel Hawthorne was her next door neighbor. Henry David Thoreau was a close family friend and he often took young Louisa on walks around Walden Pond. And, while on a trip to Europe, Louisa attended a reading by Charles Dickens. There are no reports that she ever met Mark Twain.

Louisa didn't write "An Old-Fashioned Teacher." For the first seventeen years of her writing career, Louisa May Alcott wrote mostly "sensational stories," as she called them. With their catchy titles, those tales of murder, revenge, dark-robbed villains fighting noble lords, and unrealistic love, they were easy to sell to local magazines for $5, $10, even $15 each. They brought her the much needed money to pay her family's bills.

Chaotic and poor. Louisa's father was a philosopher who refused most work. He never provided for his family. The Alcotts moved more than thirty times because they couldn't afford rent. They had little money for food and clothing. When Louisa published Little Women, at the age of thirty-five, the Alcotts were finally able to pay off their many debts and live comfortably.

Six weeks (or somewhere between six and nine weeks.) The original edition was only half the story known today as Little Women, but six weeks was still a very short time to write it.

False. Louisa was twenty-five when the Alcotts bought Orchard House. She was happy her parents were able to settle down after the many moves they had been through, but, for herself, she "never wished to live there." She spent as little time as possible at Orchard House.

False. Louisa agreed to write Little Women only because she needed money. It took her eight months to start working on the book. "I could NOT write a girls' story, knowing little about any but my own sisters & always preferring boys," she wrote in her journal.

Acting. Louisa had always loved acting. She wrote several plays herself and often entertained family and friends with her dramatic skills. Ralph Waldo Emerson's son wrote that Louisa was a good actress and could make her audience's sides "split with laughter." When she was about seventeen years old, Louisa developed "stage fever" and seriously considered acting as a career. She didn't follow that path because she decided she lacked the skills to go from being a great amateur actress to a great professional one, but continued to play for friends and charity events for most of her life.

Louisa never married. She fell in love twice: first, at fifteen, with the already married Ralph Waldo Emerson; second, at thirty-two, with the much younger Ladislas Wisniewski. She received at least one marriage proposal (from a Southern gentleman.) But she never married. She liked her independence and joked that she didn't want to inflict her moodiness on a spouse.

False. It was Louisa's acquaintance, Margaret Fuller, who was on a passenger ship that sunk in the Atlantic Ocean on its way back from Italy. Louisa herself passed away at the age of fifty-five from what looked like a stroke or a cerebral hemorrhage.

Louisa May Alcott didn't admire Mark Twain's writing. Louisa worked as a domestic servant in her teens. She hated teaching but did it, on-and-off, for almost ten years to help pay the bills. And she became addicted to opium later in life - without it she couldn't get relief from pain or her insomnia. She didn't like Mark Twain's writing though and considered it too coarse for its young audience.