Louisa Learns to Write: Louisa May Alcott Creates Little Women

Though others have retraced Louisa May Alcott’s journey from childhood to successful author, here Hannigan employs a checklist of “ten habits for becoming a writer” that offers younger readers with similar ambitions a particularly promising road map to follow. Beginning with Jo March’s redoubtable line “I like good strong words that mean something,” this short book first places Alcott “at the heart of her family,” where “she stayed her whole life.” It then goes on to highlight how reading, observing, and journaling in her “imagination book,” as well as later experiences failing and persevering as a hack writer of cheap thrillers and a nurse during the Civil War, all prepared her to write Little Women. A closing timeline, resource list, and telling chart of parallels between the Alcott and March families enhance and enrich this stimulating biographical profile. So do Moore’s painted scenes of the budding scribe looking mostly introspective, in both solitary and group settings, often holding a book or writing in one.