The Christmas Stories of Louisa May Alcott

Many great writers are defined and remembered by one piece of work that embeds itself into the culture and continues to be enjoyed by every generation since its publication. For Louisa May Alcott it was the brilliant book, Little Women. She was born in 1832, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, into an educationally progressive but poor family who were Transcendentalists. She received part of her lessons from distinguished family friends such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. These influences on the young Louisa together with her early working life as seamstress, teacher, governess, domestic helper provided much of the material for her later novels. During the Civil War she worked as a nurse. The letters she wrote home from Georgetown DC were later published and brought sufficient recognition to continue writing not only her passionate novels under the nom de plume A. M. Barnard but also her beloved children's stories. However, by 1868 she received greater success with critics and audiences with the publication of the first part of the semi autobiographical, Little Women, and despite ill health continued to write until her death at the age of 55. Alcott was also a poet and a short story writer and here we have gathered together some of those Christmas stories which present her in a very different light and showcase a breadth of talent and experience that still delights to this very day