Louisa May Alcott is best-known for her novel Little Women, but she wrote many other novels and was a very popular author in her time. She was also a member of a famous family and knew many of the important literary figures of her day. Alcott derived elements of her novels from her own life and often included herself autobiographically, notably in the character of Jo in Little Women.
Her father was Bronson Alcott, a member of the Transcendentalist movement whose best-known adherent may have been Ralph Waldo Emerson. Alcott was also an educator who implemented his ideas about education at several schools, such as the Temple School at Boston that he founded in 1834. Later, he was school superintendent at Concord and elsewhere. In his educational structure, he tried to create the harmonious development of the physical, intellectual, aesthetic, and moral natures of the individual, and he placed a stress on the imagination. His favored method was conversational instruction, and he introduced such innovations as gymnastics, organized play, and the honor system. He called his personal philosophy Personalism, but he was in addition an extreme Transcendentalist, though he was opposed to its doctrine of individualism and instead believed that all seemingly separate minds are in fact linked to a central Mind.
Alcottsaw words as the means to disclose the spiritual content of nature, and the imagination had as its primary activity the formation of language out of nature. Through the analysis of words, the mind is revealed to itself in the mirror of nature as the repository and the instigator alike of spiritual insight:
Alcott's teaching was thus designed to be a complete survey of human consciousness, the elements of which he distinguished under such general headings as Love, Conscience, Will, Faith, Judgment, etc. Over and over the lesson was conveyed that in the operations of the soul, as in those of external nature, a div...