Little Women

Presented by - Nonentities (A)

Location - Main House

Standard Ticket Prices

Curtain Up 7.30pm

PRESS RELEASE

‘Little Women with Big Hearts’

Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, was first published on September 30, 1868, and concerns the lives and loves of four sisters growing up during the American Civil War.
It was based on Alcott's own experiences as a child in Concord, Massachusetts, with her sisters.

Little Women is one of the best-loved books of all time, dealing as it does with the hard learned lessons of growing up. Through their dreams, plays, pranks, letters, illnesses, and courtships, we see a family maturing through difficult times, historically, personally and financially. Even today women of all ages can relate to the triumphs and tragedies survived by this remarkable family: lovely Meg, talented Jo, frail Beth, and spoiled Amy and their undaunted mother, Mrs March.

This charming adaptation by Emma Reeves brought to the stage in a stunning costume production by the ‘Nonentities’ will bring these remarkable young ladies alive to be enjoyed by yet another generation of women.

A Brief Biography of Louisa M. Alcott

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 29, 1832. She and her three sisters, Anna, Elizabeth and May were educated by their father, philosopher/ teacher, Bronson Alcott and raised on the practical Christianity of their mother, Abigail May.

Louisa spent her childhood in Boston and in Concord, Massachusetts, where her days were enlightened by visits to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s library, excursions into nature with Henry David Thoreau and theatricals in the barn at Hillside (now Hawthorne’s"Wayside").

Like her character, Jo March in Little Women, young Louisa was a tomboy: "No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race," she claimed, " and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences...."

For Louisa, writing was an early passion. She had a rich imagination and often her stories became melodramas that she and her sisters would act out for friends. Louisa preferred to play the "lurid" parts in these plays, "the villains, ghosts, bandits, and disdainful queens." At age 15, troubled by the poverty that plagued her family, she vowed: "I will do something by and by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!"

Confronting a society that offered little opportunity to women seeking employment, Louisa determined "...I will make a battering-ram of my head and make my way through this rough and tumble world." Whether as a teacher, seamstress, governess, or household servant, for many years Louisa did any work she could find.

Louisa’s career as an author began with poetry and short stories that appeared in popular magazines. In 1854, when she was 22, her first book Flower Fables was published. A milestone along her literary path was Hospital Sketches (1863) based on the letters she had written home from her post as a nurse in Washington, DC as a nurse during the Civil War, when she contracted typhoid. The treatment at that time contained high doses of Mercury, and she suffered from this for the rest of her life.

When Louisa was 35 years old, her publisher Thomas Niles in Boston asked her to write "a book for girls." Little Women was written at Orchard House from May to July 1868. The novel is based on Louisa and her sisters’ coming of age and is set in Civil War New England. Jo March was the first American juvenile heroine to act from her own individuality; a living, breathing person rather than the idealized stereotype then prevalent in children’s fiction.

In all, Louisa published over 30 books and collections of stories. She finally succumbed to Mercury poisoning and died on March 6, 1888, only two days after her father, and is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.