Louisa May Alcott: The Woman behind Little Women

Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo’s Boys. 

Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May Alcott and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Nevertheless, her family suffered severe financial difficulties and Alcott worked to help support the family from an early age. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard.

Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts and is loosely based on Alcott’s childhood experiences with her three sisters. The novel was very well received and is still a popular children’s novel today. Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist. She never married and died in Boston.

     The Jazz age takes its name from F. Scott Fitzgerald and jazz music, which saw a tremendous surge in popularity among many segments of society. Among the prominent concerns and trends of the period are the public embrace of technological developments (typically seen as progress)-cars, air travel and the telephone-as well as new modernist trends in social behavior, the arts, and culture.
Central developments included Art Deco design and architecture. A great theme of the age was individualism and a greater emphasis on the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment in the wake of the misery, destruction and perceived hypocrisy and waste of WWI and pre-war values.

In Literature

     Perhaps one of the most representative literary works of the age is American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), which highlighted what some describe as the decadence and hedonism of the post-WW1 age, as well as new social and sexual attitudes, and the growth of individualism.
     Fitzgerald is largely credited with coining the term, which he used in such books as “Tales of the Jazz Age.” The second novel that he wrote, “The Beautiful and Damned” (1922), also deals with the era and its effect on a young married couple. Fitzgerald’s last completed novel, “Tender Is the Night,” takes place in the same decade but is set in France and Switzerland not New York, and consequently is not widely considered a Jazz Age novel per se.
     Additional works on the Jazz Age might include Thomas Wolfe’s titanic 1935 book “Of Time and the River,” which takes its protagonist from the depths of the Carolinas, to Harvard, and finally to New York in the 1920s, but for a truly harrowing view of the end of the Jazz Age, Wolfe’s “You Can’t Go Home Again” is recommended for its party scene on the night of the 1929 stock market crash. Edith Wharton’s late novel “Twilight Sleep,” set in New York and written in 1927, is a great example of social critiques of Jazz Age values and lifestyles. Additionally,The Rosy Crucifixion of Henry Miller, “Sexus,” “Plexus,” and “Nexus,” is set in New York during this period. (http://www.squidoo.com/jazzage) 

Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. They were meant to be a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by various converging ideas and influences. They centre on Joyce’s idea of an epiphany: a moment where a character experiences self-understanding or illumination. Many of the characters in Dubliners later appear in minor roles in Joyce’s novel Ulysses. The initial stories in the collection are narrated by child protagonists, and as the stories continue, they deal with the lives and concerns of progressively older people. This is in line with Joyce’s tripartite division of the collection into childhood, adolescence, and maturity.

The stories

• The Sisters – After the priest Father Flynn dies, a young boy who was close to him and his family deal with it only superficially.
• An Encounter – Two schoolboys playing truant encounter an elderly man.
• Araby – A boy falls in love with the sister of his friend, but fails in his quest to buy her a worthy gift from the Araby bazaar.
• Eveline – A young woman abandons her plans to leave Ireland with a sailor.
• After the Race – College student Jimmy Doyle tries to fit in with his wealthy friends.
• Two Gallants – Two con men, Lenehan and Corley, find a maid who is willing to steal from her employer.
• The Boarding House – Mrs. Mooney successfully manoeuvres her daughter Polly into an upwardly mobile marriage with her lodger Mr. Doran.
• A Little Cloud – Little Chandler’s dinner with his old friend Ignatius Gallaher casts fresh light on his own failed literary dreams. The story reflects also on Chandler’s mood upon realizing his baby son has replaced him as the centre of his wife’s affections.
• Counterparts – Farrington, a lumbering alcoholic scrivener, takes out his frustration in pubs and on his son Tom.
• Clay – The old maid Maria, a laundress, celebrates Halloween with her former foster child Joe Donnelly and his family.
• A Painful Case – Mr. Duffy rebuffs Mrs. Sinico, then four years later realizes he has condemned her to loneliness and death.
• Ivy Day in the Committee Room – Minor politicians fail to live up to the memory of Charles Stewart Parnell.
• A Mother – Mrs. Kearney tries to win a place of pride for her daughter, Kathleen, in the Irish cultural movement, by starring her in a series of concerts, but ultimately fails.
• Grace – After Mr. Kernan injures himself falling down the stairs in a bar, his friends try to reform him through Catholicism.
• The Dead – Gabriel Conroy attends a party, and later, as he speaks with his wife, has an epiphany about the nature of life and death. At 15–16,000 words this story has also been classified as a novella. The Dead was adapted into a film by John Huston, written for the screen by his son Tony and starring his daughter Anjelica as Mrs. Conroy.

Style

In Dubliners Joyce rarely uses hyperbole or emotive language, relying on simplicity and close detail to create a realistic setting. This ties the reader’s understanding of people to their environments. He does not tell readers what to think, rather they are left to come to their own conclusions; this is evident when contrasted with the moral judgements displayed by earlier writers such as Charles Dickens. This frequently leads to a lack of traditional dramatic resolution within the stories.

It has been argued (by Hugh Kenner in Joyce’s Voices, among others)^[3] that Joyce often allows his narrative voice to gravitate towards the voice of a textual character. For example, the opening line of ‘The Dead’ reads “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.” She is not, in this instance, “literally” run off her feet, and neither would Joyce have thought so; rather, the narrative lends itself to a misuse of language typical of the character being described.

Joyce often uses descriptions from the characters’ point of view, although he very rarely writes in the first person. This can be seen in Eveline, when Joyce writes, “Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne”. Here, Joyce employs an empirical perspective in his description of characters and events; an understanding of characters’ personalities is often gained through an analysis of their possessions. The first paragraph of A Painful Case is an example of this style, as well as Joyce’s use of global to local description of the character’s possessions. Joyce also employs parodies of other writing styles; part of A Painful Case is written as a newspaper story, and part of Grace is written as a sermon. This stylistic motif may also be seen in Ulysses (for example, in the Aeolus episode, which is written in a newspaper style), and is indicative of a sort of blending of narrative with textual circumstances.

The collection as a whole displays an overall plan, beginning with stories of youth and progressing in age to culminate in The Dead. Great emphasis is laid upon the specific geographic details of Dublin, details to which a reader with a knowledge of the area would be able to directly relate. The multiple perspectives presented throughout the collection serve to contrast the characters in Dublin at thistime.

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)