The Alcott girls were mostly educated at home. "I never went to school," Louisa wrote, "except to my father or such governesses as from time to time came into the family. . . . so we had lessons each morning in the study. And very happy hours they were to us, for my father taught in the wise way which unfolds what lies in the child's nature as a flower blooms, rather than crammed it, like a Strasburg goose, with more than it could digest. I never liked arithmetic nor grammar . . . but reading, writing, composition, history, and geography I enjoyed, as well as the stories read to us with a skill peculiarly his own."
Running in the Concord woods early one fall morning, she stopped to see the sunshine over the meadows. "A very strange and solemn feeling came over me as I stood there," she wrote in her journal, "with no sound but the rustle of the pines, no one near me, and the sun so glorious, as for me alone. It seemed as if I felt God as I never did before, and I prayed in my heart that I might keep that happy sense of nearness all my life."
Poverty made it necessary for Alcott to go to work at an early age as an occasional teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic helper, and writer. When the American Civil War broke out, she served as a nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown, D.C., for six weeks.
Louisa May Alcott never married. She was a guardian for her sister's daughter and adopted a nephew. Two days after her father died, Louisa died of a stroke at the age of 55.
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