Shortly after she arrived, the hospital received scores of wounded soldiers from the bloody battles at Fredericksburg and Antietam: “3 or 4 hundred men in all stages of suffering, disease & death” she later wrote. The Union had a reputation for being poorly managed and in ill repair, and Alcott wrote home to her family about the rotting wood floorboards and the swarming rats. Louisa spent six weeks working at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, not the assignment she had hoped for. On December 12, 1862, she arrived in Washington, D.C., where she had arranged to work as a nurse, an opportunity only newly available to women.

When the war broke out, Louisa was determined to contribute to the Union cause. One of Alcott’s earliest childhood memories was opening a stove and finding a runaway slave hiding inside. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was friends with William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, and the Alcott home was at one point a stop on the Underground Railroad. Alcott’s letters home from the front lines, later published as Hospital Sketches (1863), proved that her true gift lay not in inventing new worlds, but in observing the one around her.Īlcott’s family were ardent abolitionists. But Alcott’s creative transformation had less to do with winning the affections of a shy scholar and more to do with her time serving in military hospitals during the American Civil War. In this way, Jo’s life mimics Alcott’s own transition from a writer of garish thrillers to sentimental tales of everyday life. Later in the story, Jo goes on to write a novel less mired in sensation and more rooted in her experience, a book not unlike Little Women. She rushes upstairs and destroys her latest story: “Demon of the Jura.” In Alcott’s time, Gothic tales were often the only type of fiction that publishers would accept from women, whom their male editors considered to be extravagantly emotional and thus suited to the genre.

Jo panics, fearing that Bhaer might accidentally come across one of her drafts. Bhaer crumples the paper up and tosses it into the fire, annoyed that such “bad trash” is published at all. At the same time, Jo falls in love with the high-minded and serious Professor Bhaer, whom she one day observes reading a newspaper: “Jo glanced at the sheet and saw a pleasing illustration composed of a lunatic, a corpse, a villain, and a viper.” Jo thinks this horrifying tableau might, in fact, be an illustration for one of her own grisly stories.

In Louisa May Alcott’s much beloved novel Little Women (1868), Jo March earns extra money writing low-brow sensational stories, or “blood and thunder tales,” as Alcott calls them.

Wounded soldiers resting with a nurse, Civil War, circa 1864

Hospital sketches