(Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

The gradual diminution of Alcott’s family circle was reflected in her fictions concerning the March family. Little Men tells of the death of John Bridge Pratt’s alter ego John Brooke. Jo’s Boys begins by announcing the death of the fictional Marmee. Yet there was one loss too painful for Alcott to reproduce in that novel. Alcott’s younger sister May, after two earlier visits to Europe, left America in 1876 for a longer sojourn to advance her studies in painting. She was never to return. In March 1878, she married a young Swiss businessman named Ernest Nieriker. In November the following year, she gave birth to a girl, whom she named Louisa May. The family’s joy did not last. Weakened by an infection she contracted during childbirth, May Alcott died on December 29, 1879. The baby, who acquired the nickname Lulu, was sent to America, and Alcott became her guardian. In the fall of 1882, Bronson Alcott suffered a debilitating stroke, and Alcott’s familial duties increased once more. Ideas for books still came in abundance, but writing was harder now. Years of using uncomfortable steel pens had crippled her right hand; she taught herself to write with her left. Even so, chronic illness and a constant cycle of daily cares slowed her production to a painful crawl. In spite of it all, she set herself about one task that she was determined to see through to the end: she would finish her Little Women trilogy.

Alcott began work on Jo’s Boys shortly before her father’s stroke. A decade and a half earlier, she had written Little Women at a furious pace, sometimes turning out a chapter a day. The twenty-two chapters of Jo’s Boys took her almost four years. Heartily tired of the enterprise, she confessed in the book’s final chapter her desire to summon “an earthquake which should engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it.”104 While the public eagerly devoured the fifty thousand copies of the first edition, Alcott quietly rejoiced, pleased to have disposed of the March family at last. She had dated the book’s preface July 4, 1886, symbolically declaring her independence from writing the juvenile novels that she now openly denounced as “moral pap for the young.”105 She hoped that, at last, she might find time and health to write the serious books for adults that she had been turning over in her mind for years. She tried almost every treatment imaginable, from homeopathy to mind cure to opium, in hopes of regaining her long-lost vigor.

It was not to be. By the end of 1886, chronic illness had led her to take up residence in a rest home in Roxbury, Massachusetts, which she fittingly called “Saint’s Rest.” Much of her journal for 1887 is a chronicle of intermittent illness and recurrent depression. In the late winter of 1888, Alcott’s father’s health went into its final decline. On March 1, Alcott went to visit him for the last time. She found him in bed, weak but smiling. When she asked him the cause of the smile on his face, he gestured skyward and said, “I am going up. Come with me.” Alcott replied, “I wish I could.”106 Three days later, Bronson Alcott died. Before news of his passing could reach her, Alcott felt a sensation like a weight of iron on her head. She lay down and closed her eyes. She opened them just once more before drifting into unconsciousness.