Puffin in Bloom’s lush new editions of children’s classics are sure to entertain older girls.” –Vogue Thomas Niles, a publisher in Boston, asked 35-year-old Louisa in 1867 to write "a book for girls." She wrote Little Women at Orchard House from May to July 1868. Louisa and her sisters came of age in the novel, set in New England during Civil War. From her own individuality, Jo March, the first such American juvenile heroine, acted as a living, breathing person rather than the idealized stereotype that then prevailed in fiction of children. People best know American writer Louisa May Alcott for Little Women (1868), her largely autobiographical novel.

Heidi was the first one I read. Then Little Women (which I still need to finish) and then Anne Of Green Gables, and now The Little Princess (which I also need to finish as well. #MULITASKING) Career of Louisa as an author began with poetry and short stories in popular magazines. In 1854, people published Flower Fables, her first book, at 22 years of age. From her post as a nurse in Washington, District of Columbia, during the Civil War, she wrote home letters that based Hospital Sketches (1863), a milestone along her literary path. Louisa spent her childhood in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts, where visits to library of Ralph Waldo Emerson, excursions into nature with Henry David Thoreau, and theatricals in the barn at Hillside (now "Wayside") of Nathaniel Hawthorne enlightened her days.In the end, all of the March sisters, excluding Beth who dies of a disease she contracts while doing charity work, are married off. Jo to the professor, Meg to John Brooke, and Amy to Laurie. Philosopher-teacher Amos Bronson Alcott, educated his four daughters, Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth and May and Abigail May, wife of Amos, reared them on her practical Christianity. At 15 years of age in 1847, the poverty that plagued her family troubled her, who 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!" Anne, when we start the book, is an eleven-year-old girl who was an orphan and, when she first come to the Gables, imagines she is Lady Cordelia Fitzgerald and that her furniture is a beautiful mahogany (although she has NO idea how it looks but sounds so luxurious) and that the floor is covered with a white velvet carpet with pink roses all over it and that there are pink silk curtains draped over the windows. She images that the walls are hung with silver and gold brocade tapestry. She imagines that there is a couch heaped with silken coushins and so on and so on (if you haven't noticed, she imagines ALOT). Then, she makes friends with a girl named Diana and they do ALOT together. Anne and Diana both imagine together and name lots of things. Like, for instance, The Lake of Shining Waters, Lover's Lane, the Haunted Wood, (which the both get freaked out by. To bad. Because it's right infront of the Green Gables!) The White Way of Delight, and Dryad's Bubble. Then Gilbert comes along. Diana likes Gilbert. But I'm pretty sure Gilbert doesn't like Diana much. He likes Anne. To get Anne's attention, he does some crazy stuff. Including pulling Anne's bright orange braids and calling her "carrots" over and over again (boy, those days where weird). This makes Anne so angry (she hasn't really got any compliments) that she smashes her slate on Gilbert's head. This gets her into trouble. But Gilbert still likes her! Like Heidi, there's more to the story. But...

Like Jo March, her character in Little Women, young Louisa, a tomboy, claimed: "No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race, ... and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences...." Louisa wrote early with a passion. She and her sisters often acted out her melodramatic stories of her rich imagination for friends. Louisa preferred to play the "lurid" parts in these plays, "the villains, ghosts, bandits, and disdainful queens." 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, Louisa ably found work for many years. Three beloved classics, now in a revolutionary new mini format with beautiful cover illustrations by Anna Bond, the artist behind world-renowned stationery brand, Rifle Paper Co.

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