Mumbai: In what seems to be providence, a day after Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty is quoted by an English daily saying that Little Women should be included in school textbooks, here we are celebrating its author's 184th birth anniversary. And there’s a lovely Google Doodle paying a tribute to Alcott with some of her most well-known characters.
"I like good strong words that mean something," says Jo March in Little Women.
The same could be said of the novel's author, Louisa May Alcott, who was born in New England 184 years ago today.
Raised by transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott, Louisa grew up in the company of luminaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau.
These well-known intellectuals fostered in her a strong sense of civic duty, which led to her coming a suffragist, abolitionist, and feminist in later life.
Alcott volunteered as a nurse during the American Civil War, and her family's home was a station on the Underground Railroad - a vast network of people who helped fugitive slaves escape to free states and Canada during the 19th century.
She was active in the women's suffrage movement and became the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts.
Through it all, she wrote novels and short stories tirelessly, sometimes working 14 hours a day.
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, under which she wrote novels for young adults.
Today she is best known as the author of the novel Little Women, published in 1868, which is loosely based on Alcott's own childhood experiences.
Originally published in two volumes, it follows the lives of four sisters - Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March - detailing their passage from childhood to womanhood.
The novel was very well received and is still a popular children's novel today. It has been adapted for film twice as silent films, and four times with sound.
The Little Women series includes Good Wives (the second half of the book), Little Men and Jo’s Boys. Her other works included An Old-Fashioned Girl, Eight Cousins and Under the Lilacs, among many others – some even written under the nom de plume AM Barnard – but none of them gained the kind of fan following as Little Women.
Alcott remained unmarried throughout her life and died in Boston on March 6, 1888.
Today's Doodle, designed by Sophie Diao, portrays the principal characters of Little Women - Beth, Jo, Amy, and Meg March - as well as Jo's best friend Laurie, their neighbour.
The coltish Jo was Louisa's vision of herself - strewing manuscript pages in her wake, charging ahead with the courage of her convictions, and cherishing her family above all else.
