Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, where her father, Bronson Alcott—a transcendentalist philosopher and an educator—directed a school for small children. Bronson later founded the Temple School in Boston, but public opposition to his radical methods and a declining enrollment forced him to close the school and incur a large debt. Suffering financially, the Alcotts eventually moved to Concord, Massachusetts, where Bronson tried to support the family by farming a small piece of land. This endeavor, too, failed.

When Bronson became ill and suffered a nervous breakdown, Alcott assumed various domestic jobs, took in sewing, and ran a small school to provide financial support for her mother, Abigail, and the rest of the family. An advocate of women's rights, Alcott remained unmarried in an age when marriage and motherhood were considered the central events of a...