Louisa May Alcott was widely known during her lifetime as the Children's Friend, a reputation based principally upon her domestic sagas for young adults, Little Women or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868, 1869) and the other books in the Little Women series. Since her death, her reputation has been greatly extended. As a result of the discovery, long after her death, of a large corpus of sensational narratives written in secret and published anonymously or pseudonymously, Alcott has been recognized as a far more complex and prolific writer in a greater variety of genres than was originally thought. Her reputation now is not only that of Children's Friend but also that of a popular literary experimenter.

Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, on 29 November 1832 to Abigail May Alcott and Amos Bronson Alcott. On the day of her birth her father wrote to his father-in-law, Colonel Joseph May:

It is...