Louisa May Alcott’s Utopian Feminist Workplace Novel

In January, 1861, Louisa May Alcott began writing a novel that she planned to call “Success.” Alcott was twenty-eight and living at Orchard House, the family home in Concord, Massachusetts. That same month, her mother became briefly yet seriously ill, and Alcott put down her manuscript to care for her. “Wrote on a new book—‘Success’—till Mother fell ill,” she writes in her journal. “I corked up my inkstand and turned nurse.”