al comfort and the artistic quality of her works to the demands of her family. She "plunged into a vortex" to write Work but had to stop to nurse her sister Anna through pneumonia; when she finished the book, it was "Not what it should be,-too many interruptions. Should like to do one book in peace, and see if it wouldn't be good." When her father was dying, she regularly dragged herself out to see him, although very ill herself; two days after his death, free at last of family obligations, she died in Boston.Alcott will always be remembered for Little Women , the classic American story of girls growing up. In her own time, it established her reputation as a purveyor of perceptive and sympathetic, but always morally uplifting, literature for young people. The subversive, feminist element in her books has only recently been clearly recognized. We now see not so much "the Children's Friend" as a deeply conflicted woman whose work richly expresses the tensions of female lives in nineteenth-century America....
