Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women [Paperback]

Cornelia Meigs (Author)

Book Description

Grade Level: 3 and up

Biography tracing the fascinating life of Louisa May Alcott from her happy childhood in Pennsylvania and Boston to her success as a writer of such classics as Little women.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers (October 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316565946
• ISBN-13: 978-0316565943
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.6 x 7.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #307,400 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #43 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Children's Books > People & Places > Biographies > Literary
  • #63 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Children's Books > People & Places > Girls & Women > Nonfiction
  • #86 in Books > Children's Books > Biographies > Literary

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Classic, October 10, 2001

By 

A 10-year old reader (Ipswich) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women (Paperback)

I think that Invincible Louisa is a wonderful, well written book. No offence meant to the other reviewers of this book, but I think that Invincible Louisa did not drag along slowly at all. It is a wonderful book for 11, 12, and 13 year olds, or 10 year olds who are advanced in reading. However, to like this book, you have to like Little Women, or any other of Louisa's books. If you like books about American History, around the time of the Civil War, you will also probably like this book. It is a vivid account of Louisa May Alcott and her faimly's life. It tells how they struggled through poverty and other hardships that would have destroyed any other faimly's life.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Still a Classic 33 Years Later!, July 16, 2006

By 

Ruth Z. Deming "Backyard Trees" (Willow Grove, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women (Paperback)

The mark of a superb biography, as is this 1934 Newbery Awardwinner, is that it details the momentous events of the times, along with the tale of the heroine, Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888). The author immerses us in gorgeous poetic language, and plenty of important vocabulary words for the young adult reader. Within these 246 pages we find the origins of the famous characters of Alcott's "Little Women" and "Little Men," a necessity in a biography, and retrace Alcott's steps through her birth in the Germantown area of Philadelphia, through her family's poverty-stricken years in Boston. Alcott realizes her ne'er do-well brilliant father, Bronson, is a dreamer and not a realist; yet his prophetic ideas on education later took hold.

The mid-1800s were a pivotal time in American history, the era of the Abolitionists, the Underground Railway, The Civil War and of Idealist Philosophies such as the Shaker religion and the Transcendental Movement with contemporaries such as Emily Dickinson, Thoreau and Emerson. The Alcott Family breaks bread with the latter great men, and indeed, her early mentor Emerson tells Louisa, "Your father might have talked with Plato."

She is much like her father. Impulsively, she travels at age 30 to Washington, DC, to become a nurse to the wounded Northerners in the Civil War. Hopelessness & disorganization is rife in the make-shift hospital, reminiscent of today's stalled attempts to rebuild New Orleans: "One soldier, with such a bad heart that he should never have been taken into the army... was given heavy trays to carry... When [such injustices] were practiced in her ward, Louisa had a simple remedy. She herself lifted and carried and got down on her knees to scrub the floor."

Alcott's tenacity, devotion to family, love of learning and of writing, make her an ideal heroine for today's Little Women. Recommended for curious readers from age 10 to 100.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Plodding right along, April 16, 2008

By 

A. LEJEUNE "scarlettdoll" (Prairieville, LA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of Little Women (Paperback)

I have to agree with the majority of the other reviewers. This book does read rather slowly. It is a good account of the life of Louisa May Alcott, from birth to death but it is somehow flat. Every now and again, there would be a description that could paint a vivid picture but for the most part, it just reads like a listing of colorless facts.

I think the problem lies primarily in the reader's expectations. The book description says this book is for anyone who loved "Little Women" and wants to find out what really happened to Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy but the author doesn't show an actual comparison until the very end, when she concludes the book. Technically, the book does tell you what happened to each member of the family but I think it would have been more enjoyable if she'd shown how the real life events of Louisa were reshaped into the parts of the story, comparing as she went along. As it is, I feel like I got a better sense of Louisa May Alcott from reading "Little Women" than I did from this book.