"'Stay' is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary." ~Louisa May Alcott
Happy Birthday to Louisa May Alcott, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1832. She died two days after the death of her father, Bronson Alcott, in March of 1888.
She is my favorite American author. I think I'd like to study her in Graduate school. side note: There's so much I'd like to read and study, can you relate?
Take a virtual tour of Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts. Read her satirical work, Transcendental Wild Oats, which is said to be a reflection of her own Father and Mother's disagreements about living in the Transcendentalists' Utopian Experiment at Fruitlands. Read this interesting analysis at the Domestic Goddess website.
Even so, Louisa did love and admire her friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and wrote about another side of him that the public did not get to see or know in her Reminiscences of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Switching gears from Alcott and the Transcendentalists, those 19th century writers and thinkers that we are studying in American Literature these days, today also marks the birthdate of C. S. Lewis in 1898. I came to know about and read Lewis for the first time in my college Philosophy class. The first book of his that I read was Screwtape Letters, then The Great Divorce, and Mere Christianity.
The Professor of this class, Mr. Parmer, was probably my favorite Prof. of my college career. He and his wife, whom I had as a writing Prof., opened up the small world in my mind to the opportunities and possibilites (that's a cliché, but so true) that I could only wish for and dream about in my youth....missions, travelling, learning languages, experiencing the Lord's church internationally, just to name a few. They also opened up the world of great books for me.
The day is fleeting, and I've been sidetracked once again*, and I must get back to reading with the boys, and to the duties of the household.
Javamom
*by my teenaged son who wants me to help him hack into his sister's computer while she is out of town babysitting for a few days. How could she have the nerve to put a password on her computer while she is away? Can you say "boundaries?" Ahem.
1 comment:
Louisa May Alcott may just be my favorite author as well. Or maybe Jane Austen. Or C.S. Lewis, whom I "met" when I was in high school in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. (I didn't even know it was Christian allegory then!) Or Charlotte Bronte. (Oh, it's so tough to pick just one!) Thanks for letting us know about the birthdays, and for the Alcott links!
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