ABSTRACT
When Louisa May Alcott read Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte in 1857, she noted that the biography was "[a] very interesting, but sad one. So full of talent; and after working long, just as success, love, and happiness come, she dies."! Alcott's own mother commented that "[The Brontes'] struggle reminds me of my own dear girlS."2 Indeed, there are striking similarities in the histories of the two families. Both writers were the daughters of committed moralists-Patrick Bronte an Anglican clergyman, A. Bronson Alcott a philosopher and educator-who had unorthodox ideas about child-raising and little talent for financial support. Both women lived early lives of poverty and each eventually became her family's breadwinner. Both developed close ties to siblings, cemented by artistic endeavors (the Brontes with their fantasies of Angria and Gondal, the Alcotts with family theatricals) and ruptured by the loss of those same siblings. Both spent their later years caring for their elderly fathers: Bronte lived with and cared for her father to the end of her life, even after she married; Alcott cared for her father until his death, outliving him by only two days.
