Lulu's Library: Complete Volumes 1-3

by Louisa May Alcott

Lulu's Library is a book by American novelist Louisa May Alcott, first published between 1886 and 1889. It is a three volume set that includes thirty-two short stories for children. Lulu was the name of Alcott's niece who she took care of after the death of her younger sister. This edition presents the stories in one complete volume. The stories included A Christmas Dream; The Candy Country; Naughty Jocko; The Skipping Shoes; Cockyloo; Rosy's Journey; How They Ran Away; The Fairy Box; A Hole in the Wall; The Piggy Girl; The Three Frogs; Baa! Baa!; The Frost King and how the Fairies conquered him; Lilybell and Thistledown, or the Fairy Sleeping Beauty; Ripple, the Water Sprite; Eva's Visit to Fairyland; Sunshine, and her Brothers and Sisters; The Fairy Spring; Queen Aster; The Brownie and the Princess; Mermaids; Little Bud; The Flower's Story; Recollections of My Childhood; A Christmas Turkey, and How It Came; The Silver Party; The Blind Lark; Music and Macaroni; The Little Red Purse; Sophie's Secret; Dolly's Bedstead; and, Trudel's Siege.

452 pages, Paperback

Published January 6, 2022

About the author

Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet best known for writing the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May Alcott and Amos Bronson Alcott, she grew up among many well-known intellectuals of the day, including Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Alcott's family suffered from financial difficulties, and while she worked to help support the family from an early age, she also sought an outlet in writing. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used pen names such as A.M. Barnard, under which she wrote lurid short stories and sensation novels for adults that focused on passion and revenge.
Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts, and is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters, Abigail May Alcott Nieriker, Elizabeth Sewall Alcott, and Anna Bronson Alcott Pratt. The novel was well-received at the time and is still popular today among both children and adults. It has been adapted for stage plays, films, and television many times.
Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist and remained unmarried throughout her life. She also spent her life active in reform movements such as temperance and women's suffrage. She died from a stroke in Boston on March 6, 1888, just two days after her father's death.