On this day in 1888, the author Louisa May Alcott passed away.

In her life, she wrote more than thirty novels and short stories and poem collections. Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts, is where she lived with her family from 1857 to 1877 – and a visit to Orchard House is like stepping into the pages of perhaps Alcott’s most famous novel, Little Women.

Why? Because Alcott not only wrote Little Women here in 1868, in only three months (I wish I was that efficient a writer!), but it was based upon her own family and the things that happened at Orchard House.

Like the heroine of the novel, Jo March (whom Alcott based on herself), she had three sisters. They were called Anna, Elizabeth and May, and they would act out plays that Alcott wrote, serving the perfect inspiration for the four March sisters.

Virtually everything in the house is the same as when the Alcott family lived there – you can even go and see the shelf desk that Alcott’s father built her, upon which she wrote Little Women.

Find out more information about Orchard House, the Alcott family and visiting here. We had such a wonderful time last autumn.