Louisa May Alcott
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50 free Louisa May Alcott trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Louisa May Alcott is remembered for one novel about four sisters, but her own life was stranger than anything in it. She grew up poor among New England's most famous thinkers, worked as a servant, a teacher and an army nurse, and wrote sensational fiction in secret to pay the family's bills. This quiz covers the whole story: her unconventional parents and childhood homes, her weeks in a wartime ward, the real people behind the March family, the plot and characters of Little Women and its sequels, her lesser-known novels, and the actresses and directors who brought her work to the screen. It suits book-club readers, students of American literature and anyone who has loved Jo March. Questions run from easy to challenging, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which US president of the early 1900s said that he worshiped the books of Louisa May Alcott?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt counted himself a devoted reader, and he had company: Simone de Beauvoir and Ursula K. Le Guin also drew inspiration from her books.
Q 02Which disease ended Louisa May Alcott's work as a Civil War army nurse after only six weeks?
Typhoid fever
Typhoid fever left her critically ill partway through a planned three months, and her father had to travel south and take her home to Concord.
Q 03Louisa May Alcott was the first woman in Concord, Massachusetts, to do what in an 1879 school board election?
Register to vote
Register to vote is what she did first, and then she urged the other women of Concord to follow her, only to be disappointed when few did.
Q 04Which March sister in Little Women tours Europe with her aunt and comes home married to Laurie?
Amy
Amy is chosen for the trip that Jo had hoped to make, and Laurie, still stung by Jo's refusal, slowly falls in love with her abroad.
Q 05By what pet name do the four March sisters call their mother, a character Louisa May Alcott based on her own?
Marmee
Marmee was modelled on Abigail Alcott, who held the household together while her husband, a philosopher, often failed to bring in an income.
Q 06Who wrote and directed the 2019 film of Little Women, with Saoirse Ronan as Jo March?
Greta Gerwig
Greta Gerwig built her screenplay from Alcott's own letters and diaries as well as the novel, and began writing it on a trip to Big Sur.
Q 07Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women after her publisher, Thomas Niles, asked her to write what?
A book for girls
A book for girls was not her own idea, and she hesitated over it because she felt she knew more about boys.
Q 08In which state was Louisa May Alcott born, in a town called Germantown?
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania was home only briefly: the family left for Boston in 1834, when Louisa was still a toddler.
Q 09In Little Women, what does old Mr. Laurence give Beth March, who reminds him of his late granddaughter?
A piano
A piano that had belonged to the girl herself goes to Beth, one sign of the special, tender friendship the old man forms with her.
Q 10Which naturalist and family friend taught the young Louisa May Alcott biology and Native American history?
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was a source of girlhood romantic fantasies as well as lessons, and she later wrote a poem titled Thoreau's Flute.
Q 11Under which pen name did Louisa May Alcott publish lurid thrillers for adults during the 1860s?
A. M. Barnard
A. M. Barnard kept the secret well: her gothic thrillers went undiscovered until the 1940s and were not collected in books until the 1970s.
Q 12Which writer paid the Alcott family's rent in Concord and gave young Louisa May Alcott open access to his library?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson had talked her father into moving the family to Concord in the first place, and he went on to mentor Louisa in literature.
Q 13Which novelist bought the Alcott family's Concord home, Hillside, in 1852 and renamed it The Wayside?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Q 21Which 1863 book did Louisa May Alcott build from the letters she sent home during the Civil War?
Hospital Sketches
Hospital Sketches gave its narrator the comic name Tribulation Periwinkle, though the scenes stay virtually true to what Alcott herself saw.
Q 22In which city did Louisa May Alcott spend her six weeks of Civil War service in the winter of 1862?
Washington
Washington's Georgetown district housed the makeshift wards, where she found overcrowded, filthy quarters, bad food and poor ventilation.
Q 23Which utopian farm commune did Louisa May Alcott's father co-found in 1843, only for it to collapse within months?
Fruitlands
Nathaniel Hawthorne paid $1,500 for it and chose the new name because the house stood so close to the road that it could be mistaken for a coach stop.
Q 14Louisa May Alcott's parents, Bronson and Abigail, belonged to which New England philosophical movement?
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism shaped her earliest lessons: her father taught her the alphabet by forming the shapes of the letters with his own body.
Q 15In Little Women, what post does the March sisters' father hold in the Union Army during the Civil War?
Chaplain
Chaplain is the post he takes after losing all his money, which leaves his wife and four daughters at home in genteel poverty.
Q 16Which penniless professor does Jo March marry in Little Women after refusing her wealthy neighbour Laurie?
Fritz Bhaer
Fritz Bhaer, in full Friedrich, is a middle-aged German immigrant, and the couple go on to raise his two orphaned nephews beside two sons of their own.
Q 17On which holiday does the March sisters' father come home from the war in Little Women, a year after it opens?
Christmas Day
Christmas Day brings him back to where the novel began: it opens with his wife and daughters facing the same holiday without him.
Q 18Which actress earned an Oscar nomination for playing Jo March in the 1994 film of Little Women?
Winona Ryder
Winona Ryder was the reason the film was made at all: Columbia agreed to consider the project only on condition that she played Jo.
Q 19Which abolitionist, executed in 1859, did Louisa May Alcott describe at the time as a saint?
John Brown
John Brown was, in her words, Saint John the Just, and she later marked his death with a poem about a rose that bloomed on the day.
Q 20In which Concord home, now a museum, did Louisa May Alcott write Little Women at a desk built by her father?
Orchard House
Orchard House took its name from the apple orchard on the land, and it was the most permanent home the wandering Alcotts ever had.
Fruitlands refused to use animal labour on the farm, a rule that helped to undo it while many of the men spent their days philosophising.
Q 24Louisa May Alcott is buried on a hillside called Authors' Ridge in which Concord cemetery?
Sleepy Hollow
Sleepy Hollow became her resting place in March 1888, after she died just two days after her own father.
Q 25Under which title was the second part of Little Women, about the sisters' adult lives, published in Britain?
Good Wives
Good Wives was a name chosen by the publisher rather than by Alcott, and British editions still sell it as a separate book.
Q 26Which estate does Jo March inherit from her Aunt March in Little Women and turn into a school for boys?
Plumfield
Plumfield becomes the setting of the sequel Little Men, in which Jo and her husband educate a houseful of children there.
Q 27Which religious classic do the March sisters keep citing in Little Women, comparing their trials to its journey?
The Pilgrim's Progress
The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan's allegory, even supplies several of the novel's chapter titles, which name its characters and places.
Q 28In Little Women, which treat does the youngest March sister bring to school, earning a punishment from her teacher?
Pickled limes
Pickled limes cost her a strike on the palm and a spell standing on a platform in front of the whole class.
Q 29In Little Women, Meg March marries John Brooke, who is employed by the wealthy Laurence family as what?
Tutor
Tutor to young Laurie, who is being readied for college, is the job that brings him into the Marches' lives and into Meg's heart.
Q 30Louisa May Alcott blamed her years of poor health on poisoning by which substance, in a drug she was given in 1863?
Mercury
Mercury was in calomel, the medicine she was dosed with as an army nurse, though two modern doctors have suggested that she had lupus.