A Merry Christmas and Other Christmas Stories; Penguin, 2014

Louisa May Alcott's enchanting Christmas stories, presented in a beautiful hardcover edition perfect for giving as a gift.

A Merry Christmas collects the best holiday stories of Louisa May Alcott, from the yuletide festivities of Marmee and her 'little women' to the moving 'What Love Can Do'. Deeply influenced by real-life events, including characters based on Alcott's family members and drawing from her experiences participating in the suffrage and abolitionist movements, these stories have the authentic texture and detail of Christmas in nineteenth-century America.

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1832. Her family later moved to Concord, Massachusetts, where Alcott was influenced by their neighbours Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. At a young age, Louisa took on some of the family's financial burdens, working as a domestic, a teacher, and a writer. In 1868 and 1869, fame and fortune came with the publication of Little Women. The author of many novels and an active campaigner for temperance and women's suffrage, Alcott died in 1888.