Elizabeth Sewall Alcott


Elizabeth Sewall "Lizzie" Alcott was one of the two younger sisters of Louisa May Alcott. She was born in 1835 and died at the age of 22.

Biography

She was originally named Elizabeth Peabody Alcott in honor of her father Bronson's teaching assistant at the Temple School and close friend of her mother, Abba. By age three, however, after a falling out between Bronson and Elizabeth Peabody, her name was changed to Elizabeth Sewall Alcott, after her mother's mother, Dorothy Sewall May.
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In her semi-autobiographical novel, Little Women'', Louisa May Alcott represented her sister as Beth. She wrote:
In 1856, Lizzie contracted scarlet fever while helping a poor German family. Although she recovered, she was permanently weakened. Her father Bronson was on a tour of the Western United States and had reached as far as Cincinnati when he heard that Lizzie, known to be ill, had taken a turn for the worse. By February 1858, she refused to take medicine and told her father, "I can best be spared of the four." As time went by, she had grown weaker and thinner. On March 14, 1858, Lizzie Alcott had died in her sleep. She was only 22 years old, about three months short of her 23rd birthday. On the same day, Louisa wrote in her journal:
At the moment of her death, Louisa, her mother, and the doctor saw a ghost-like mist rising from Lizzie's body. Her funeral was a small affair, with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn serving as pallbearers. Lizzie was interred at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.