Her first successful book Hospital Sketches, a fictionalized memoir based on her experience on the front lines, was a hit because “people wanted to know more of the real stories of the Civil War,” says Turnquist. While she couldn’t be as physically active, she stayed mentally active by writing. to see him, in real life that all happened to Alcott herself.

March as a Union Army chaplain in the Civil War who falls ill, requiring Marmee to rush to a hospital in Washington, D.C. She never fully recovered, and would always be weak. She was an avid runner and tree-climber until the Civil War, when she served as a nurse and contracted typhoid pneumonia. The second-oldest March sister Alcott based on herself. For background on the real people in Alcott’s life who inspired the characters in Little Women, TIME spoke to Jan Turnquist, a historical advisor to the show and Executive Director of Orchard House in Concord, Mass., the Alcott family home-turned-museum where Alcott wrote and set the famous novel. Proof of the story’s enduring resonance can be seen in its many adaptations, the latest of which, the two-part drama Little Women co-produced by Masterpiece and the BBC, debuts on PBS on Mother’s Day, starring Willa Fitzgerald as Meg, Maya Hawke as Jo, Annes Elwy as Beth, and Kathryn Newton as Amy, Emily Watson as their mother Marmee, and Dylan Baker as their father, Mr. Alcott theorized that one reason it was so successful was that grain of truth on which it was based, as she wrote that November before starting to write volume two, which would come out the following year: “Pleasant notices and letters arrive, and much interest in my little women, who seem to find friends by their truth to life, as I hoped.”

Louisa alcott