Flower Fables

Louisa May Alcott's Flower Fables is a collection of six bedtime fairy tales for young children written in a very pleasant and accessible language. Each fable tells the fanciful adventures of different fantastic characters which range from wood elves and talking flowers to magic dwarves and sprites. It is widely believed that sixteen-year old Alcott first wrote these tales for the little daughter of the famous transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. In fact, critics and biographers agree that Alcott's family contact with renowned American writers and poets such as Emerson and Henry David Thoreau must have enriched her ideas about the romantic notion of the 'fairyland' as about the enchanting beauty of nature and the wilderness. The stories in Flower Fables emanate from the author's personal experience as a young storyteller when the children of her neighborhood in Concord, Massachusetts, used to gather around her to listen to the works of her pure imagination. Alcott's stories, such as 'The Frost King: or, the Power of Love,' 'Clover-Blossom,' or 'The Flower's Lesson,' display a sense of innocence and always convey a moral message of peace, love and responsibility towards nature.