Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott, the famous author, was likewise born and nurtured during the conservative times of the early nineteenth century, during the American Civil War. Alcott chose not to marry and instead chose to live her whole life as a single woman. May Alcott grew up surrounded by some of the world’s most prominent intellectuals of the period, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, so she had her choice of big-headed guys. Her single status, though, seems to be wholly voluntary.
“I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body… because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man,” she said in an interview when asked why she chose to remain single (unlike her female characters). That would have definitely clarified things up.