University of Virginia Library

“Miss Alcott performed a brief tour of hospital duty during the late war. Her
career as nurse was terminated by an attack of dangerous illness. But she made
good use of her time, and her sketches of hospital life, if briefer than could be
wished, make up in quality what they lack in quantity. They are, indeed, the most
graphic and natural pictures of life in the great army hospitals that have yet
appeared. Free from all affected sentimentalism, they blend in a strange and
piquant manner the grave and gay, the lively and severe.”

“It is a book which is thoroughly enjoyable, and with which little fault need be
found. It is not a pretentious work, and the author has only aimed at telling the
story of her experience as an army hospital nurse, in an easy, natural style; but the
incidents which she has given us are so varied, — sometimes amusingly humorous
and sometimes tenderly pathetic, — and her narrative is so simple and straight-forward
and truthful, that the reader's attention is chained, and he finds it impossible
to resist the charm of the pleasant, kindly, keen-sighted Nurse Perriwinkle.”

“Such is the title of a volume by Miss Louisa M. Alcott, author of `Little
Women,' one of the most charming productions of the day. Miss Alcott is a New
England woman of the best type, — gifted, refined, progressive in her opinions,
heroic, self-sacrificing. She devoted her time and means to the service of her
country in the darkest days of the Rebellion, visiting the camp and the hospital,
devoting herself to the care of the sick and the dying, braving danger and privation
in the sacred cause of humanity. The results of her experience are embodied in
these `Sketches,' which are graphic in narrative, rich in incident, and dramatic
in style. Miss Alcott has a keen sense of the ludicrous, and, while she does not
trifle with her subject, seeks to amuse as well as instruct her reader. She has the
sunniest of tempers, and sees a humorous side even to the sad life of the hospital.”

“This volume illustrates excellently well the characteristics of Miss Alcott's
talent as a novelist. Her subjects are always portions of her own experience; her
characters always the people she has known, under slight disguises, or strangely
metamorphosed, as may happen, but easily to be recognized by those who have
the key to them. In this she resembles many other writers; but there is a peculiar
blending of this realism with extreme idealization in most of her stories. She
succeeds best — indeed, she only succeeds at all — in her real pictures. Her descriptions
are as faithful and as varied in their fidelity as life itself, so long as she
restricts herself to what she has actually seen and known. When she cleaves to
real experiences, she is sure of her effect; and her success is always greater in
proportion to the depth of the experience she has to portray. For this reason
we have always thought `Hospital Sketches' her best piece of work.”