Birthdays of C.S. Lewis and Louisa May Alcott
Next: November 29, 2026
Two storytellers, one birthday.
The story
Where it comes from
This Story marks a shared birthday. Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, on 29 November 1832, and C.S. Lewis was born in Belfast on 29 November 1898. Alcott wrote Little Women in 1868, when her publisher asked for a story for girls, and drew on her own family of four sisters. Lewis published The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950, the first of the seven Chronicles of Narnia. Between them they gave readers the March family's parlour and the land behind the wardrobe.
How it's celebrated
Readers mark the day by going back to the books. Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts, where Alcott wrote and set Little Women, is a museum, and about 80 per cent of the furnishings on display belonged to the family. In east Belfast, C.S. Lewis Square has seven bronze sculptures from the first Narnia book, Aslan among them. Anywhere else, a library card and a winter evening will do.
Did you know
- Alcott shared her birthday with her father, Bronson Alcott, who wrote of 'the birth of a second daughter on my own birth-day'.
- The Chronicles of Narnia have sold more than 115 million copies and are published in about sixty languages.
- A 48-episode Japanese anime of Little Women, Ai no Wakakusa Monogatari, ran every Sunday evening through 1987 as part of Nippon Animation's World Masterpiece Theater.
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