Lydia Olsson (1874-1958) was the daughter of Swedish immigrants, born in Kansas in the late nineteenth century. She moved to Illinois and attended Augustana College, where she kept diaries the documented her experience as a young woman coming of age in an exciting time, one where education and access was opening to women.

During this time, Olsson turned to one book in particular for comfort and direction: Little Women. As she navigated relationships, college, friendship, sisterhood, grief, she saw her own experiences reflected in Alcott's seminal work. Today, we can read Lydia's diaries as a time capsule of the 1890s, but we also see they have extraordinary resonance with our own experience as readers of Little Women.

In this episode, we discuss:

Lydia Olsson's relationship to Little Women and Louisa May Alcott and the passages she chose to capture in her diaries
How Little Women played a role in one immigrant-family's experience of assimilating into American culture and understanding what it meant to be American in the late 19th century
Marriage, spinsterhood, queerness, female friendships, and emotional fulfillment in relationships, and how these were evolving and changing in Lydia's time
The power of fiction in the lives of women across centuries

More about Rebecca: https://rebeccahopman.com/

More about Lydia: https://lydiaolsson.wordpress.com/

Rebecca Hopman is an archivist and historian who specializes in women’s history and life writing, American culture, and the history of entertainment. Currently, she serves as the Genealogy Services Librarian at the Wisconsin Historical Society, where she helps people discover their family stories. Prior to her work as a genealogy librarian, she specialized in topics as varied as the history of physics (at the American Institute of Physics); the art, science, and technology of glass (at the Corning Museum of Glass); and the groundbreaking career of Barbara Walters (at Sarah Lawrence College). She has a BA in History, English, and German from Augustana College (IL), an MLIS in Archives & Records Management from the University of Maryland, College Park, and an MA in Women’s History from Sarah Lawrence College.