She was originally named Elizabeth
Peabody Alcott in honor of her father
Bronson's teaching assistant at the Temple School and close friend of her mother,
Abba. By age three, however, after a falling out between Bronson and Elizabeth Peabody, her name was changed to Elizabeth
Sewall Alcott, after her mother's mother, Dorothy Sewall May. '' (1868). In her
semi-autobiographical novel,
Little Women (1868), Louisa May Alcott represented her sister as Beth. She wrote: In 1856, Lizzie contracted
scarlet fever while helping a poor German family. Although she recovered, she was permanently weakened. Her father Bronson was on a tour of the
Western United States and had reached as far as
Cincinnati when he heard that Lizzie, known to be ill, had taken a turn for the worse. By February 1858, she refused to take medicine and told her father, "I can best be spared of the four." As time went by, she grew weaker and thinner. On March 14, 1858, Lizzie Alcott died three hours after slipping into a coma. She was only 22 years old, about 3 months short of her 23rd birthday. On the same day, Louisa wrote in her
journal: At the moment of her death, Louisa, her mother, and the doctor saw a ghost-like mist rising from Lizzie's body. Her funeral was a small affair, with
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Henry David Thoreau and
Franklin Benjamin Sanborn serving as
pallbearers. Lizzie was interred at
Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. ==References==