Louisa May Alcott

Earth takes four of her ten planets, fire three, air two and a single one water, with four of the ten mutable. The chart holds a grand trine on Mars, Saturn and Neptune. The record says Alcott wrote Little Women in ten weeks because her publisher wanted a book for girls and the family needed the money, and that she nursed in the Civil War and never fully recovered from the typhoid.

Mercury sits square Saturn at two hundredths of a degree, as exact as this project prints, and the reading is thought meeting doubt: self-criticism, difficulty being understood, and a mind that treats its own uncertainty as evidence of stupidity when it is usually evidence of care. The record's first sentence is a commission taken for money, written in ten weeks, for a readership somebody else specified. Self-criticism about the one book that made her name is the obvious place for that reading to land, and the record supplies the circumstances rather than the opinion.

Mars sits in easy contact with Neptune at eight hundredths of a degree inside the grand trine, effort with imagination behind it: action that benefits from feel rather than from force. Ten weeks is the number the record supplies, and it is what makes the contact concrete. A grand trine is a closed figure of easy contacts that asks nothing of the rest of the chart, and having Mars, Saturn and Neptune in it puts drive, limit and imagination into a self-sufficient arrangement, which for somebody writing to a deadline and a brief is a usable account of how it got done.

The record's second sentence is an illness she did not recover from, contracted nursing in a war, and nothing in these ten planets contains it or predicted it. Venus sits square Pluto at under half a degree, love and control, and Mars in mild friction with that same Pluto at a third, force against force, neither of which the record gives anything to test. Her Moon sits on the twenty ninth degree of Aquarius at noon with Pisces still possible, so it is left out. Mars and Pluto were the two retrograde planets. She died at Boston on 6 March 1888, at fifty five. Nothing came inside three tenths of a degree of a natal planet that day. The Moon was at its last quarter and thirty three per cent lit, a phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details.