She had a lively fancy, a clear understanding... [I]ndependence was a marked trait.… She held her fortunes in her hands, and failure was a word unknown in her vocabulary of effort.

[8][9] then returned home in August 1861[9] or 1862 to begin teaching art at the Concord school run by her father's friend Franklin Benjamin Sanborn.

[10] As educational opportunities expanded in the 19th century, women artists became part of professional enterprises, which included them founding their own art associations.

[11] Artists, then, "played crucial roles in representing the New Woman, both by drawing images of the icon and exemplifying this emerging type through their own lives.

[16] She studied in Paris, London, and Rome during three European trips in 1870, 1873 and 1877, which the 1868 publication of her sister Louisa's book Little Women made possible.

[19] Her success as a copyist of Turner was such as to command the praise of Mr. John Ruskin and secure the adoption of some of her work for the pupils to copy at the South Kensington schools in London.

[4][19][21] After having studied in Europe, she had become "an accomplished artist" by the 1870s, and her works during that time showed marked improvement compared to the earlier illustrations for Little Women and the "quirky" depiction of Walden Pond in Concord Sketches.

[22] In 1877, her still life was the only painting by an American woman[citation needed] to be exhibited in the Paris Salon,[3] selected over the work of Mary Cassatt.

"[1] Her strength was as a copyist and as a painter of still life, in oils and watercolors, and she painted many panels featuring flowers on a black background.

[23] In contrast, Louisa Alcott called the day a "happy event" and described Ernest as a handsome, cultivated and successful "tender friend".

[3][4][nb 2] The following year, she made the painting La Négresse, which was exhibited at the Paris Salon, "what might be judged her masterpiece" of her career.

[3][25][nb 5] Though Louisa placed a stone with her initials at the family plot at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, May is buried in Paris[31] at Montrouge.