Google Doodle commemorates 184th anniversary of the birth of writer Louisa May Alcott

One of the world's best known female authors and a pioneer of feminism, Louisa May Alcott, is being celebrated by Google, which marks the 184th anniversary of her birth with its latest doodle.

The Doodle by Sophie Diao displays the characters of the iconic writer's most famous book, Little Women.

Born in Pennsylvania in 1832, Alcott grew up amid the intellectuals of the Transcendentalist movement, which instilled in her a sense of the importance of independence for women.

A key figure in the women's suffrage movement, she became the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts.

While she was finding her literary voice, she worked as a teacher and a seamstress and it was her experiences as a volunteer in the American Civil War which sparked her to write anti-slavery articles and books.

Little Women was her most famous publication and is enjoyed to this day around the world. It follows the lives of four sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March, as they grow up, and Alcott drew on her own experiences as she was herself the second-eldest of four girls. Written in two parts, Little Women was succeeded by the books Little Men and Jo's Boys over the following 20 years.

In the Doodle, Jo runs through the middle of the image with papers flying. She was based on Alcott, and Jo's quote "I like good strong words that mean something" was a rule that Alcott followed throughout her life. She died from a stroke, at the age of 55, in 1888.