The title Little Women may summon recollection of the book you read as a child and have forgotten. Not to mention the mostly terrible movie representations (although Katherine Hepburn and Douglas Montgomery were very good in the 1933 version). The novel was published as a serial 150 years ago, and deserves a revisit, as does its author. Indeed, if the name Louisa May Alcott only summons thoughts of sweetness and light, even treacle and light, an education is in order.
Her Pen For A Bridegroom
Louisa May Alcott wrote that she had “…taken her pen for a bridegroom,” and while the phallic reference would not have been lost on her, she referred to her life’s work: writing. L.M.A. wrote to publish and to earn money out of necessity, but had she a wealthy start in life, she still would have taken her pen as a bridegroom. As a rich woman, would she have written Little Women? Certainly not: she wrote it at her publisher’s behest and his intuition that little girls constituted a market. She wrote it to earn money. Think instead of a young woman who wrote obsessively and prolifically, and worked from her teen years onward. First as a domestic servant, then as a nurse during the Civil War—but always as a writer. While Little Women paints a rosier picture of her own life—although its realism and tales of hardship might shock today’s children—it contains many of her life’s truths.
Started As She Meant To Go On
Born on November 29th, 1832 in Philadelphia, L.M.A. paddled her own canoe from the beginning. After the family moved to Boston, the child Louisa often meandered along the Boston wharves—by herself. One afternoon, having lost her way home from there, she waited for her mother to find her as it grew dark. Recognizing herself in the town crier’s announcement, “Lost! A Little Girl. Curly Brown Hair. Had on a White Frock and Green Shoes,” she turned herself in to him as the lost girl. The man scooped her up onto his shoulder and took her home to the Alcott apartment in the South End.
Once inside any of their homes, the boisterous Louisa and her sisters—Lizzie, Anna, and May—were quiet and respectful of the gentlemen in the parlor: their father, Amos Bronson Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, discussing religion and philosophy. The friends’ habit of sitting and discussing had started at The Temple on Tremont Street, where Alcott taught children for a short time (the remaining students abandoned the school after he brought an African-American student into the class).
Nomads
The itinerant Alcotts moved around in the City of Boston, from the South End to Beacon Hill, to Brook Farm in West Roxbury, to towns in the corridor from Boston west to Concord, and west to Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts. They moved often—including summer visits to the Alcotts in Walpole, New Hampshire—due to their ever-worsening financial situation. Their poverty was a result of their mother’s May family money dwindling while their father earned no money to speak of—but their poverty was also intentional and according to Bronson Alcott’s principles. He and the others living at dilapidated farms like Brook and Fruitlands—like-minded in their intent on living in utopian communes—believed in a bloodless diet, one short on milk and hot meals of any sort. While their mother was unsure of these measures, she did not ask her husband to go against his principles for her girls’ sake. His principles extended to wearing linen tunics and taking cold baths. Tolerable in the warm summer months, torture in the New England winter. The girls lived on apples and bread soaked in water.
Mr. Emerson
After many negotiations and arrangements offered and discarded by Mr. and Mrs. Alcott, the family returned to Concord, to live near Mr. Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, another of Bronson’s friends. Settling into a house named The Orchard House, where later Louisa wrote and set Little Women, the family became a concern to the neighbors, who worried about the girls’ diets, and left offerings to supplement their Spartan fare (Mr. Emerson foremost among them). The Orchard House (http://www.louisamayalcott.org/) today is a preserved version of the Alcott house, rather than a reconstruction. On view is the trunk where the actual sisters and those of Little Women kept their costumes for their many theatrical presentations. The parlor where Bronson Alcott and the other Transcendentalists (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendentalism/) held their talks remains very much as it was.
Louisa grew up listening to her father and Mr. Emerson discuss religion and philosophy. When they lived in The Orchard House, the discussions included others, such as writer and feminist Margaret Fuller. The speakers would gather in the parlor, while the audience, having paid a small sum, stood in the open doorways to listen.
Mr. Thoreau
As a young woman, Louisa worked as a domestic servant, but she walked the woods with Henry David Thoreau, who could name every plant and tell her the hour a flower would bloom. Her unusual upbringing and education prepared her for the life of a woman writer in the mid-19th century.
Concord was a magic place in L.M.A.’s time. Famous for its role in the American Revolution, Concord was home to Emerson, Thoreau, Nathanial Hawthorne, and Harriet Tubman—an abolitionist born into slavery—who smuggled enslaved people out of the Southern states to be hidden and housed by many of the town’s families. The small town was a busy stop on the Underground Railroad, as well as the scene of a lecture by John Brown shortly before the rebellion at Harper’s Ferry. John Brown’s daughters remained friends of the Alcotts.
A Professional Writer
Concord is about 20 miles from Boston—a trip that L.M.A. made on foot in order to attend the theater, a passion of hers from childhood. In womanhood, she grew stifled by the small town, and though an athlete, possibly tired of the long walk, and took to living with her relatives the Sewalls in Melrose (about 10 miles north of the theater district) or in boarding houses in Boston. While living in these places, she shopped her plays and fiction to theatrical agents and publishers, and worked sewing or helping with other domestic duties to offset her room and board.
Before writing Little Women, L.M.A. earned money writing lurid stories anonymously—stories of harems, hashish, and kidnappings, masks and rival prima donnas. She wrote that the lurid better suited her writing style, but her anonymity, like earning the money, was a necessity. Both L.M.A. and Emerson, whom she worshipped, supported the Alcott family, and she felt the urgency to earn money keenly. Although she wrote these stories under a nom de plume or anon., she scattered clues in her letters (collected by the Houghton Library at Harvard) and other writings, especially in Little Women. It wasn’t until Leona Rostenberg—in partnership with Madeleine Stern as scholars, sleuths, bibliographers, and rare book dealers (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/leona-rostenberg/old-books-rare-friends/)—cracked L.M.A.’s code that the full extent of her lurid writings was known, as detailed and recorded in Stern’s Louisa May Alcott, A Biography (University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), still regarded as the best biography of L.M.A., although any biographer’s bias must be considered.
The Civil War
The Civil War caught L.M.A. in its maw, not Bronson Alcott, the model for wounded patriarch Mr. March in Little Women. L.M.A. did go off to the war—she volunteered as a nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington, learning to care for wounds and the thousands of men wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg. She chose night duty, when she could read to the wounded men in the quiet ward—her story, A Night, from the collection Hospital Sketches, describes these nights in a surprising manner. Disease killed more of the men in that war than did the injuries of battle, and typhoid fever nearly felled L.M.A. as well. She was treated with mercury, and suffered from mercury poisoning, losing her hair and also her mind for a time. Bronson Alcott fetched her back to The Orchard House, where she recovered and a few years later, wrote Little Women.
No To Marriage
Like Little Women’s Jo, L.M.A. ran for physical exercise all of her life, although her general health was poor after the mercury poisoning (note: she may have suffered from an autoimmune disease also). Like Jo, she followed her own path, and never wished to marry. Her publisher forced L.M.A. to write Jo’s marriage into the second of the series of Little Women, but she refused to marry Jo to Laurie, despite the hue and cry of her readers. Instead, she married Jo to an older professor, a foreigner with an accent—an outsider. It was her way of satisfying both her publisher and herself, but not the little girls who read Little Women.
L.M.A. never married and revealed the heartbreak of her sisters marrying in Little Women. When Jo senses that Meg will marry John Brooke, she tells her mother, Marmee, “I just wish I could marry Meg myself, and keep her safe in the family.” Later, with Meg’s wedding imminent, Jo tells Laurie, “It never can be the same again. I’ve lost my dearest friend.” The lines L.M.A. wrote for Jo reveal her own feelings about marriage but also about keeping the family together—meaning the four sisters together with their parents—there was no other family possible.
Four Sisters And A Niece
Jo’s fate reflected L.M.A.’s, for she too lost her sisters, Anna, Elizabeth, and Abigail May. L.M.A. lost Elizabeth at a young age to illness, as Beth died in Little Women; Anna to marriage and children, although excepting L.M.A.’s trips to Europe, Anna lived with or near L.M.A. in Concord and Beacon Hill all of their lives. The youngest sister May, the model for the artistic Amy in Little Women, died a few weeks after the birth of her daughter, Louisa May Alcott Nieriker in Switzerland. May’s husband Ernest Nieriker wrote to Ralph Waldo Emerson with the sad news and asked him to break it to Louisa, which he did. It was May’s dying wish that L.M.A. adopt the baby Louisa, so she did, raising the little girl, called Lulu, in Concord and Beacon Hill with Anna’s help.
A Family Reunion
L.M.A.’s last completed work, Lu Sing, was written about and for Lulu. Upon Louisa’s death in 1888 at age 55—days after Bronson’s death and 11 years after his wife’s—Lulu returned to her father’s care in Switzerland. The adult Lulu married and had children, and died in Germany in 1975 at age 95. Lulu’s great-granddaughter brought the original Lu Sing, bound by L.M.A. in birch bark with blue ribbon, back to Concord to raise funds for repair of The Orchard House in 2002. She also brought illustrations by Lulu’s mother May, an accomplished artist who had studied in Boston, Paris, and London, and whose still life was chosen for exhibition over Mary Cassatt’s in Paris in 1877. The illustrations were of a vaguely oriental theme to suit Lu Sing, some described as dreamy Turner copies. The return of the great-grandniece with L.M.A.’s work, and her sister May’s art to The Orchard House, made something of a family reunion.
The Alcotts rest together, with the exception of May, who is buried in Paris, in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, near Mr. Emerson and Mr. Thoreau, and their families. L.M.A. placed a headstone for May in the family plot. The little women are together.