Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women

Reisen, Harriet

3.93

1,749 ratings by Goodreads

9781400144457: Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women

ISBN 10: 1400144450 ISBN 13: 9781400144457

Publisher: Tantor Audio, 2009

Louisa May Alcott portrays a writer as worthy of interest in her own right as her most famous character, Jo March, and addresses all aspects of Alcott's life: the effect of her father's self-indulgent utopian schemes; her family's chronic economic difficulties and frequent uprootings; her experience as a nurse in the Civil War; and the loss of her health and frequent recourse to opiates in search of relief from migraines, insomnia, and symptomatic pain. Stories and details culled from Alcott's journals; her equally rich letters to family, friends, publishers, and admiring readers; and the correspondence, journals, and recollections of her family, friends, and famous contemporaries provide the basis for this lively account of the author's classic rags-to-riches tale.

Alcott would become the equivalent of a multimillionaire in her lifetime based on the astounding sales of her books, leaving contemporaries like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James in the dust. This biography explores Alcott's life in the context of her works, all of which are to some extent autobiographical. A fresh, modern take on this remarkable and prolific writer, who secretly authored pulp fiction, harbored radical abolitionist views, and completed heroic service as a Civil War nurse, Louisa May Alcott is also the story of how the all-time beloved American classic Little Women came to be. This revelatory portrait will present the popular author as she was and as she has never been seen before.

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About the Author:

Harriet Reisen has directed, produced, and developed new programs in various facets of media, including television, radio, print, and publicity. She has written dramatic and historical documentary scripts for PBS and HBO, and radio commentary for Morning Edition and Marketplace.

ONEFIT FOR THE
SCUFFLE OF THINGS
She has “a fine foundation for health and energy of character,” Bronson Alcott wrote to his father-in-law within hours of the birth of his second daughter on November 29, 1832. “[She] is a very fine healthful child, much more so than Anna was at birth.” He had wished for a boy, but he was linked to Louisa by a coincidence rarer than a common gender: “She was born at half-past 12 this morning on my birthday (33).”
Although they shared a birthday, Louisa May Alcott and her father were born under different stars. From the first, Louisa displayed her mother’s moody, passionate temperament. She was an autumn hurricane arriving twenty months after Anna, a veritable March lamb, a paragon of a baby with her father’s calm temperament. Louisa’s version of her vexed beginnings matched her sense that life had been one long battle from the start. “On a dismal November day I found myself, & began my long fight,” she wrote on her twenty-third birthday. Her first fight would be for supremacy over her sister. Her mother would be her best ally.Abigail May Alcott’s family was a distinguished one, especially on her mother’s side. Dorothy Sewall May was the daughter of Samuel Sewall, the deacon of Old South Church, from whose steps Samuel Adams had signaled the start of the Boston Tea Party in 1773. The Sewalls were related to the Quincys and the Adamses; Abigail’s aunt Dorothy Quincy’s second marriage was to John Hancock. Born in 1800, Abigail (called Abby or Abba) was the youngest of the May family’s eight surviving children.
Colonel Joseph May, Abigail’s father and Louisa’s grandfather, came from a humbler line. (The title “colonel” was a memento not of wartime service but of his rank in a teenage cadet corps during the Revolution.) The son of a modestly successful lumber dealer, Joseph May met Dorothy Sewall when he was a thirteen-year-old apprentice in her uncle’s store. Enterprising and ambitious, by age thirty Colonel May was a rich and gregarious man known for his honesty, his love of learning, his charitable works, and his support of liberal causes. He was one of the best informed men of his day, according to a family biographer. Outside the family he was distinguished by his snuff habit and for wearing outmoded black silk stockings and knee buckles. All Boston knew of Colonel May’s vanity about his shapely legs, which he claimed were the models for George Washington’s in the full-length Gilbert Stuart portrait.
The Colonel’s easy course through life hit a snag in 1799, the year before Abigail was born, when he was involved in a disastrous investment. To clear his debts and his name, thirty-eight-year-old Joseph May gave up everything he owned, selling even the gold rings on his fingers. He vowed never again to pursue wealth, took a part-time salaried job in a shipping insurance office, and sold his grand mansion on Atkinson (now Congress) Street. He moved his family to a modest place on Federal Court. May’s was by all accounts a happy household, alive with music and intellectual engagement.
Abby was very attached to her father, although she later felt she could never live up to his high expectations. She was a much loved and indulged child, yet near the end of her life, she began her brief memoir on a deeply mournful note: “I was the youngest of twelve children, born sickly, nursed by a sickly mother.” The roots of Abigail’s lifelong melancholy and sense of having been shortchanged may lie in a childhood dominated by her mother’s declining health, the ghosts of siblings she never knew, and the subsequent deaths of other siblings she had known and loved.
Abby idealized her mother as Louisa would in turn idealize Abby as “Marmee” in Little Women. “She adored her husband and children,” Abby wrote of Dorothy. “She loved the whole human family.” Dorothy May had twelve pregnancies in sixteen years, several times burying an infant and giving its name to a successor: two Charleses, two Louisas, and three Samuels. When Abby was only a year old, her six-year-old brother Edward—“a fair-haired boy, with blue eyes, bright, playful, affectionate” in his younger brother Sam’s recollection—impaled himself on a post while playing in the backyard and bled to death in his mother’s arms. Two of Abby’s married sisters preceded her mother to the grave; only Abby, Charles, and Sam would live to see their own children grow up.
In her earliest years Abby was allowed to tag along after her older brother Sam to school in Boston’s High Street; later she was given private lessons. Both Sam and her older sister Louisa took an active interest in Abby’s intellectual development. From Harvard Sam corresponded with Abby about his readings in philosophy, while at home Louisa urged Abby to concentrate on her studies.
Abby shared her father’s love of music and reading, and favored him in appearance—the same thick eyebrows above deep-set brown eyes, the same sloping nose, fine upper lip, and vivid complexion. But where her father was steady and careful, Abby was mercurial and rash. By her own account, Abby “was a good child—but willful.”
When her parents suggested she marry one of her May cousins, Sam Frothingham, she resisted the idea; she wanted a love match. Her brother and ally Sam proposed to their parents that Abby spend a year studying with a Reverend Allyn in Duxbury, about thirty-five miles south of Boston. The courses in moral philosophy, natural theology, science, history, and Latin left Abby with a fleeting sense of possibility that she and her sister Louisa might together open a school. “I may yet earn my bread by the knowledge this year has afforded me. I am not willing to be thought incapable of anything,” she wrote, as honest a self-assessment as she would ever make. Aware of his sister’s inclination to despondency, Sam wrote to her of the importance of “a cheerful habit of mind. Cheerfulness is a kind of oil to the springs, and wheels of life.... Without it they may move, but they will move [badly and] all our duties will be performed with pain.”
It was advice she was constitutionally unable to follow. Her Duxbury sojourn did not make her happier, and, living under threat of an unwanted marriage, Abby could scarcely believe in any of her schemes for an independent life. Then, in August 1819, Sam Frothingham died unexpectedly. Abby insisted she be excused from any obligation to pay or receive calls. “If I incur the epithet pedantic or unsocial or misanthropic, I must bear it patiently,” she wrote, but patience was not a virtue she possessed. Louisa Alcott would not have it either.
Abby’s dream of starting a school with her sister ended with Louisa May’s marriage in 1823. She turned to her brother Sam, now a Unitarian minister embarking upon a distinguished career as a radical reformer as eloquent and fierce as he was sweet-tempered. Abby became a regular visitor at his home in the town of Brooklyn in eastern Connecticut, cheering on Sam’s efforts to reform education, and taking to his wife, Lucretia (“Lu”), as a sister.
Abby’s mother, Dorothy Sewall May, died in 1825; less than a year later Colonel Joseph May remarried. His new wife was just fourteen years older than his only remaining unmarried daughter. As a spinster of twenty-five, Abby could have hoped and expected to take on the role of lady of the house to her widowed father. Instead, disaffected with her father for remarrying and displaced by her stepmother, she paid a visit of indefinite length to her brother and congenial sister-in-law. On a hot afternoon in July of 1827, she was alone at the parsonage when a towering blue-eyed young man appeared at the door looking for Sam. Abby was almost twenty-seven and ripe for a serious attachment. After five minutes alone with Bronson Alcott, she was sure she had found it.
Of the small band of radical thinkers who defined the Transcendentalist movement of the early nineteenth century, Bronson Alcott was possibly the most original, certainly the most improbable. He was born Amos Bronson Alcox in the last year of the eighteenth century, into an isolated clan of farmers long settled in the northwestern corner of Connecticut. Their only news came in small weekly doses of the Connecticut Courant, read by the few literate to the many illiterate members of the family, among the latter Joseph Alcox, Bronson’s father. Bronson’s mother, Anna Bronson Alcox, though a genuine rustic who smoked a corncob pipe, could read, and taught her eager son to write the alphabet in the sand she used to sweep clean the kitchen floor of the home they called Spindle Hill. She praised his gift for drawing too. Bronson was the first of Anna Alcox’s eight children (of ten) to live past infancy; mother and son adored each other.
Bronson’s years of rudimentary country education, interrupted for spring planting and the fall harvest, ended when he was thirteen. He and his cousin William Alcox, also avid for knowledge, embarked upon an ambitious plan of private study. Their self-improvement program extended to their surname: their common paternal grandfather, a Revolutionary War veteran, was Captain John Alcock, not Alcox. The pun-inviting family name was spelled several different ways, and none conjured the image of a cultivated gentleman. Young Bronson and William came up with the more refined “Alcott.” William took up a middle name, “Andrus,” and Bronson further improved his handle by reducing the plain “Amos” to its initial A. They assembled their own library of stray books hoarded by relatives, now and then scraping together enough money to purchase a volume. They acquired the poems of Pope, a volume of Milton, a copy of Robinson Crusoe, and more Bibles than they could use. They began a corr...

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