The Real Meg March
Meet Anna Alcott Pratt, Your Fellow Bookworm and Introvert
Of all the sisters in Little Women, I submit that Meg March inspires the least passion.
Jo has legions of adoring minions — or, as Louisa May Alcott scornfully put it, “Jo-worshipers”. Countless identify with her awkwardness, her wobbly self-control, her fierce moods, and her blazing drive to go out into the world and astonish it. She’s the heroine of every budding writer and feminist, much like Alcott herself.
Amy enjoys a sizeable share of haters, largely due to that horrific manuscript-burning episode. Even so, Amy possesses laudable artistic ambition and a genuine love of beauty. And let the Amy-haters note that Aunt Carrol invites Amy to Europe only after Amy behaves with perfect grace after being unjustly booted from the art table at Mrs. Chester’s fair. Still not convinced? Then you prove my point: She’s a character that inspires strong opinions, for or against.
As for Beth, you’re missing an empathy chip if you feel nothing for her gentle goodness and selflessness. She’s the only sister who looks out for the Hummels in Marmee’s absence, at tremendous personal cost. I’d elaborate further but I’m beginning to tear up.
But Meg? I’m not aware of a hardcore Meg fandom. Neither am I aware of hardcore Meg detractors. She’s a bit too bland for either. Both Jo and Amy struggle with hot tempers, worldly ambitions, and Laurie. Beth struggles with crippling shyness and her own mortality. In contrast, Meg struggles with vanity and wanting to dress as nice as Sally Moffatt — challenges, to be sure, but much less dramatic than Amy plunging through the ice or Beth’s death. What’s more, Meg is mild and mother hen-ish, lacking in eccentricity. Jo is rough-and-tumble and prone to shouting “Christopher Columbus!”, Amy sniffs and puts on airs, and even Beth has the quirk of nursing mangled dolls. Meanwhile, Meg is pretty.
In short, Meg is too conventional to prompt much attachment. Except that she’s not. She’s actually bookish and sensitive and super-introverted — the real Meg March, that is. She’s Anna Alcott Pratt and she’s just as intelligent and endearingly weird as the other Alcott sisters. I never would have known this, had I not read her diary and fallen in love with her.
Separating the Marches From the Alcotts
As the world knows by now, Louisa May Alcott loosely based Little Women on her experience growing up with her four sisters in Concord, Massachusetts. Beth March is modeled after Lizzie Alcott, a quiet soul who died from scarlet fever contracted while delivering charity to a poor German family. Amy is Abigail “May” Alcott — also the youngest of the family, and a talented artist who grew up to have her painting exhibited at the Paris Salon. Jo the writer is a stand-in for Louisa herself. And Meg is Anna Alcott — likewise the eldest, even-tempered sister who marries first.
Despite their similarities, however, it’s a mistake to take the March sisters as identical to their Alcott counterparts. As Harriet Reisen describes in Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, Thomas Niles, Louisa May Alcott’s editor at Roberts Brothers, asked her for a moral book for girls to compete with the hugely popular boys’ books — such as Hans Brinker: or, The Silver Skates — that were so successful for other publishers. In other words, Niles wanted a money-maker.
He asked the right woman. Little Women is so beloved as a classic that it’s easy to forget Louisa May Alcott was, above all, a commercial writer. From a young age, she strove to support her impoverished family with novels (Flower Fables, Moods), autobiographical accounts (Hospital Sketches), and stories for everything from respected magazines like The Atlantic to pulp weeklies like Frank Leslie’s Illustrated. By the time she sat down to write Little Women in 1869, she had well over a decade’s experience as a working writer, with a working writer’s savvy for what sold and what readers craved. This included young readers, as Alcott served as editor and contributor for the children’s publication, Merry’s Museum.
With the first volume of Little Women, she gave Niles just what he requested: A hit. Certainly, the book is ground-breaking in its depiction of Jo March, the unbridled tomboy with creative aspirations. And the matriarch Marmee is committed to her daughters’ intellectual development and engagement with the larger world, with an adamance that 19th-Century readers might have found odd. Yet the true innovation of Little Women is its departure from the treacly fables about preternaturally good children, so common at the time. It’s a moral book full of realism, humor, and flesh-and-blood characters — a combination to attract droves of fans, then as now.
Like all skilled commercial writers, Alcott gave each of the March sisters distinct personalities, trials, and character arcs, even if this meant deviating from and embellishing upon real life. May Alcott, for instance, was by many accounts more amiable and good-natured than petulant Amy. Lizzie doesn’t appear to have ever conquered her shyness, as Beth did with Colonel Laurence, and while Louisa herself claimed, “I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe,” Jo not only marries but relinquishes her writing career. In fact, by the end of Little Women, Volume Two, all three surviving sisters are married. Since Alcott was inundated with letters from readers, clamoring for the March girls to wed, I consider this an über case of “givin’ them what they want.” (And, if you’re familiar with the grinding poverty and mountains of debt Louisa endured, largely due to her father’s inability and/or unwillingness to work, it’s hard to blame her for the concession).
Anna Alcott Pratt’s Diary
So how did Louisa tweak her sister Anna’s life and character in service of a best-seller? For one, she transformed the plain Anna into a “very pretty” Meg, “being plump and fair.” Anna, like Louisa, was tasked with supporting the family from adolescence, largely through teaching stints, including at an insane asylum in Syracuse. As such, the “real” Meg was probably as prematurely aged as Louisa, yet in a sharp nod to commercialism, Louisa joked to Anna that someonehad to be the pretty sister.
More clues as to how Louisa changed Anna into Meg are found in Anna’s own diary, as transcribed and annotated by Ray Angelo (and which you may peruse here). The transcription covers diary entries from 1859 to 1862, with most from 1861 — the year of Anna’s marriage to John Pratt, the inspiration for Meg March’s husband, John Brooke. In reading the diary, I was struck by what Anna Alcott wasn’t, but even more struck by what she profoundly was.
Anna Alcott Was No Materialist and No Party Girl
Readers tend to identify Meg March with her trip to “Vanity Fair”, in which she immodestly gussies up at the Moffat’s ball, succumbing to her envy for the fine clothes and fashionable lifestyle her wealthier friends enjoyed. The Anna Alcott who emerges from her diary, however, is a woman easily contented by simpler pleasures — a lucky turn, as John Pratt earned only a small income from his clerical job at an iron forge:
“It takes very little [to make me happy], a loving word, a thoughtful act, or affectionate look from John makes me happy for a whole day, & small things that some would soon forget linger round me for a long time. My friends, my books, my work & my health are all I want in this world, & I don’t think that is wishing for too much where there are so many things to be desired.”
- Anna Alcott Pratt’s Diary, February 20, 1861
And as for a Moffat Ball? Well, in a diary entry in which she discusses an elderly pair of acquaintances reminiscing over their first ball, Anna writes:
“I have but few such recollections connected with my childhood, tho’ it was a very happy one full of enjoyment & fun, & now at the age of 29 [I] can say I never danced at a ball.”
- Anna Alcott Pratt’s Diary, January 22, 1861
Anna Was a Major Introvert, and a Little Judge-y
It would be a mistake to detect a note of pained regret in that last diary entry. I have a good hunch Anna Alcott Pratt felt none the worse for missing out on those balls. And that is because her diary proves her to be an intense homebody and introvert, through-and-through:
“My week has been a very quiet one, spent mostly in my own little room, absorbed in my own little affairs, a very pleasant tho’ perhaps not a very beautiful way of passing the time, but I enjoy it best.”
- Anna Alcott Pratt’s Diary, January 18, 1861
Besides housework, Anna’s “own little affairs” included studying European history — a pursuit to which she dedicated herself with passion and discipline. She devoured biographies of French and English royals and appears to have kept study notes on her reading. Often, she sewed as she read to amplify her “usefulness” (like all the Alcotts, Anna revered productive work). Perhaps she inherited this academic approach to learning from Bronson Alcott, an impressive self-taught scholar. In another age, she might have been a college professor — if she could stand to venture out of the house and amongst other people, that is.
People, you see, taxed Anna Alcott. For instance, Anna describes an evening spent with John’s cousins as follows:
“After supper we spent an hour with the family chatting & having a very stupid time, for if there is any one thing I do dislike, it is having to talk with people I do not care for. I don’t think I am unsocial, & I’m sure I feel most kindly towards every one & w’d put myself to much inconvenience to oblige them, but their society doesn’t afford me least satisfaction & I [would] much rather be alone. If I really love a person, it is quite the reverse, for I want them constantly & mourn their absence in the most foolish manner possible . . .
I wish I knew if this is right, for it is so a part of my nature that I should feel much troubled if it were wrong . . .”
- Anna Alcott Pratt’s Diary, January 13, 1861.
Ouch. If John’s cousins had known the disdain hiding behind Anna’s placid demeanor, they might have cut their visit short. In fact, most folks might have avoided her if they had read this confession:
“. . . I hardly know what I ought to do for I find this dislike to society is growing upon me rapidly, & the time that is not spent in our own room is to me all lost time . . . People don’t interest me, and beyond my own family I don’t care to see or know anyone.”
- Anna Alcott Pratt’s Diary, January 19, 1861
Was Anna a bit withdrawn? Yes, I think so. Was she quick to dismiss those outside her family? Perhaps. But in fairness to Anna, she grew up Alcott: progressive, Transcendentalist, eccentric. When the Alcotts were living in Concord, Massachusetts, Emerson was a neighbor, mentor to Bronson, and family friend; Henry Thoreau was a childhood tutor. The Alcott’s social circle included literary stars such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller, and the family was active in both the women’s suffrage and abolitionist movements (even volunteering their home as a stop on the Underground Railway). Anna was raised to eat vegetarian, wear loose clothing, and take cold shower-baths for health. More importantly, she was encouraged to read widely and engage in deep self-evaluation and reflection in her journal.
With such an upbringing, surrounded by such unconventional characters and minds, I think it’s forgivable that Anna found socializing with most people . . . well, pretty boring, to be frank. After a lifetime listening to your father discuss Nature’s role as a conduit to the Divine with Emerson, or your mother describe her work with the poor and underserved — in short, after a thorough steeping in moral and intellectual seriousness — anyone might develop the kind of distaste for insipid banter and chit-chat that Anna shows here:
“In the evening Mrs. Cole had a little Party & what with the dancing, supper music and flirting, the young folks had quite a gay time. I didn’t go having no taste for such things, and being conscious of my own inability to shine or even play the agreeable on such occasions. But I enjoyed peeping at the company & watching the various doings from my quiet corner, tho I found it hard to understand how people can enjoy anything so silly & noisy. I love fun, but such nonsense as folk talk, such flirting and absurd chattering I can’t find to be fun.”
- Anna Alcott Pratt Diary, February 12, 1861
Indeed, Anna herself recognized that having siblings with strong, idiosyncratic personalities played a part in her struggle to form meaningful female friendships. In assessing a visit with other young women, she writes:
“They are kind clever girls but I do not “take to them” much. I think perhaps one reason why girls are not more attractive may be because I have been so much with Louisa who is so uncommonly interesting & funny that beside her other girls seem commonplace. My sisters are all peculiar, and attractive and so very different from most girls I meet that I miss them, finding none to take their place.”
- Anna Alcott Pratt Diary, April 3, 1861
Reading the foregoing, it’s easy to forget that, in her youth, Anna was stage-struck and charmed audiences as an amateur actress in both Concord and Walpole, New Hampshire. In this, I suppose she resembles many a reserved individual who finds a vent and place to shine onstage (Steve Martin comes to mind).
Anna’s Introversion Complicated Her Marriage
While Anna was introverted, she described her husband as “social and jolly”. This difference in temperaments seems to have been one of the few tensions in what was a loving and devoted union. A recurring theme in Anna’s diary is John’s concern over Anna’s remoteness, and Anna’s guilt over a nature she couldn’t control:
“John & I fell to talking, & he wants me very much to make friends more, & try to have more interest in people about me, lest by & bye I shall be entirely without friend . . .
. . . I don’t feel the need of them now, my mother, father, sisters & husband are enough for all my needs, & beyond them I don’t care, they absorb all the love I have in me which is more than most people have, & I’ve not much left for any one else. However, I will try for dear John’s sake to be more social.”
- Anna Alcott Pratt’s Diary, January 22, 1861
“[At the dance] John however seemed to enjoy himself & danced as if he loved it, & I couldn’t help wishing he had more opportunities for jollity of some kind. He is naturally more lively & social than I and tho’ well content with his quiet life, he enjoys gaiety very much. I wish I could be more like him in this respect, he w’d enjoy so much more if I tho’t I was happy too.”
- Anna Alcott Pratt’s Diary, February 12, 1861
Anna did try to be more social, both for John’s sake and for others. Privately, she may have confessed to her diary that she found most conversations tedious. But publicly, she put on a cheerful face and accommodated people, out of her innate kindness and desire to do good:
“[I had] settled myself to have a delicious afternoon of reading when in walked Philo Cole who feeling blue had come in to be cheered up for she likes my yarns, & I pity her because I think she is out of her sphere, & suffers a good deal from loneliness & want of sympathy.
So I talked or rather let her talk all the afternoon and I think she enjoyed herself very much, so I ought not to regret my book.”
- Anna Alcott Pratt’s Diary, January 17, 1861
“In the evening Miss Stickney came in to see us & tho’ I was very sorry to see her I played what Lu w’d call “the hypocrite” & was as kind as I could be, played cribbage, bestowed my best apple upon her and tried to make her enjoy her evening, for poor girl she has very little fun. Miss Kimble & her sister also came for an hour & we had quite a little party.”
- Anna Alcott Pratt’s Diary, March 14, 1861
Lest you conclude that Anna wasn’t all that anti-social, know that she ended that last diary entry with: “I like much better to be alone.”
John and Anna: A Love Story
My biggest takeaway from Anna’s diary is her sincere and abiding love for her husband. One might be tempted to dismiss her devotion as the product of 19th-Century gender roles and a Victorian exaltation of domesticity. It wasn’t. Reading Anna’s words, I had no doubt her love for John was deep and genuine, the Real Deal. I was less struck by her fairly grand attestations to their happiness than by the way she documents John’s little acts of attentiveness and care. For instance:
“I had a nice present today from my dear kind husband who always seems to find out everything I want & then manage some how until I have it.
I’ve long wished for a box with a lock & key in which to stow safely away all my treasures . . . And today John brought me home such a beauty, black walnut with a mysterious little key to turn jealously upon my treasures.”
- Anna Alcott Pratt’s Diary, January 28, 1861
The box was a small kindness, to be sure, but it’s evidence John Pratt noticed and acknowledged his wife, and tenderly strove to meet her needs. While Anna may have known that such husbands existed, her father couldn’t have inspired much confidence. Bronson Alcott was not present nor attentive to his wife and daughters. Rather, he was largely absent, whether it was due to mental illness (such as the crippling depression he suffered following his failed Utopian colony, Fruitlands), traveling the lecture circuit with his “Conversations”, or over-absorption in his own airy thoughts and theories. As such, Anna must have received John’s “treasure box” like a small miracle.
Indeed, Anna’s diary hints that John’s steadfast love and easy-going nature was a balm for her unresolved childhood pain. As a newlywed, she reflected:
“I did not think I should be so entirely tranquil, so peaceful & content, so full of a quiet happiness that for many years I have not known . . .
I believe one source of all this content arises from the peaceful atmosphere around me . . . In a household like my father’s where poverty & trial & disappointment have been continually trying the tempers & hearts, very quick tempers, very warm hearts, there has necessarily been much disquiet & great clashing of wills, & tho’ we have always dearly loved & gladly labored for each other, there has been a want of that harmony which is the great charm of family life.
- Anna Alcott Pratt’s Diary, August 15, 1860
Anna and Louisa: Introvert and Drama Queen
One of the “very quick tempers” and “very warm hearts” Anna was no doubt referring to was Louisa May Alcott. Multiple diary entries attest to Anna’s adoration of her sister. She marvels over her humor and talent; she relishes Louisa’s letters and frets over her well-being; she takes it upon herself to make Louisa a fresh set of “unmentionables.” Yet at the same time, Anna’s diary suggests that volatile Louisa was a challenge for someone as sweet and restrained as herself. In recalling her childhood birthdays, Anna writes:
“. . . When the morning arrived with what extra ease I always dressed myself, how tremendously loving every body was, how angelic Louisa seemed postponing all her quarrels in a virtuous manner till after the birthday (which meant to her presenting her own gift with a flourish) . . .
Louisa usually gave vent to her feelings in some funny verses, & made some offering of astounding magnificence which she always took pains to inform us was original in form, design & execution.”
- Anna Alcott Pratt’s Diary, March 16, 1861
Transcriber Ray Angelo notes that Anna underlined the foregoing passages “in a thick stroke.” I think that “thick stroke” conveys Anna’s affection for Louisa’s theatrics and self-aggrandizement, and equally, her annoyance for them. In that underline, I hear the plaintive cry of every introvert inexorably drawn to, fascinated by, and in love with Dramatic Types: I adore you. But must you suck all the oxygen from the room?
In Praise of Anna and All Peace-Keepers
Anna’s diary reveals a woman who cared immensely about her family’s welfare, who strove to help her siblings and parents, and to promote emotional harmony between them. She writes letters of praise and support to both May and Louisa, understanding their thirst for encouragement, and scrimps together funds to make them new or upgraded clothing, realizing how frustrated they are at owning so little. She tends to her ailing mother to “keep her jolly” and kisses her father till he blushes, knowing he secretly enjoys it despite his embarrassment.
Anna did all this, not simply from a giving nature, but out of a sense of familial duty so ingrained that she appears to have felt guilt-stricken at leaving home to marry John:
“I know my duty is to stay with my husband & I am sure my heart is with him, but ‘the family’ has for so many years been my especial care & first thought that I can’t rid myself of the feeling that I am turning my back wickedly upon them all, & have no business to be so comfortable when they are hard at work.”
- Anna Alcott Pratt Diary, March 26, 1861
Anna felt guilty that she was no longer working to contribute to the paltry Alcott income, leaving Louisa to do most of the heavy lifting through her writing. Just as equally, Anna felt guilty that she was no longer at home to act as the steady, even presence that kept the peace between Louisa, May and their parents:
“[Louisa] tries very hard to do right & be everything to father & mother, who suffer very much from this separation from their children, but Louy’s ways & modes of tho’t are peculiar & it is hard work to adapt herself to regular habits. Dear soul I long to do something for her.”
- Anna Alcott Pratt Diary, March 25, 1861
In Little Women, Jo is initially distressed at Meg’s marriage, believing she is losing her sister, friend and confidante to John Brooke. But Anna’s words suggest Louisa May Alcott knew that she was not only losing her sister’s daily companionship, but the family mediator — the one who soothed tempers, cheered spirits, and went about the day’s business with comforting regularity.
A mediating, peace-keeping spirit is a hard thing to lose. Although her value can’t be overstated, she often goes unnoticed and unremarked upon until she’s gone. Perhaps that’s because she’s not very dramatic. Peace-keepers tend not to be loud, or demanding, or the kick-butt heroines of novels or films. In today’s terms, we don’t call them “fierce.” In fact, culturally, we don’t seem to find them interesting, which Anna realized:
“Perhaps anyone look’g over my journal would think I led a very useless life, but I do all my hands find to do, & as well as I know how, & it has always seemed to me that if every one did faithfully that which lay around them & employed every moment in some thing useful, it was not wasting their life, no matter how small the occupation may be.”
- Anna Alcott Pratt’s Diary, March 21, 1861
You were useful, Anna. Every day, in a thousand unobtrusive, sometimes hidden acts. Writing the little note that inspired hope; offering the guest a smile and a second cup of tea when the novel was beckoning; brokering the apologies and concessions that allow a family to sit down and share a meal together, despite the differences and arguments that may have occurred. Putting the house in “apple-pie” order to keep the sense of looming chaos at bay. Holding your tongue. Making home, and family, and marriage a refuge.
Later, Anna would be called to tasks that were larger and far more daunting. She met all of them: The death of John Pratt in 1870, leaving her widowed with two young sons. The death of her mother in 1877. The death of May Alcott in 1879, leaving Anna to raise May’s daughter, Lulu, with Louisa. The death of Louisa and her father within days of each other in 1888, making Anna the sole survivor of her immediate family.
“I thought when I began this journal that I should make it entertaining, but I think it is a very stupid book, my life is so uneventful there are but few entertaining facts to place here, & John & I live so happy & peacefully together that I never have any scenes to relate, no history of quarrels & reconciliations to spin long yarns about, and nothing exciting to enliven this prosy matter of fact pages with.”
- Anna Alcott Pratt’s Diary, February 9, 1861
Oh, Anna. You were way too hard on yourself.
In the play The Rise and Fall of Little Voice by Jim Cartwright, the character Little Voice confronts her mother over her belittling of Little Voice’s quiet and unassuming father: “Oh my Dad, when he had his records on he sparkled — not dazzling like you, but with fine lights, fine lights!”
That very much describes my feelings for Anna Alcott Pratt: She may not have blazed like the sun. But she sparkled through life, like the finest lights in the sky.
