Louisa May Alcott and How She Wrote “Little Women”
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, the author of “Little Women,” was born in 1832 and raised mostly in several different homes in Concord, Massachusetts. She was a gifted, loyal, fiercely intelligent woman who wrote a great deal and was deservedly proud of her work but is chiefly known for a book, “Little Women,” which she did not particularly like. It became a classic, and is still being read 154 years after it was written.
In the first decade of her life, Louisa was in awe of her father, Bronson Alcott, an itinerant salesman from Connecticut with a lively intellect who became a teacher and a prominent Transcendentalist. Bronson was an activist, a high-minded philosopher and a doting father who loved Louisa and encouraged her love of books. Father and daughter shared a birthday.
Louisa’s mother, Abigail “Abby” May Alcott, from the the well-known May family of Boston, had strong convictions and character but less love to share. Abby Alcott was one of the very first paid social workers in Massachusetts. She had progressive social views which rubbed off on her daughter, including faith in the intelligence of women, and a conviction that they should involve themselves in politics, and create serious works of art.
Transcendentalism cast a deep shadow over the family. Shaped by Unitarian thought, and by some of the leading lights of the Harvard Divinity School, Transcendentalism was a philosophy that idealized the goodness in people, and in nature, and encouraged us to find a natural setting and look inside ourselves for truth, as Henry David Thoreau famously did at Walden Pond.
The trick was to be free from the strictures of society, its political parties, and organized religions. “Self-Reliance” was the title of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s classic Transcendentalist essay. The Transcendentalists believed that political parties were bad because they blurred individual experience in the interest of taking a collective position on issues. Organized religion was bad because it created rituals of broad but shallow appeal. Transcendentalists wanted something much more personal and intense.
But a basic flaw in this Transcendental philosophy of personal questing in nature and rejection of social institutions was that it tended to separate its adherents from any regular source of income. This might not matter to single people with little interest in material things — but for those trying to support a wife and children it was a serious problem.
Louisa’s father Bronson founded or helped found “Fruitlands,” a Utopian community that failed. He often seemed more interested in leading “a spotless spiritual life” than in supporting his family financially and sometimes had delusions as well as wisdom and learning, so the family was not stable.
As Louisa entered her teens, she began to see more clearly her father’s deficits, to chafe at his proud poverty, and the restrictions he placed on her. He had a loud voice and imperious manners. while she was quirky and word-struck. Though rather indifferent to how Concord “society” saw her, she felt hemmed in by the limits of the town and was sharply aware of her family’s low financial status in town, and the fact that this poverty was the result of choices her father had made.
Still, she largely did as her parents asked. She would have preferred to use her leisure time to write stories or talk with her sisters but to help put food on the table, she worked as a seamstress, a governess and as a helper in other people’s homes. “Duty’s faithful child,” Bronson once called his daughter.
Bronson made elaborate excuses for being a poor provider. He claimed plain living was good for the soul. He recommended faithful friends, good books and “the sweetness of self-denial” ahead of comfort. As to money, he felt something would turn up, that all the hardship the family felt was a prelude to something marvelous. He would say: “Success is sweet and sweeter if long delayed and gotten through many struggles and defeats.” He also liked to say “We climb to heaven often on the ruins of our cherished plans, finding our failures were successes.”
With a dad like that, and a mother who was impressive but often distant, the great emotional bonds of Louisa’s teenage years were with her three sisters. Anna Alcott was more classically pretty than Louisa, also more conventional and compliant. Elizabeth (“Lizzie”) was gentle and shy, the family peacemaker, content to live in the domestic sphere in a way Louisa never could. Finally, there was May, strong-willed like Louisa, but more conceited, more outwardly ambitious and more vulnerable.
The Alcotts couldn’t bond deeply with their neighbors because they moved in 1834, 1840, 1843 and 1845.
“Shall never lead my own life,” Louisa noted sadly in her journal.
Her formal education was spotty because of the family’s constant moves and lack of money. On the other hand, among her father’s Transcendentalist friends were not only Emerson and Thoreau but also Margaret Fuller, each of them remarkable teachers in their own way. Julia Ward Howe and Nathaniel Hawthorne were NOT good Transcendentalists but they were forgiven for that and were also friends of the Alcott family. Compelling outsiders like Frederick Douglass also came to the house, and so Louisa’s informal education was superb.
The 1850’s were a hard decade for her. If she got any marriage proposals, they are not recorded. Her writing career floundered and this was doubly hard for her because Bronson Alcott had told her literary fame might be hers, because ‘Real talent can never be overlooked for long.’ In 1857, Louisa even seems to have thought of suicide. In 1858, her sister Anna married a man named John Pratt and Louisa rarely saw her anymore. Louisa’s younger sister Lizzie died.
Louisa read Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Bronte and seems to have been moved by the parallels she saw between Bronte’s life and her own. Whether or not she expected some sort of literary fame, she kept writing, and her melancholy seems to have receded. She said: “I’m not afraid of storms for I’m learning how to sail my ship.”
She wanted to write a great novel and when, in 1867 or ’68, she was asked by a book editor for a ‘girl’s novel’ she wasn’t much interested. But she felt she couldn’t turn down the money offered, small as it was. She set about writing what became Little Women. Louisa May Alcott understood that females of all ages are fascinated by how girls become “little women” — how they negotiate the physical, emotional and psychic changes that come over them between the age of 12 and the day they marry or move away.
In writing Little Women, in a sense, she recast her own childhood, in happier form. In the novel, the father of the house, Mr. March, has a regular, paying job, is a respected chaplain, and is out of the house. Bronson Alcott, such an overbearing presence in Orchard House in her childhood, was banished from the Orchard House she recreated in Little Women. Just as Harper Lee removed her difficult mother when recreating her childhood family in To Kill a Mockingbird, so Louisa May Alcott removed her frustrating father in Little Women, by having him off fighting in the Civil War. She remade her mother as warmer, more nurturing.
Her sisters she brought into the book much as they were. Beautiful, conventional Anna became “Meg” in the book. Louisa made herself “Jo” in the novel, a book-loving, rebellious tomboy. Shy, gentle Lizzie became “Beth” in the book and with the simple invesion of two letters in her name, conceited, strong-willed May became “Amy.” The sisters in the novel have a great deal of time together — more time than Louisa had been able to spend with her own Anna, Lizzie and May.
Louisa May Alcott must have found some pleasure in writing a book as fine as Little Women — but there is little evidence of it. It was an assignment, and she wrote it, and in 1868 turned it in to her editor. (“Money,” she once said, “is the root of all evil, and yet it is such a useful root that we canot get on without it, any more than we can without potatoes.”)
Little Women was published in 1868 and 2,000 copies sold in the first two weeks. It has never been out of print since 1868. There have been hundreds of editions and dozens of foreign translations. It’s a book that constantly both delights and instructs, never flagging at either.
It begins, “‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,’ grumbled Jo,” and instantly we are drawn into the March family circle, at Christmas time. The March daughters must do without — but they have each other, a glorious gift, and though they don’t realize it yet, a temporary one because marriage and death will tear these four girls apart. Good fortune and misfortune stick very close together in this novel, like sunshine and shadow.
The book reminds us that the pleasures which seem delightful to little women can lead to greater discontent when they realize these pleasures can’t be enjoyed again for months. The book conveys sharply how much teenagers yearn to look ahead and see the future; and what a delicious dish warm gossip can be; and how solid honesty and true friendship feel; and how comforting a personal letter can be; and how hot anger is; and how sweet is forgiveness.
It is also a book about how patient a good mother has to be; and about how often the apparent indifference of people is only so much play-acting.
Alcott never married. She was a feminist and the first woman in Concord to register to vote. She once said “Women have been called queens for a long time but the kingdom given them isn’t worth ruling.”
She was in pain for much of her last 25 years, and may have suffered from lupus. She died in Boston, of a stroke, on March 6, 1888, just two days after the death of her father.
Louisa May Alcott is famous for a book which she did not want to write, and did not feel terribly proud of when she’d finished it. It was a much better novel than she would publicly admit — because it was infused with so much of a real life — her own — and because it took “little women” far more seriously than did other ‘girls books’ of that era. In doing so, she changed the genre. The ‘young adult’ book would never be the same.