Marmee & Louisa

The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother

Eve LaPlante

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781451620689
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Biographies littéraires

The acclaimed and "meticulously researched" ( People ) biography that actor Laura Dern—who plays Marmee in the Little Women film adaptation—calls "a beautiful book of letters between Louisa and her mother…a massive influence. You feel it as like a cord of the film." Marmee & Louisa, hailed by NPR as one of the best books of 2012, paints an exquisitely moving and utterly convincing portrait of Louisa May Alcott and her mother, the real "Marmee." Award-winning biographer Eve LaPlante mines the Alcotts' intimate diaries and other private papers, some recently discovered in a family attic and others thought to have been destroyed, to revive this remarkable daughter and mother. Abigail May Alcott—long dismissed as a quiet, self-effacing background figure—comes to life as a gifted writer and thinker. A politically active feminist firebrand, she fought for universal civil rights, an end to slavery, and women's suffrage. This gorgeously written story of two extraordinary women is guaranteed to transform our view and deepen our understanding of one of America's most beloved authors.

Chapter One

A Good Child, but Willful

On Wednesday, October 8, 1800, in a large frame house on Milk Street overlooking Boston Harbor, Dorothy Sewall May delivered her fourth living daughter, whom she named Abigail, after her husband’s mother.¹⁹ “[I was] a sickly child, nursed by a sickly mother,” Abigail recalled, linked from the start to her own “Marmee.”

Dorothy Sewall May’s “most striking trait” was “her affectionate disposition,” according to Abigail.²² “She adored her husband and children.”²⁰ This natural tendency was intensified because Dorothy had been orphaned at twelve when her father died of a stroke, a year after the death of her forty-year-old mother.²¹ Thereafter Dorothy had lived with her eldest sister, Elizabeth Sewall Salisbury. Elizabeth’s husband, Samuel, was a merchant whose apprentice, Joseph May, Dorothy married in 1784.

By the time of Abigail’s birth sixteen years later, the Mays had three boys—ages twelve, five, and three—and four girls: thirteen-year-old Catherine; Louisa, who was eleven; two-year-old Elizabeth, whom they called Eliza; and the new baby. Dorothy had no formal education and her husband had abandoned Boston Latin School in his early teens to work for Dorothy’s brother-in-law. Nevertheless, she determined to send their boys at age five to dame, or ma’am, schools run by women and then to “man schools” to prepare for Harvard College, from which her brother, father, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers had graduated. As for her daughters, Dorothy encouraged them to follow a year or two of dame school with reading, singing, and sewing at home, where she provided tutors in dancing and music. The girls could read freely, for the Mays had house servants and a library stocked with the classic historians, philosophical works of Priestley and Paley, and the poetry of Pope, Addison, and Shakespeare.²³

The year after Abigail’s birth, the family moved three blocks south to a “plain but comfortable” wood house with a large garden and orchards at No. 1 Federal Court, a “sunny and cheerful spot” off Federal Street that is less than a block from South Station in modern Boston.²⁴ Around that time, Abigail’s frail, forty-three-year-old mother suffered a miscarriage that ended her thirteenth and final pregnancy.

At midday on Thursday, April 29, 1802, when Abigail was eighteen months old, her six-year-old brother Edward arrived home from ma’am school “full of glee” and eager to play, according to her four-year-old brother, Samuel Joseph, who was known in the family as Sam Jo. The brothers were close, Sam Jo said later: “We slept together, ate together, and he taught me all the sports. I every day awaited his return” from school.

Following the family’s midday meal, the two boys ran out to the garden, leaving their sisters inside with their mother. Edward climbed to the roof of a barn and pretended to be a chimney sweep. Minutes later, having concluded his sweeping, he prepared to descend from the barn by stepping onto the post of an old wooden chair.²⁵ The chair post splintered beneath him, a broken spindle pierced his side, and he dropped to the ground. Screams from servants alerted Dorothy, who raced from the house, carried her six-year-old inside, and called for a bath. Servants rushed to the well and the stove. Not until Dorothy removed Edward’s shirt did anyone see the fatal wound.

Dorothy fainted, Sam Jo recalled, and all around the dying boy was “confusion and dismay.” Servants ran to summon the doctor and Joseph May, who raced home from his marine insurance office near Long Wharf. Amid the chaos Edward’s body was cleaned, dressed, and laid out in the best room.

“Some strange awful change had come over my beloved Edward,” Sam Jo said. “Eyes shut, body cold,” he gave “no replies to the tender things said to him” and took “no notice of all that was being done to him.” But Sam Jo would not abandon his brother’s body. He begged his parents to let him sleep with Edward one last time. That night in bed he kissed his brother’s “cold cheek and lips, pulled open his eyelids, begged him to speak to me, and cried myself to sleep because he would not.”

The next morning the children watched their father place Edward into his coffin “in order that it might be laid away in the ground.” The parents and older sisters continually assured the younger children that “Edward is still living; he has become an angel and gone to heaven.”

Throngs of relatives and friends and Joseph May’s colleagues in shipping and insurance attended the funeral. James Freeman, America’s first Unitarian preacher and one of Joseph’s closest friends, performed the funeral service at home. Pallbearers carried the little coffin out to a carriage. Black-clad mourners followed the carriage on foot up the hill to the burial ground beside King’s Chapel, where Joseph was warden and coauthor of the new hymnal. Young men bore the coffin into the burying ground beside the stone church, while Sam Jo pleaded to see what they were doing to his brother.

His uncle Samuel May, his father’s younger brother, carried the boy into the graveyard and down the steps to the family burial vault. From the safety of his uncle’s arms Sam Jo surveyed the coffins of his brother Edward, his other deceased siblings, and his paternal grandfather, who had died in 1794. “Our kind uncle,” Sam Jo said later, “opened one of the coffins and let me see how decayed the body had become.” Uncle Sam allowed him to kiss his brother one last time. “Edward’s body is going to decay and become like the dust of the earth,” his uncle reassured him, while “his soul has gone to live in heaven with God and Christ and the angels.”

Over the years Sam Jo would recount this experience for Abigail, who was too young to recall the details. The night after the funeral, alone in bed for the first time without his brother, Sam Jo had a vivid dream. The ceiling of his room seemed to open, revealing a bright light. From “the midst of it came our lost brother, attended by a troop of little angels. He lay by me as he used to do, his head on my arm,” and said, “How happy I am in heaven.”

This dream recurred nightly until “by degrees” Sam Jo’s grief abated. “But I have never forgotten my almost twin brother” and the “heavenly vision” that provided “the deepest religious impression that my soul ever received.” That vision, he told Abigail, motivated him to devote his life to God.

Edward’s death caused other revolutions. Joseph and Dorothy May, who had lost five babies, were devastated. Dorothy drew even closer to her two surviving sons and four daughters. Meanwhile, their oldest son, Charles, an indifferent scholar, determined in his teens to go to sea. Charles’s departure when Abigail was small reduced the siblings at home to four girls and a single boy. This fundamental May quintet, as described decades later by Abigail to her daughters, would become a model for Little Women’s central characters, the four “March” sisters who share their remarkable Marmee with “Laurie,” the privileged boy next door.

Edward’s death forged an unexpected bond between little Abigail and her sole brother at home. A year after Edward’s death, when Sam Jo began attending school, two-and-a-half-year-old Abba, as she was known in the family, begged him to take her along. He and their sisters persuaded their parents to allow Abba to join them at school.²⁶ By the time she was four she was learning to read and write under the tutelage of her seven-year-old brother, who delighted in walking his “darling little sister” up the cobbled road from home to Mrs.²⁷ Walcutt’s Dame School on High Street.

This bond was unusual in Boston and the wider society, which assigned boys and girls to separate realms. Privileged boys were trained at school to excel in the public sphere, while their sisters were prepared at home to manage a family. Sons, expected to succeed in the world, were prepared with the finest education available, while daughters were prepared to marry well, a task that required no outside education.

These different modes of education, the Mays and their peers believed, suited the genders’ inherently distinct natures. Women were considered emotional, nurturing, and intellectually inferior to men, who were all “rational, selfish, and intellectually superior,” according to the historian Eve Kornfeld.²⁸ Middle-class boys “studied the classics, mathematics, natural science, history, and theology” and learned “an aggressive language suitable for debate,” while their female peers studied “literature, art, languages, dance, and music” so as to speak “a docile language intended to soothe and to smooth over controversy.” This cultivation at school and at home of boys’ and girls’ apparently distinct interests and talents seemed to provide “further proof of the natural gulf between the male and female worlds.”

Sam Jo and Abba May departed from this pattern. Beginning soon after Edward’s death, they were each other’s best companion and ally. Sam Jo dutifully followed the male path by attending a private academy for boys, Harvard College, and Harvard Divinity School. “My generous father,” he recalled later, “thought the best patrimony he could give his children was a good education, so we [boys] were sent to the private schools in Boston that enjoyed the highest reputation.” Unlike many of his peers, however, Sam Jo also developed in the wake of his brother’s death a passion to rectify the world’s wrongs. Among those wrongs was his clever little sister’s inability to secure an education like the one that his gender granted him. As a result, he set out to share his man’s education with Abba, who concluded in early adolescence that a girl’s education was “deficient.”²⁹ Her brother encouraged her to read his books, improve her writing, and think for herself. By the time they were young adults, due to a series of family tragedies Abigail and Samuel Joseph were the only May siblings still living save Charles, who remained away from New England for decades to come. Abigail’s remarkable bond with Samuel Joseph contributed to her lifelong determination that women should not only be educated but also have a voice in running the world.

The setting of Abigail May’s early life was still in many respects the town from which Paul Revere and William Dawes had ridden just a quarter century before. Dawes, in fact, was Abigail’s uncle.³⁰ In 1800 Boston was still a “pretty country town” with fewer than twenty-five thousand inhabitants, most of them descendants of English settlers, occupying detached houses surrounded by gardens and orchards on a peninsula of roughly one square mile and several adjoining villages.³¹ Many Bostonians farmed. Some still shepherded their milk cows to graze on the Common, which descended to a marshy bay along the Charles River. The town had not yet begun its great nineteenth-century transformation, in which cows were banished, pastures and hills smoothed, marshes and bays filled, and brownstones built. In this “handsome” Boston of Abigail May’s youth, according to a visitor, “Town and Country seem married.”³²

Growing up on the peninsula’s less populous south side, the May children could step into the sea at high tide hardly two minutes from home. Clipper ships passed to and fro. In the evening “the sea dashed under the windows,” Abigail’s friend Lydia Maria Child recalled, and was “often sparkling with moon-beams when we went to bed.”³³ To the southeast the Mays could see from their windows the town’s wharves, Gallows Bay, the mud flats of Dorchester, and the harbor islands, most prominently Castle Island with its star-shaped fortification. Looking north their view was of numerous steeples and the town’s four great hills. Atop the tallest, Beacon Hill, were the new State House, designed and built in 1798 by Charles Bulfinch, and the elegant home of the late John Hancock, the revolutionary hero and first governor. Hancock, too, was Abigail’s uncle, the late husband of her “Aunt Q,” Dorothy Quincy Hancock. During Abigail’s early years, her Aunt Q still lived in that grand mansion replete with books, paintings, silver, and mahogany furniture, where she had hosted John Adams and General Lafayette.³⁴ The old woman often invited Abigail and her sisters in for treats. Decades later, in her great-niece Louisa’s Old-Fashioned Girl, Aunt Q would be immortalized as Grandma Shaw’s late aunt, Governor Hancock’s widow, with her red-velvet-lined carriage, her “great garden,” and her memories of feeding General Lafayette and his troops during the revolution.³⁵ In fact, Aunt Q’s poignant recollections of her only son and daughter, both of whom had died early, may have enhanced her fondness for her nieces and nephews. Aunt Q, like Abigail, had been the youngest, “most petted” of her family.³⁶ Each year on Abigail’s birthday, her aunt reminded her that October 8 was also the day on which “My Mr. Hancock” had died, seven years before Abigail was born.

A revolutionary spirit imbued Abigail’s childhood. Many Bostonians had opposed the American Revolution when it happened, but not the Mays. When Abigail was small, her father recounted for her the resolute response of his “strong” mother to a British soldier’s petty robbery.³⁷ Passing by the May house, the soldier had reached into an open kitchen window and grabbed food from the table. “Your grandmother quickly shut the window down upon his arm and held it as in a vise,” Joseph May said. Not until a British officer arrived to arrest the offender did Madam Abigail Williams May loosen her grip on the sash. Like other Bostonians opposed to British rule, the Mays left during the Siege of Boston. They boarded with cousins in Pomfret, Connecticut, and did not return to Boston until the British evacuation in the spring of 1776. Joseph was ...