Louisa May Alcott

A Personal Biography

Susan Cheever

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781416569923
• eBook ISBN: 9781416570240
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Literature

Louisa May Alcott never intended to write Little Women. She had dismissed her publisher’s pleas for such a novel. Written out of necessity to support her family, the book had an astounding success that changed her life, a life which turned out very differently from that of her beloved heroine Jo March.

In Louisa May Alcott, Susan Cheever, the acclaimed author of American Bloomsbury, returns to Concord, Massachusetts, to explore the life of one of its most iconic residents. Based on extensive research, journals, and correspondence, Cheever’s biography chronicles all aspects of Alcott’s life, from the fateful meeting of her parents to her death, just two days after that of her father. She details Bronson Alcott’s stalwart educational vision, which led the Alcotts to relocate each time his progressive teaching went sour; her unsuccessful early attempts at serious literature, including Moods, which Henry James panned; her time as a Civil War nurse, when she contracted pneumonia and was treated with mercury-laden calomel, which would affect her health for the rest of her life; and her vibrant intellectual circle of writers and reformers, idealists who led the charge in support of antislavery, temperance, and women’s rights.

Alcott’s independence defied the conventional wisdom, and her personal choices and literary legacy continue to inspire generations of women. A fan of Little Women from the age of twelve, and a distinguished author in her own right, Cheever brings a unique perspective to Louisa May Alcott’s life as a woman, a daughter, and a working writer.

1

Trailing Clouds of Glory.
1832–1839

She had gone back to Concord to write, but instead she wasted time. Louisa May Alcott arrived at Orchard House to join her parents in February of 1868 while there was still snow on the ground; now she noticed crocuses and daffodils. The elms in Monument Square were spring green; the lilacs were about to explode into blossom. She had left her steady job as a children’s magazine editor in Boston to write, but she wasn’t writing.

Many mornings Louisa settled her aging mother happily downstairs in the parlor. “She sits at rest in her sunny room and that is better than any amount of fame to me,” the thirty-five-year-old wrote in her journal.¹ Then she found a hundred excuses to avoid her own desk upstairs. There was so much to do besides writing! She had to visit the Emersons down the road to borrow the latest Dickens novel; she had to gossip with Mr. Emerson about Dickens’s disappointing reading in London and his farewell reading in Boston, and play blind-man’s buff with the Emerson children. She had to deliver a gift of her father’s Sweeting apples to Mrs. Thoreau in town. She had to get some lamp oil. Her father’s blue shirt had to be mended.

Some days she still felt too sick to work. The dizziness was mostly gone, but the effects of what had happened four years earlier when she was a Civil War nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington, D.C., were still with her. Her right hand hurt so much when she wrote in her journal that she had to switch to her left for a few sentences. She wanted to write. She was a writer. She put it off. The truth was that she didn’t want to write the book that her editor and publisher Thomas Niles had first suggested almost a year ago. She had pretended she didn’t really hear him. “Niles, partner of Roberts, asked me to write a girls’ book,” she wrote in her journal. “Said I’d try.”²

Still, she hadn’t tried, even when her father had brought it up more than once. She did not want to write a girls’ book. After everything she had been through—the war, her illness, the death of her sister, the decades of gritty poverty, the dozens of melodramatic stories written to make money, the serious novel, Moods, and then Hospital Sketches about her nursing experience, the magazine jobs and advice columns—hadn’t she earned the right to choose her own project? After being published in the Atlantic Monthly and reviewed by young Henry James she wasn’t about to happily churn out some kind of simple book for young ladies. Would they ask Emerson to write a girls’ book? Or Dickens?

Thomas Niles hadn’t given up. He kept asking about the book she didn’t want to write, and he even got her father to pressure her by offering to publish Bronson’s book Tablets if Louisa wrote the book for young women. Her father had been thrilled, and he happily told Niles that she was hard at work on the book and would be done by September. Not true. Writing the kind of story Niles had in mind, a story about a family like her own and their domestic trials and tribulations, was the last thing she wanted to do. She didn’t think the “Pathetic Family,” as she called the Alcotts, were a good subject for stories. She had asked everyone’s permission, hoping they would say no. They all said yes.

It was the middle of May already! Time was wearing down her resistance. She had run every errand she could think of. Her mother, Abba, was comfortable, and sometimes she could hear her father chopping wood in the distance. The family of owls in the elm outside her bedroom window had built a nest, and perhaps there would be owlets soon.

Finally, just to see how it would feel, she sat down at the little half-moon desk between the windows. From there she could see between the elms over the road toward the meadows where Walden Pond sat like a watery jewel in the landscape. There she had spent afternoons idling with her friend Henry David Thoreau in his little boat on that pond. He had played the flute; she had gazed at the sky. But Thoreau had been dead for six years. She still thought of him every time she took a walk toward Walden. Walks became a way of avoiding the book she was supposed to write. She had enough paper; the quill and ink were next to her. Maybe she could write just one scene before lunch.

She reached for the happiest times she could remember, the childhood times of visiting Thoreau in his hut on Walden Pond, the times of haunting Mr. Emerson’s library, the times when her father called his four girls the golden band of sisters. A reluctant invalid sitting at the cramped desk, she remembered Christmas in Concord when the family was young and bursting out of their ramshackle house—a house that, coincidentally, was next door to the house where she sat writing twenty years later. “‘Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,’ grumbled Jo,”³ she wrote. Jo March would be the leader of the golden band, the smart sister with the plain face who was always in trouble. Meg would be the ladylike one. Amy would be the prissy artist. Sweet, lost Beth would be the one who was always happy with what she had.

Outside her windows, apple blossoms came and went, but for Louisa it was a cold Christmas Eve a long time ago, a Christmas when their mother, Abba, was still vigorous enough to organize the sisters to visit a poor family, bringing their own Christmas breakfast. Still, she resisted. The sisters’ experiences together seemed so ordinary compared to the drama and passion, the howling winds and demonic men and desperate love affairs of the melodramas, written under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, with which she had helped support her family for many years. “I plod away though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing,” she wrote in her journal. “Never liked girls or knew many except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.”⁴

Books often seem to have a life of their own. Scratching away at her little desk, Louisa was taken over by the story she was writing and did not want to write. The scenes of family life seemed to her to be dull and ordinary, but they fell into place one after the other. Even Jo March had something to say about writing: “She did not think herself a genius by any means; but when the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh.”⁵ Soon, Louisa was at her desk every morning, and the lives of her sisters, partly remembered, partly as she yearned for them to have been, became more vivid than the Concord summer with its abundant wildflowers and heady birdsong. Deftly transposing the events of the three years the Alcott family had spent in the house next door to the house where she now sat writing, Louisa May Alcott found the pages quickly piling up next to her. Within six weeks, she had sent off 400 pages to Niles. Like Alcott, Niles thought the material was dull, but he said he would publish it anyway. They would have to see about a sequel. At least she agreed that he had suggested a good title: Little Women.

In Little Women, the story of four sisters growing up in a house like Orchard House, the father has barely a cameo. Mr. March is away during the bulk of the action, and the girls’ growing fits and starts are handled by their beloved mother, Marmee, and by each other. Because of the intimate voice of the writing—it’s written in close third person so that all the girls’ deepest thoughts and feelings are revealed—the book sounds like a memoir. In some ways, with its emphasis on domestic drama and personal search and salvation, Little Women is the mother of the modern memoir.

At the same time, Little Women is definitely fiction. Most strikingly, Louisa May Alcott is not Jo March. Jo is a rebel who is nevertheless beloved. Louisa was a rebel who often seemed genuinely disappointing to her parents and who found scant love from them or their friends.

Furthermore, Louisa May Alcott was so dominated by her father that it is hard to unravel their lives from each other. As an infant, Louisa was subject to her father’s experiments. All through her life, Louisa’s father was prodding and bullying, commanding and occasionally rescuing, letting Louisa know what was wrong with her and telling her what to do. In every big decision she made, from going to Washington to be a Civil War nurse, to the commitment to her family that kept her from marrying and starting a new family, to the writing of Little Women, her father hovers in the background. His hold on her was incalculable. She loved him and fought with him. He called her a “fiend.”

Yet Louisa had a stubborn soul and sometimes a sympathetic mother and sisters. She was born in 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, because her father had won the job of running a school there, but she came to consciousness when she was three years old, at the apex of her father’s success as a Boston celebrity. Our earliest memories and our experiences as babies, before we can remember, are arguably powerful factors in the formation of our personalities. This “dance of the giant figures,” as the psychiatrists call it, can have lifelong effects that are especially resistant to change because the memories can’t be retrieved and understood. In Louisa’s earliest memories, and in the years before she started remembering, her father was a hero. During the winter of 1835, as she approached her third birthday, Bronson Alcott was one of the most respected and sought-after men in Boston.

That winter the temperature in the city hit record lows.⁶ Shouting schoolboys had epic snowball fights on the Boston Common; and icicles covered the pediment of the new courthouse. Boston Harbor froze over from Hingham to Nahant. In a schoolroom on Temple Place with a single inadequate stove, schoolmaster Bronson Alcott was undisturbed. “I will kindle a fire for the mind,”⁷ he told his students. Even in the record cold, his fire spread quickly.

Bronson Alcott’s new Temple School, his fourth academic venture, was more than just the talk of the town. Visitors from as far away as London came to sit on the schoolroom’s green velvet couch and watch the charismatic schoolmaster hold forth in his sunlit kingdom at the top of the building that featured high arched windows and busts of Plato, Shakespeare, Jesus, and Sir Walter Scott. There, the sons and daughters of progressive, aristocratic Boston were educated and enchanted by this dramatic character with wild blue eyes and a broad-brimmed hat.

Most nineteenth-century education was memorization and punishment, and most educators thought of children as evil savages in need of civilization. Not Bronson Alcott. Seated in cunning desks, each with its own private bookshelf, the little Tuckermans, Shaws, Jacksons, and Quincys—the grandson of former President John Quincy Adams was the school’s youngest student—were entranced by this mysterious Pied Piper of a schoolmaster. The schoolroom at the Temple School was filled with progressive delights that had previously been emphatically excluded from education. Dozens of books invited exploration, a pitcher of water was always filled for the thirsty, the room sparkled with wonders: alarm clocks, decks of cards, an hourglass, blocks, and paintings. The students, boys in stovepipe trousers and wide-collared shirts and girls in dresses and pantalettes, were encouraged to sing and clap during frequent breaks from lessons. Instead of raising hands, students were asked to stand up at their desks. Twice a day a twenty-minute recess allowed them to run and play.

The basis of Alcott’s pedagogy was the Romantic and revolutionary idea that children were holy innocents, able to teach adults important moral lessons instead of the other way around. Alcott believed that children were born perfect, as the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth had written in his already famous Intimations of Immortality less than thirty years earlier in 1807. Children, Wordsworth wrote, in an image that would help to change the world, were born “trailing clouds of glory . . . from God, who is our home.”⁸

From the first, Louisa seemed to trail clouds of mischief rather than clouds of glory. As an infant, Louisa had suffered plenty of hitting and scratching from her jealous and obedient older sister, Anna, who was very good at escaping punishment. By the time the family moved to Boston and into a boardinghouse at 1 Bedford Place, the tables had turned. Louisa had become the aggressor in fights with her older sister; she suffered from “a deep-seated obstinacy of temper,” her father wrote; “she seems practicing on the law of might—the stronger and colder has the mastery over the weaker and more timid. She is still the undisciplined subject of her instincts.”⁹ In another world, what might have been called the “terrible twos” was diagnosed as a severe character flaw by the attentive Alcott.

What could be the source of this two-year-old’s inability to act like the civilized visitor from God her father knew her to be? Perhaps, Bronson speculated, it was that her mother persisted in feeding her meat. Perhaps it was her coloring—Bronson believed that dark eyes and dark hair, unlike his own vivid blue-eyed blondness, was a sign of inferior morality. Subscribing to a repulsive, popular pseudoscience of the day, Bronson theorized that blond, blue-eyed people like himself were angelic and godlike, while dark-haired, dark-eyed people like his wife and Louisa were less elevated and further from heaven. Their dark coloring and olive skin was, as Emerson paraphrased it, “a reminder of brutish nature.” Or perhaps Louisa’s bond with her overly indulgent mother was ruining Bronson’s attempts to bring out the angel in Louisa.

That angel was often obscured by Louisa’s hot temper, a trait she seemed to have inherited from her mother. Even as an adorable toddler, Louisa had the power to drive her father a little crazy. In the nursery, Louisa was the villain. He believed, of course, that spanking was a “brutal” and “barbarous” method, an animalistic and even impious method of punishment. Yet he spanked Louisa often, sometimes repeatedly. Although this sometimes worked temporarily, she became more and more rebellious.¹⁰ She was always the freer of the two sisters and adored her father’s game of letting the two little girls run around naked before getting dressed for bed. “I always thought I must have been a deer or a horse in some former state, because it was such a joy to run. No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race, and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences and be a tomboy,”¹¹ she wrote.

Bronson Alcott was an aristocrat of nothing but the schoolroom. He was born Amos Alcox to a poor farming family in Spindle Hill, Connecticut. His fire for educational reform was stoked at the dreadful local school he went to with his brother William. Bronson always loved books, but at the schoolhouse he and William were shut up indoors for the best hours of the day, lined up with all the other pupils on backless benches in fetid air. An automaton of a teacher dragged his charges forward by rote and punishment toward the goal of a basic literacy that most of them would never use. The brothers both quit after elementary school and went to work as laborers.

The Alcox family had few resources, but distinguished connections. Although the boys’ mother wrote haltingly, her brother Tillotson Bronson was a distinguished scholar who had gone to Yale and was the principal of Cheshire Academy. Her father, Amos Bronson, was a country patriarch who had turned against the prevailing Calvinism of that part of Connecticut and joined the Episcopal Church. Bronson’s father’s father was also a distinguished man who had fought in the American Revolution, had seen General Washington, and had received his commission from Jonathan Trumbull.

All this distinction wasn’t of much use to a farm boy whose principal tasks were herding sheep, planting crops, mending stone walls, husking corn, milking cows, collecting eggs, fetching water, and picking beans or whatever was in season. William nevertheless ended up at Yale and later went to medical school; he suggested many of the physical changes that Bronson employed in his schoolrooms. “It is certain at any rate,” writes Alcott biographer Odell Shepard, “that as time went by, the two earnest youths became equally convinced that there was something deeply wrong with primary education, and that they must do their best to change it. In the planting of this conviction, the little gray schoolhouse at the crossroads must have played some part—as a horrible example.”¹²

By the 1820s, Bronson had left the family farm and become an itinerant Yankee peddler of women’s notions, going door-to-door up and down the Atlantic seaboard, drinking too much and building up substantial debts. A reinvention was in order. He changed his name from Amos Alcox to A. Bronson Alcott and turned his energies to education. As a peddler, he had seen the way the wealthy live—their airy sunlit rooms, their books and beautiful objects, their choices when it came to food. Teaching was his way to achieve that kind of life for himself and for his students. He embraced Wordsworth’s ideas and rebelled against the predominant idea of children promulgated by the great preacher Jonathan Edwards, who had written that children “are young vipers, and infinitely more hateful than vipers.”¹³

By 1825, Bronson’s career as an educator was off to a promising start. Although he had only an elementary school education, he was widely read and brilliantly self-taught. He established himself as the head of a small school in Cheshire, Connecticut, where he began to put his ideas into practice. This was almost ten years before he opened the Temple School, but his pedagogical methods were already in place: a phy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: A Trip to Concord
• 1: Trailing Clouds of Glory. 1832–1839
• 2: Concord. Louisa in Exile. 1840–1843
• 3: Fruitlands. Family in Crisis. 1843–1848
• 4: Boston. “Stick to Your Teaching”. 1848–1858
• 5: Orchard House. 1858–1862
• 6: Fredericksburg. At the Union Hospital. 1863–1865
• 7: The Writer. 1861–1867
• 8: Little Women. 1868–1872
• 9: Success. 1873–1880
• 10: Lulu. 1880–1888
• Epilogue: 2009
• Photo Insert
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Praise