Although Meg’s daughter Josie anticipates Billie Jean King by matching the boys stroke for stroke on the tennis court, the juxtaposing of young male and female scholars is in no other instance competitive. Alcott’s educational ideal does not focus on the winning of personal honor. Rather, it calls for each person, male and female, to cultivate his or her talents without regard to sex, so that each may optimally serve the community. At Plumfield, stigma attaches neither to the young woman who studies ancient Greek nor to the one who is happiest in the college’s sewing circle. To be useful is to be blessed; all other considerations are beside the point. In her holding that all honest, useful work is equally valid, Louisa remained true to the ideals of her mentor Emerson, who, as William James observed, believed that “no position is insignificant, if the life that fills it out be only genuine.”56 Louisa was hostile to any limitation on women’s opportunities. Nevertheless, she would have been mystified by any feminist credo that implicitly valued traditionally masculine pursuits above the conventionally feminine. In her view, it was idiotic to force a born physician to stay home and bake pies, yet it was equally foolish to disparage the person who loved to bake pies, and baked them well. Louisa does not hesitate to enlist the opinion of Bronson’s alter ego in support of her egalitarian views. Mr. March rejects the idea that women must always submit to men as “the old-fashioned belief.” While admitting that changing old attitudes can take time, Mr. March states his own impression that “the woman’s hour has struck; and…the boys must do their best, for the girls are abreast now, and may reach the goal first.”57
The changes are manifest in Jo herself, who has not only been a successful mother to her own children and countless others, but has also won accolades as an author. Like Little Women, Jo’s breakthrough opus is a hastily scribbled family story, written with no great hope of success. To Jo’s astonishment, the book “sailed with a fair wind…straight into public favor, and came home heavily laden with an unexpected cargo of gold and glory.”58 Jo’s triumphs in both domestic and professional life appear to repudiate the apparent message of Little Women that one must choose among one’s satisfactions. In her last appearance, Jo March, who had once bravely martyred herself for the greater good, is resurrected as a woman who has been able to have it all.
While writing Jo’s Boys, Louisa had worried that her young audience, after fifteen years, might have outgrown its interest in the March family. To the contrary, she discovered that her first generation of readers was now raising children of its own, equally ready to be captivated. Louisa, however, had had her fill of the March family and their protégés. As the manuscript approached completion, she sounded faintly murderous when she wrote to tell Thomas Niles of her desire to “finish off these dreadful boys.” She closed the same letter saying “Sha’n’t we be glad when it is done?”59
To vent her frustration, Louisa used odd moments in Jo’s Boys to take satirical vengeance on her admiring audience. In “Jo’s Last Scrape,” a chapter that is both the comic highlight of the book and the author’s earnest plea for privacy, entire boarding schools descend on Jo’s home in search of mementos. A literary charlatan asks her to affix her name to his manuscript, and another eccentric acolyte demands both a pair of Jo’s stockings to weave into a rug and the opportunity to catch a grasshopper in the author’s garden. When a critic suggested that the chapter was too personal and should have been omitted, Louisa replied that there was no other way in which the rising generation of autograph fiends could be reached so well and pleasantly. With “a little good-natured ridicule,” she hoped to teach them “not to harass the authors whom they hold in thier [sic] regard.”60 Despite the lighthearted tone of “Jo’s Last Scrape,” Louisa was only partly able to conceal the annoyance she felt toward the army of juvenile readers who have reduced Mrs. Bhaer, as they had reduced Louisa herself, to “only a literary nurse maid who provides moral pap for the young.” The phrase sounds more like W. C. Fields than Louisa May Alcott. It is a bitter self-description.
When she reached the last page of Jo’s Boys, Louisa confessed her strong temptation to polish her manuscript off “with an earthquake which should engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it.”61 She dated her preface to the book July 4, 1886, declaring once and for all her independence from the March family and the task of writing juvenile novels. Orders for Jo’s Boys were immediately brisk, and Roberts Brothers printed thirty thousand copies in the first two months of its publication. Louisa could count on the lordly sum of twenty thousand dollars in publishing income for the year. Having sent Lulu with Anna to the seaside for the summer, Louisa had plenty of quiet now. Despite medical warnings that the effort of finishing Jo’s Boys might dangerously tax her strength, she found herself surprisingly invigorated. She hoped that, at last, she would be free to write serious books for mature readers.
Her hopes proved premature. The ideas, it seems, crowded in too fast to be sorted out, and even with Lulu absent, the demands of keeping the house in order kept her too busy. Most disappointingly, however, the improvements in Louisa’s health and emotional outlook proved transitory. By mid-September, all her apparent gains in strength and enthusiasm had evaporated, brought to a sudden end by a round of headaches and dizzy spells. She was “much discouraged,” she wrote, and life again seemed “a burden with constant pain & weariness.”62 Her journal entries, ever more fragmentary, noted some days of comfort but told more often of coughs, a pounding head, and a rebellious stomach. The doctors firmly advised against another full-length book, and Louisa could choose only to submit.
Her steadfast hope now came from God, as she explained in a letter she wrote that autumn to Florence Phillips, a young woman whom she had met on one of her excursions to Nonquitt. Some, Louisa acknowledged, might know God through an epiphany of joy, but the God who mattered to her now had been revealed to her through poverty and pain. The last veil that had separated her from divine love had been pushed aside by sorrow, when her mother had died. When she cried for Abba, she knew that God was very near. Of her firm faith, she wrote, “It needs no logic, no preaching to make me sure of it. The instinct is there & following it as fast as one can brings the fact home at last in a way that cannot be doubted.”63 Her God was very much like the characters who had played the part of ministering angels in her novels: quietly present, sharing burdens, not banishing pain but making it sweeter and easier to withstand. If not restoring health, He at least might provide patience and peace.
There was, however, a kind of repose that the Lord could not provide and that Louisa needed to seek for herself. It was time for her to give up caring for Bronson and Lulu. Dr. Rhoda Lawrence, who had used Louisa’s money eleven years earlier to found a nursing home in Roxbury and who now came to give her benefactor therapeutic massages, invited Louisa to sample the fruits of her own charity. Louisa May Alcott, now fifty-four, began the year 1887 as a patient in Dr. Lawrence’s convalescent home on Dunreath Place, Roxbury.
Bronson remained with Anna at 10 Louisburg Square, a very fashionable address in Boston. He was comfortable and alert but still incapable of meaningful work. He had clear memories of all his old friends, and he took pleasure in being paid social visits and being in the company of his family. However, his right side had never regained normal function. Just how much progress he made in learning how to write with his left hand is unclear, but the issue was rendered moot by his mental state. Although he could carry on simple conversations, he was unable to express complex ideas. Once a week, attendants carried him to a waiting carriage for a drive around town. His greatest joy remained his books, including, Louisa noted, the ones that he had written himself. He kept these near him constantly and loved to boast that he had written four of them after the age of seventy.64 The greatest comforts of all, however, may have been the books that only Bronson himself could fully appreciate: the sixty-odd volumes of journals that, but for the tomes from the early forties
lost in Albany, gave such a complete record of an eventful and contemplative life. Indeed, Bronson had more than his journals to remind him of old times. He also had kept a collection of books that he called his “autobiographical collections.” These were scrapbooks of memorabilia collected over the course of decades: newspaper clippings, advertisements for his conversations, almost every scrap of paper imaginable pertaining to himself and his family. Although his waking hours were bright with memories, Bronson slept much of the day now. One day, he looked up from a newspaper and remarked, “Beecher has gone now; all go but me.” He was now one of the last living representatives of a generation that had given a new conscience to America. Once Louisa took up residence in Dr. Lawrence’s rest home, she seldom saw her father. During 1887, under doctor’s orders mandating complete rest, Louisa spent weeks at a time without leaving the home, relying on the ever-faithful Anna for news of the outside world. When she did go to visit her father, it was with the constant awareness that this might be the last meeting before he slipped away.
As to Louisa’s own prognosis, the doctors were more optimistic, though one may reasonably question the absoluteness of their candor. One of the many physicians who took his turn at trying to cure her was Dr. Milbrey Green, who based his therapy on plant remedies. Louisa was as much attracted to his common sense and positive attitude as to these botanical concoctions. In a letter to Anna, she transcribed the following conversation with Green:
Dr. G…. [said] all was doing well and [gave] me a fourth kind of tonic…. I said, “Well, now the oyster will go into her shell again.” The conversation continued: “You mustn’t call yourself that when you are doing so nicely. Why, some of my patients have to lie in bed in dark rooms for months before I can get them where you are. We are going to have some more fine books in a year or two.” “Do you honestly think so?” “Certainly, why not?” & he looked as much surprised as if I’d denied that I had a nose on my face. “Oh, I never expect to be well again, only patched up for a while. At 55 one doesn’t hope for much.”65
Louisa both hoped and did not hope. Like her father after his stroke, she was bent on recovery. She was willing to try any regimen of baths, exotic herbs, or rest cure that might give her the years of health that the doctors promised her. Dr. Green had said that one or two years of patient conformity with his instructions would bring twenty years of productive life. The plain appearance of things, however, contradicted the bold predictions. In September 1887, she noted her weight as 136 pounds, already low for a woman of her large frame. By February 27, 1888, the figure was down to 113. She jauntily observed, “Now we will see how much I gain in the next 6 [months],” but it was getting harder to deny what was happening to her.66 Her life had become a ceaseless round of reporting symptoms, absorbing medications, and experiencing pain.
On March 1, Louisa went to visit Bronson and Anna at Louisburg Square. She brought flowers, and her father smelled them gratefully. Smiling up from his pillow, Bronson looked sweet and feeble. As Louisa knelt at his bedside, the dying philosopher made an eerie request. Noticing his benign countenance, Louisa said, “Father, here is your Louy. What are you thinking of as you lie here so happily?” He took her hand in his and, with a gesture toward the ceiling, replied, “I am going up. Come with me.” Instead of being aghast at the suggestion, Louisa replied gently, “I wish I could.”67 Her father kissed her. “Come soon,” he said. When they parted company, Louisa had much to occupy her mind—enough, apparently, to make her forget to put on her wrap as she stepped out into the late winter air.
Three days later, around eleven in the morning, Amos Bronson Alcott died. As he slipped away, Louisa was across town at her nursing home on Dunreath Place, unaware that her father’s end had come. She wrote a letter to her friend Maria Porter, who had sent her a photograph of May. Knowing that Bronson was near death, Mrs. Porter had expressed her hope that Louisa would find the same strength to bear her father’s passing that had been hers when Abba had died. Louisa replied that sorrow had no place in such circumstances and that death was never terrible when it came, “as now, in the likeness of a friend.” She would be glad, she said, “when the dear old man falls asleep after this long & innocent life.”68 Over long decades, the father and daughter had judged each other often, and not always in the most lenient terms. However, the last adjective Louisa ever wrote with reference to her father was “innocent.” If ever he had wronged her, those wrongs were now forgotten. In a postscript to Mrs. Porter, Louisa wrote that she expected to spend another year at “Saint’s Rest,” the name she had given to Dr. Lawrence’s house. Thereafter, she added, “I am promised twenty years of health. I don’t want so many, & have no idea I shall see them. But as I don’t live for myself I hold on for others, and shall find time to die some day, I hope.”69
That same morning, Louisa wrote a brief note to Anna. She complained of a dull pain and the sensation of a weight of iron pressing down on her head. As she wrote these two letters, Louisa began to feel feverish. She sent for Dr. Green, who expressed concern but offered no specific diagnosis. It occurred to her that some rest might do her good. She settled into her bed and closed her eyes. She opened them once more, just long enough to recognize the worried faces of Dr. Lawrence and her nephew John. Before news of Bronson’s death could reach her, Louisa’s sleep had deepened into a coma. Anna joined the bedside vigil, but there was nothing to do but wait. Before sunrise on March 6, barely forty hours after Bronson’s death, Louisa, too, was dead. When the story of their last conversation circulated and people became aware of Bronson’s request that his daughter might come up with him, it was hard not to entertain the macabre idea that Louisa had accepted her father’s invitation.
Among her papers, Louisa had left an unpublished poem, simply titled “Free.” Written with the suspicion that her death was not far off, it may have given some comfort to those who found it, reassuring them that Louisa had greeted death as a blessed liberation. It reads in part:
Sing, happy soul! And singing soar.
No weary flesh now fetters thee.
Thy wings have burst the narrow cell
And heaven’s boundless blue is free.
Yet cast one grateful, backward glance
Toward the life forever done,
For even when a poor, blind worm,
Thou hadst thy share of shade and sun.70
Bronson was buried on the morning of Louisa’s death. The cemetery where he is interred, Sleepy Hollow, was itself an offspring of transcendental thinking. A reaction against the somber aesthetics of the barren churchyard, it was intended as a place that would enfold the dead and the bereaved in the redemptive beauty of nature. At Sleepy Hollow’s dedication in 1855, Emerson had told those gathered, “The being that can share a thought and a feeling so sublime as confidence in truth is no mushroom. Our dissatisfaction with any other solution is the blazing evidence of immortality.”71 No one had believed more confidently in truth than Bronson Alcott. In what he deemed to be its earnest service, he had endured ridicule and poverty. With the innocent faith of a child, he had placed all his trust in a voice that had always summoned him upward. On a cheerless March day, the earth of Sleepy Hollow received his body. He had always been certain that a finer part of him would be welcomed elsewhere.
The mound above Bronson’s coffin was still fresh when, on March 8, his daughter joined him. The funeral was held in the family’s home at 10 Louisburg Square in Boston, the same place where Bronson’s had been conducted two days before. The same mourners were there, and the same minister, Cyrus Bartol, delivered Louisa’s eulogy. Then it was time for Louisa’s remains to follow those of Bronson to Sleepy Hollow. It is impossible to know the thoughts of Anna, the oldest and now the last of the little women, as she stood on this hill whose soil contained not only so much of the literary life of America, but of her own life as well.
Lulu Nieriker, now eight, had lost a second mother. Her father came to visit her after Louisa’s death and, the following year, sent
a relative to bring the girl back to Europe. Anna went with them to assure herself of the fitness of her niece’s new home. She left Lulu there, satisfied that Ernest Nieriker was “a good man,” whom she respected “more and more every day.” Before her death, Louisa had legally adopted Anna’s younger son John, a stratagem that enabled him to inherit her copyrights. These he held as a trustee, dividing the income with Lulu, his brother Fred, and his mother. Anna Alcott Pratt outlived her father and sister by only five years. Her two sons remained in Concord. Fred Pratt died in 1910. John passed away in 1923. Raised in Zurich, Louisa May Nieriker married an Austrian, Emil Rasim. Sheltered by Switzerland’s neutrality from the ravages of two world wars, she raised a daughter of her own, was widowed early, and lived to the age of ninety-six.72
On Spindle Hill, near a sloping crossroads where the traffic goes too fast, a heavy stone marker indicates the spot near which Bronson Alcott was born. It is easy to drive by without seeing it, and not everyone who lives in the neighborhood knows it is there. In Concord, tourists now come to snap pictures and lay flowers in a corner of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery known as Author’s Ridge. Apart from Westminster Abbey and Père Lachaise, one doubts that there are many places on earth richer in literary remains. Barely a dozen paces separate Bronson’s grave from Henry Thoreau’s, and Hawthorne’s is nearer still. Emerson lies a short distance away. His monument, a large, white, rough-hewn monolith, is the only one on Author’s Ridge that is in any sense imposing. Although more ornate markers were later erected to commemorate both the Thoreau and Alcott families, the original headstones are startling in their simplicity. Thoreau’s bears the name “Henry,” and nothing more. The grave of Hawthorne carries only the last name, and there is nothing but the small floral tributes of admirers to distinguish his place from those of various other members of the family. The Alcotts lie in an orderly row along an asphalt-covered path beneath sheltering oaks and pines. The stones are engraved only with dates and initials. “A.B.A.,” the good but enigmatic patriarch, is on the far right. Next to him is “A.M.A.,” the sometimes angry but always loyal wife and mother. Then come three daughters, in the order in which they left the world, “E.S.A.,” “M.A.N.,” and lastly “L.M.A.” Anna, buried as a Pratt, not an Alcott, is a few strides back from the path, alongside her beloved John. The earth beneath one of the stones contains nothing; although Louisa had hoped to one day bring May’s remains back to Concord, she never succeeded. Bronson’s and Abba’s youngest girl, perhaps the boldest adventurer of all, never came home. With this exception, the family is still close together. Of the five who are represented in this neat little row, only Louisa has any additional personal memorial: a narrow marble rectangle that says “Louisa M. Alcott” and a bronze-colored medallion identifying her as a veteran of the United States Army. No reference is made to any other accomplishment of this astonishing family.
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