Louisa May Alcott

by Susan Cheever

  The second golden egg was An Old-Fashioned Girl. First a small story for Merry’s Museum about Polly Milton, a simple country girl who goes for an extended visit to see her decadent cousins, Alcott expanded it into a novel that ran in Merry’s Museum as a series and was then published by Niles at Roberts. Before publication, Alcott visited Niles to ask him to increase her royalty from 6.66 percent to 10 or even 12 percent. Little Women had already made him a fortune. He refused. His prediction was that Little Women had been a bubble, a once-in-a-lifetime book, and that Alcott’s next book would not do as well.

  But as Madeleine Stern has written, 1869 was Louisa May Alcott’s annus mirabilis. The woman who had scraped together a living as a seamstress, governess, and teacher was now feted at teas and clubs as a literary lion. She hobnobbed with Julia Ward Howe and the Brahmin families of Boston, quietly remembering that she had taught their children. On a train, a sales boy tried to sell her a copy of her latest book. When she declined, the boy protested that it was a bestseller: “Bully book, ma’am, Sell a lot, better have it.” Louisa was delighted by the boy’s wide-eyed surprise when he found out who she was.20

  An Old-Fashioned Girl reads as well as Little Women, and its narrative energy speeds it along. Alcott’s growing public audience agreed, ordering 12,000 copies before publication and more than 24,000 afterward. It’s written in simple, unaffected English, which was at the time a revolutionary way of writing that Alcott had really pioneered in Little Women. In the book, she apologizes for the simplicity of her language, noting that she hopes her readers will not be able to say “it’s all very prim and proper, but it isn’t a bit like us.”21 Instead, she hopes that the covers of her novel will be the dirtiest in the library.

  In An Old-Fashioned Girl, Alcott writes with confidence and mastery, weaving her ferocious ideas about the effects of too much money and the unjust and cruel way society treats women, with a simple plot. The story revolves around the Shaw family with its two sisters, brother, money-earning father, and helpless shut-in mother. The heroine is their country cousin Polly, who brings to their attention all the characters she encounters in her impoverished city life—the saintly Mrs. Mills, who runs a boardinghouse for young women like Polly, the tragic girl Jane who tries to kill herself with a drug overdose because the effects of poverty have robbed her of hope, and a two-dimensional love interest, Arthur Sydney, who is captivated by Polly. She discourages him because, although his money would mean the world to her and her family, she does not truly love him.

  Six generations later, Alcott’s book is still on point. Young women without resources still marry for money, if only for the money to help their families. Money continues to corrupt and undermine the lives of children who have too much of it, especially when, as Alcott brilliantly depicts, the making of money has distracted their parents from the day-to-day contact that creates real families. Worst of all, women with money are still encouraged to make themselves into attractive ornaments rather than to develop any real skills. With the highest ambition for a woman often still marriage to a wealthy and powerful man—you don’t think so? look around you!—women are still enslaved by society and all it entails. “I’m not a rampant women’s rights reformer,” says Mrs. Mills, “but I think women can do a great deal for each other, if they will only stop fearing what people think.”22

  Alcott’s personal life seeps into the novel at many places. “All is fish that comes to the literary net,” Alcott wrote in her journal.23 There are a few pages describing the noble Revolutionary family that Polly claims as her own but which is actually the May family complete with Colonel May and his breeches and boots. In one scene, a woman who has come to see the Milton family’s model children is met by shrieks and laughter and hoydenish tumbling out of a wheelbarrow just as Margaret Fuller was met on her visit to the Alcotts at Dovecote Cottage so many years before. Most of all, Alcott’s outrage at the way women are treated by their families and by our culture lends an edge to the sweet story.

  In Boston, which Alcott calls the most conceited city in the land, Polly Milton meets other young, independent, and talented women like herself, women who have broken away from the conventional ideals of womanhood to pursue their talents, or have just broken away because those ideals were too expensive financially or spiritually. “Purpose and principle are the two best teachers we can have,” Alcott wrote, “and the want of them makes half the women of America what they are, restless, aimless, frivolous and sick.”24

  Alcott’s heroine is pretty and poor and spirited and good, but the Shaw family is stuck in the corrupt toils of social acceptance. Then they lose most of their money. At that point, the elegant, idiotic Tom becomes a solid, loving son. The frivolous, fashion-obsessed Fan is transformed into a dutiful wife and daughter who learns to cook and clean and mend, and the bratty Maud morphs into a charming woman who ends up a happy spinster—an oxymoron in her previous world. The greatest transformation is that of the elder Shaw who, relieved of the obligation of supporting his family in the style to which they had become accustomed—but which was ruining them from the inside—stops being an absent father and becomes a guide and friend to his children. All ends well.

  “Intimidated by the threats, denunciations, and complaints showered upon me in consequence of taking the liberty to end a certain story as I like,” Alcott joked with her invisible readers about her refusal to marry Jo to Laurie at the end of her second popular novel, “I now yield to the amiable desire of giving satisfaction.” Fan will marry Arthur Sydney, Polly her beloved Tom, and all will go on happily ever after.

  By the time O.F.G., as Louisa May called the novel in her journals, was published, the author was getting ready to reap some of the benefits of her newfound fame and fortune. Anything with her name on it seemed to sell in the thousands. Even Redpath, who had brought out a new edition of Moods to take advantage of Alcott’s fame, found himself selling 10,000 copies, many more than had been sold on original publication. On the first of April, Louisa and her sister May left for New York on their way to France. The end of adversity had not made a dent in Louisa May Alcott’s black humor. In her journals, she noted that April Fool’s day was a fit day for her undertaking a trip.25

  This time Alcott was going on the Grand Tour as a distinguished literary lion and a Boston lady, not as a paid nurse and servant. The going-away festivities included a huge party, a great cake that no one suggested that Louisa May should save for her guests, and a crowd at the Concord station to see them off. On April 2, Louisa, her sister, and their friend Alice Bartlett left New York on the French steamer Lafayette and arrived in Brest, France, twelve days later. At the same time, An Old-Fashioned Girl was being published in London to great sales and acclaim.

  For May Alcott, whose career as a painter had paralleled her sister’s career as a writer, living and working in Europe was essential both for her education as an artist and for her desire to be taken seriously. Europe was her Concord, and her sister’s money gave her the ability to take advantage of European museums and masters. In France the sisters and their companion ran right into the declaration of the Franco-Prussian War. In July, France declared war on Germany as a result of anger that had been simmering for years. It came to a head after the deposition of Queen Isabella of Spain over the Prussian plan to replace her with a Hohenzollern. This would cede another part of Europe to the Germans.

  But this was an old-fashioned war, and instead of being executed or hung by the neck until dead, Isabella decamped to luxurious exile in Switzerland, where the Alcott party ran into them taking the waters at Vevey with a crowd of sycophants and refugees. In September, as the war dragged on and the German armies seemed to win every battle, Alcott decided to head for Italy, partly because she had never been to Rome except in her imagination, and partly to feed May’s hunger for the artistic stimulation of the Old Masters and the ruins of Roman art and architecture.

  For New Englanders with their Yankee way of seeing things, Rome has always been an epiphany,
an adventure in the opposite perspective. In Concord, houses and churches are built on a diminutive human scale. Ceilings are low and staircases are narrow. Climbing up the stairs to Louisa May Alcott’s bedroom, many visitors have trouble with the narrow risers built to take up the least possible space. New England architecture is built to conserve heat in the brutal winters and protect against the weight of huge snowdrifts. The roofs are sharply peaked; the windows are high and small.

  Roman architecture is the opposite, partly in response to a warmer, sunnier climate, but partly as a statement of the place of men and women in the universe. Roman ceilings are so high that the clouds and sky paintings that sometimes adorn them seem actually like a sky. In Rome, staircases are vast and ornate, with low marble risers that seem to have been built for the pleasure of the eye and the ease of the climbing.

  In New England, prudishness reigned as a heritage from the dour Puritans. The female leg was never glimpsed, and many families even covered the shapely legs on their pianos, tables, and chairs. No one was even supposed to think about legs of any kind. Clothes hung out to dry were disguised in special cases lest a passerby be dreadfully tempted by the sight of a woman’s undergarment blowing on the line. Rome is littered with statues of almost naked men and women. Everywhere you look, in frescos and sculpture, there are muscular male thighs and shapely female breasts.

  Rome in the autumn, with its golden light and wild towers, its policemen dressed in feathers, gold braid, and spurs, and its street beggars, its feral dogs and solemn religious processions, its narrow alleys and grand squares, was a strange, magical place. Louisa, May, and Alice took an apartment in the Palazzo Barberini, in a vast Roman palace that seemed to have been built for a race of gods. The staircases had landings as big as Orchard House itself and the doors were so huge that smaller doors were cut into them for people to use. Their balcony overlooked the Piazza Barberini, with its fountain splashing around a statue of Triton, the God of the Sea, blowing his horn in their direction.

  The women wandered among the ancient ruins where marble shards sat in piles and the ghosts of the vestal virgins who had lived in the Roman Forum seemed almost real. May haunted museums and took lessons with the young artist Frederic Crowninshield. Louisa, in her new capacity of literary lion, sat for her first oil portrait in George Healy’s studio on the Via San Nicola da Tolentino. Against a crimson background, Alcott posed only half believing that she had earned the fortune and freedom and distinction implied in what was happening as her portrait was painted. Instead of talking about herself, she gave Shield/Crowninshield advice about his daughter Mary, who had written a novel, which, Louisa advised, should be sent to Roberts Brothers in Boston.

  At Roberts Brothers, the Alcott name was synonymous with success; Little Women had sold 60,000 copies and An Old-Fashioned Girl almost 40,000. In Rome, Louisa also spent more time with the sisters’ companion Alice Bartlett, a young Bostonian who would later be the best friend and constant companion of young Henry James during his visits to Rome. It was Alice Bartlett who told James the story on which he based Daisy Miller. Alcott and Bartlett, although thrown together as traveling companions, got along well.

  At the end of November, Alcott had a quiet Roman birthday, little knowing that, the day before, her brother-in-law John Pratt had died after a short illness. When the news reached the Alcott sisters, they grieved for the man who had been such a good husband to their sister and for the fact that home, where they should be to mourn him, was so far away.

  John Pratt had been a cause of great sorrow for Louisa when he married her older sister so soon after the death of her youngest sister. But the man had been loving and steady and won her over as a solid rock in a family that sometimes felt more like rushing rapids than the still water of the grassy Concord River. It was John who always met her boat or train in New York and John who became the reliable man of the family her father had never been.

  Now, overwhelmed with emotion, Alcott did what she always did when feelings were too much for her—she wrote. For years she had expressed love by providing financial support, and she had provided through her writing. By this time, the link between her writing vortex and her love for her family was well established. She would begin another book and give the proceeds to Anna and her boys in case John had not left them enough to provide a good life. Sitting in the Palazzo Barberini with the sound of the fountain outside and the bells of Rome pealing the hour from the Piazza del Gesù, the pageantry of the city with its domes and towers outside her balcony window, Alcott channeled her longing back to Concord and Boston. She remembered the thrilling days of her father’s Temple School and the students who reveled in the freedom he gave them. She thought of the two beloved Pratt boys. “In writing and thinking of the little lads, to whom I must be a father now, I found comfort for my sorrow,” she wrote in her journals.26

  Alcott downplayed the writing of Little Men in her journals, but the boys of Plumfield came alive in her imagination as the three travelers settled in the eternal, windy city founded by Romulus and Remus, two impoverished orphan boys who had been rescued from certain death in the forest and raised by loving wolves in ancient times. Alcott wrote voluminously every day, escaping from her enchanted and strange surroundings into the world she longed for. Once again, yearning fueled her visions of what a school would be like run by Jo March; once again the real world receded as she wrote, and by the time the travelers left Rome, Alcott had sent her manuscript off to a delighted Thomas Niles.

  Christmas in Rome permeates every corner of the city. The Piazza Navona with its fountains becomes a showplace of thousands of different versions of the crèche, its humble animals and tiny babe, its loving Virgin, doting father, and silk- and jewel-bedecked magi. The center of Roman Catholicism, Rome boasts a church on every corner and in every square and each of them turns inside out at Christmas time. The streets are perfumed with incense; wreaths and crosses dot every surface. The deep sounds of organs and choral music bellow out onto the wide streets. Christmas in Concord is austere and simple; in Rome, Christmas is pageantry and excess. Just after Christmas, the travelers were treated to a Roman disaster when the Tiber flooded its banks.

  Many churches were flooded although the Piazza Barberini stayed high and dry. The women’s maid laid in supplies, and Alcott watched with amusement as Romans improvised new ways of life using rowboats and delivering food into the high windows of the great palazzos. In February the women enjoyed the pre-Lenten Carnival festivities, another great Roman celebration, which featured elaborate gowns and costumes and during which the streets become one big party. Money continued to flow in from Redpath and Niles, and even Loring in Boston. On the way home, the three women stopped in Albano, near Rome, then in Venice, and by the time the three of them reached London in May, Little Men had been finished and was being published.

  In London, May studied with the painter Thomas Leeson Rowbotham, and Alice Bartlett left the two sisters for her trip home. Ten days later, Alcott embarked, typically writing “I am needed” in order to explain why she had to go. Her father and Thomas Niles met her boat in New York with a huge placard reading Little Men—the book had already sold 50,000 copies. By June she was back in Concord, catching up with paying the many debts her parents had incurred in her year away.

  One debt in particular, paid back from Concord on July 3, 1871, after Alcott’s return from Europe, provides a fitting end to the story of how Louisa May Alcott, against all odds and in spite of sharp criticism, became one of the world’s most successful writers. In 1854 it was James Fields who had told Louisa that she should stick to her teaching. In January of 1862 when she was teaching, he had loaned her $40 to help establish a new kindergarten in Boston.

  “Dear Mr. Fields,” Louisa wrote. “Once upon a time you lent me forty dollars, kindly saying that I might return them when I had made ‘a pot of gold.’ As the miracle has been unexpectedly wrought I wish to fulfill my part of the bargain, & herewith repay my debt with many thanks. Very Truly
Yours L. M. Alcott.”

  9

  Success.

  1873–1880

  Little Men was Alcott’s sixth novel, the third to which she was willing to sign her name. It was begun in Rome where Alcott heard the sad news of the death of John Pratt, and it was finished, delivered, and published, and already a bestseller, by the time Alcott sailed back into Boston Harbor. She wrote the book for her sister Anna’s sons Frederick and John, sometimes called Donny or Demi for Demi-John, and the two Pratt boys are the basis of two boys in the novel in the same way that the Alcott sisters were models for the March sisters. Alcott, always immensely practical, wrote the book to make the money to support her young nephews. It did this very well. But in many other ways, Little Men demonstrates less of Alcott’s prodigious writing talent and more of her emotional exhaustion, physical illness, and a growing feeling that success would not bring her much of what she wanted.

  Little Men tells the story of Jo March more than a decade after the happy ending of Little Women in which Jo and her odd but adoring true love—the bearish Professor Bhaer—walk off into the future together. In Little Men, Jo and Frederic (Fritz) Bhaer have started a school for young boys at Plumfield, an old house that Jo has somehow inherited from her cranky Aunt March. In writing Little Men, Alcott capitalized on her lifelong passion for young boys, whether they were romantic Polish refugees or her own nephews; the novel is a kind of hymn to the qualities of men before puberty. This novel also allowed her to memorialize her father’s ideas about education. She wasn’t going to write the book about him they had both planned—or she said she had planned. The novel that Louisa was supposed to write about her father titled The Cost of an Idea, in which a noble, brilliant, but misunderstood philosopher gave up financial and social success because of his high principles, was never even started. Nevertheless, she admired his educational philosophy.