“Father, here is your Louy,” Alcott said gently. “What are you thinking of as you lie there so happily?” With his final feeble gestures, Bronson took Louisa’s hand and said, “I am going up. Come with me.”
Her answer? “Oh I wish I could.” Her father kissed her. “Come soon,” he said. Distracted, and perhaps already embarked on that journey to which her father had just invited her, Louisa forgot her wrap as she stepped out into the cold March air on Louisburg Square.
In Louisa’s journals, the final visit is less dramatic. Her father is sweet and feeble and asks her to “Come soon.” But as her journal shows, Louisa had a lot on her mind even at her father’s deathbed. Later that day, she made out the bills and receipts for the month of February: the rent, Dr. Lawrence’s bill, and the bill for cab rides. Three days later, around eleven in the morning of March 4, Bronson took his final breaths. His daughter, south of the city of Boston on Dunreath Place, went on about her business. No one told her the news. She wrote letters. She paid a few remaining bills. She hoped her health would continue to improve.
The next morning, still not knowing that her father had died the day before, Alcott wrote a note to her sister complaining of a headache that felt like a weight pressing down on her. She sent for the doctor; he wasn’t sure what was wrong and prescribed rest. Although she didn’t know it consciously, Alcott had passed into a strange country where the people she had lived for had all left this ephemeral life of ours. Only one sister remained—Anna—and Louisa’s money provided well for her. Lulu was no longer a baby.
Both Louisa’s parents, those goads and educators, those needy, loving, critical, and supportive people, were gone. Although she had millions of readers, she had lost her first and truest audience. Alone and in a strange place, Louisa May Alcott obediently settled down in bed and closed her eyes. Before anyone had been able to tell her that her father was dead, less than forty hours after his death, she had passed into a coma. At three-thirty on the morning of March 6, just five days after accepting her father’s invitation to join him in heaven, Louisa May Alcott died, as her father lay in his coffin at Louisburg Square awaiting burial. Did she decide to accept his mysterious invitation? Death is a mystery, but life is filled with light and clarity. We can’t know what happened to Louisa May Alcott after March 6, 1888, but we have her last journals, which show the generous, talented Alcott taking care of business as she always did. Her final journal entry is a snapshot of the concerns of the last chapter of her life: “Write letters. Pay Ropes $30, Notman 4. Sew. Write a little. L to come.”
Epilogue:
2009
On the sixth of March, as his daughter passed from this world to the next, Bronson was buried in Sleepy Hollow cemetery on a ridge above Concord, a short walk from Orchard House. Two days later, when the earth over his grave was still fresh, Louisa was buried next to him. Father and daughter were forever together in the little town that had been so often the center of their real and imaginative lives. Only Anna remained alive.
Lulu, who had lost her second mother in her first ten years of life, was the focus of Anna’s concern. Sophie had already gone home. Lulu’s father visited Concord and a year later sent a relative to fetch his daughter. Anna traveled with them to be sure that Lulu was well settled. Lulu eventually married an Austrian, Emil Rasim, moved to Switzerland, and lived to be ninety-six. The Alcotts were rarely spoken about in her household. She learned most of the story of her own family from reading Martha Saxton’s biography of Louisa May Alcott when it was published in 1977. Anna Alcott Pratt survived her father and sister by only five years. Her sons and their families remained in Concord.
“Tell me she had a happy life!” the woman next to me at dinner pleads when she finds out that I am writing a biography of Louisa May Alcott. I have just been chatting about her final years, and I know that I need to change the subject. “I always wanted to be Jo!” the woman says. “Yes, she had a happy life,” I say. Privately, I wonder, what is a happy life, exactly?
Earlier in the evening, I had tried to start a conversation with a famous artist. He announced to me that he had a happy life: a long marriage to a woman now standing across the room, great professional recognition, money, many successful and loving children. That’s many men’s version of a happy life. Women are more complicated. When I mention that my children are also extraordinary, he loses patience with me. “Everyone says that,” he informs me, “but my children are truly extraordinary.”
What I think but don’t say to my dinner partner is that Louisa May Alcott had a happy life but that she had something even more important—a life and a body of work that are still fresh and enlightening today. What if you could choose a pleasant, so-called happy life or a real immortality through your work? The problems Alcott encountered as a young woman, and the choices she made are still the problems and choices that most women have today. Do we want to be appreciated for our beauty—our sexual currency? Or do we want to be respected for what we do?
Alcott’s life was what she made it, what she chose. From the beginning, she hoped to support her family; she did. From the beginning, she aimed to have a voice in the world; she did. And from the beginning, she wanted a life that would allow her to keep the freedom to travel, to set her own course, to say what she pleased. She did. Perhaps this isn’t our version of happiness, which is often still mired in fairy-tale ideals of romantic marriages and adorable children—but it was her happiness.
It is this, I think, this expanded vision of what is possible for women, a vision evident in Alcott’s life and in her art, that makes Little Women such a powerful book today. This is why Henry James took on its theme and its heroine and wrote about them in novel after novel. This is why we still love reading it and why we still imagine we are Jo March. Even Louisa May Alcott wanted to be Jo. She didn’t quite get her wish, but she got something better.
The young Louisa May Alcott.
Amos Bronson Alcott at the Concord School of Philosophy, c.1880.
Amos Bronson Alcott’s Temple School.
A tracing of two-year-old Louisa May Alcott’s hand by her father in his journal; he wrote she “manifests uncommon activity and force of mind at present.”
The Alcotts and Orchard House, c.1865.
Orchard House and School of Philosophy, c. 1905.
The Fruitlands Farmhouse, c. 1908.
May Alcott drawing of her sister Louisa as “The Golden Goose,” c. 1870.
Illustration by May Alcott from the first edition of Little Women.
Frontispiece from first edition of Little Women, 1868.
Louisa May Alcott, c. 1858.
Louisa May Alcott postage stamp issued on February 5, 1940.
Alcott in her bedroom at Orchard House, the room where she wrote Little Women.
Louisa May Alcott on the porch of her Main Street home (the Thoreau-Alcott House) with her niece Lulu’s rocking horse, c. 1880–85.
Louisa May Alcott, c. 1870.
Louisa May Alcott and her niece Lulu, c. 1882.
Louisa May Alcott’s letter declining marriage proposal from Sears Byram Condit.
Page from Louisa May Alcott’s journal describing the death of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1882.
Louisa May Alcott after her literary success, c. 1879.
Louisa May Alcott with the actor James Edward Murdoch, c. 1886.
Acknowledgments
During the ten years I have been writing about Louisa May Alcott, I have been buoyed up by an outpouring of energy from hundreds of people including inspired archivists, passing tourists, my beloved children, and many men and women who have listened to me rant about Louisa May Alcott and the choices women make. I am also deeply indebted to the writers and scholars who have gone before me; dozens of wonderful books and editions of Alcott’s letters and journals were indispensable to my writing. There is only one author’s name on the cover of this book, but in fact the book is a community effort.
The list of my collaborators begins with my bril
liant agent Gail Hochman and editor Sydny Miner who both believed fervently in this book. I like to read aloud at least once everything I write, and I am forever in the debt of the writers who have accommodated this time-consuming habit—my brother Ben Cheever and my friend Jane Hitchcock, both extraordinary writers as well as inspired listeners. Warren and Sarah, my beloved and astonishing children—both writers themselves—have also been part of the development of this book from its beginning. Warren’s research has been invaluable. Other friends who have been immeasurably patient and helpful include Adam Bock, Tina Brown, Ken Burrows and Erica Jong, Molly Jong-Fast, Amy Belding Brown, Marcelle Clements, Ned Cabot, Judy Collins, June Iseman, Ron Gallen, Eliza Griswold, Jeannette Watson Sanger who surprised me with the idea for this book ten years ago, Mary-Beth Hughes, Muriel Lloyd, Nancy Tilghman, Ruthie Rogers, and Maggie Scarf. My colleagues at Bennington continue to inspire me, reminding me of the seriousness of this enterprise. My students at Bennington and the New School teach me as much as I could ever teach them.
My deepest thanks go to Leslie Wilson, scholar and archivist at the Concord Free Public Library, to the staff of the Houghton Library at Harvard, and the staff of the New York Society Library. Researchers Kelsey Ford and Richard Smith were invaluable. Jan Turnquist at Orchard House was immensely helpful and always good humored. The work of Robert Richardson, Dan Shealey, Joel Myerson, Ednah Cheney, Madelon Bedell, Madeleine Stern, Martha Saxton, John Matteson and many other Alcott scholars has been the foundation of everything I have written.
At Simon & Schuster I have had much needed help from Michelle Rorke and Michele Bové, Sarah Hochman who gracefully and enthusiastically took over the editing of this book at the last minute, Gypsy da Silva, Fred Wiemer, Victoria Meyer, the incomparable Brian Ulicky, and of course David Rosenthal, whose support has been generous and unstinting.
Without my time at Yaddo, that magical place where the air seems to sparkle with words, I would not have been able to write this book.
Notes
The bulk of my research was done in the archives at the Concord Free Library in Concord and at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. I also worked in the New York Public Library and at the incomparable New York Society Library.
Louisa May Alcott has been a subject of great interest since the first biography of her, written by Ednah Dow Cheney a decade after Alcott’s death. As a result I have been the beneficiary of a century and a half of publication of Alcott materials, including Louisa May Alcott’s journals and correspondence as well as Bronson Alcott’s journals and letters, and many other journals and reminiscences from people who knew the Alcotts first hand. In 2005 Louisa May Alcott joined the prestigious group of literary writers collected in a Library of America volume edited by Elaine Showalter.
In writing this book, I have tried to write in Alcott’s personal voice—culled from her letters and journals—as often as possible. She destroyed many, many records for fear of gossip and publicity, but her tart, elegant voice is still apparent in almost everything she wrote, especially after 1863.
PREFACE: A TRIP TO CONCORD
1. L. M. Alcott, Little Women (2000), p. 9.
2. L. M. Alcott, The Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 197.
3. Ibid., p. 167.
1: TRAILING CLOUDS OF GLORY. 1832–1839
1. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 165.
2. Ibid., p. 158.
3. Little Women, p. 87.
4. Journals of Louisa May Alcott, p. 166. “May prove interesting, though I doubt it”—in a later notation in these journals after Little Women became successful, Louisa May Alcott said of her denigration of the book “(good joke).”
5. Little Women, p. 259.
6. The State of Massachusetts, 1835 meteorological report.
7. Elizabeth Peabody, Record of a School, p. 55.
8. William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality.
9. B. Alcott, “Researches on Childhood,” as quoted in Charles Strickland’s essay: “A Transcendentalist Father,” in Perspectives in American History, Vol. III, 1969, p. 49.
10. Penelope Leach, Spanking: A Shortcut to Nowhere, 1999. http://nospank.org.
11. Louisa May Alcott, “Recollections of My Childhood,” an essay in Louisa May Alcott: An Intimate Anthology, p. 5.
12. Shepard, Pedlar’s Progress, p. 12.
13. Alex V. G. Allen, Jonathan Edwards (Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, 1899), p. 191.
14. Journals of Abigail May Alcott at Houghton Library, Harvard.
15. Shepard, Pedlar’s Progress, p. 120.
16. Journals of Bronson Alcott, ed. Odell Shepard, Sept. 2, 1828.
17. Megan Marshall in her introduction to Elizabeth Peabody’s Record of a School, p. x. The Summerhill School was started in 1921, but it was headmaster A. S. Neill’s 1960 account of the school, Summerhill, which brought it popular attention in the United States’ alternative-education community.
18. Little Women, p. 76.
19. Mary Peabody letter to Elizabeth Peabody, in Marshall, The Peabody Sisters, p. 323.
20. Journals of Louisa May Alcott.
21. L. M. Alcott, Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals, ed. Ednah D. Cheney, p. 27.
22. Strickland, “A Transcendentalist Father,” p. 69.
23. Ibid., p. 164.
24. L. M. Alcott, “Recollections of My Childhood,” in Louisa May Alcott: An Intimate Anthology, p. 4.
25. This story is told many places, most notably in Alcott’s “Recollections of My Childhood,” a memoir piece written in 1888 and printed in the Women’s Journal long after she became famous. Alcott omits being tied up by her mother, which is cited in Saxton, Louisa May Alcott, p. 100.
26. Bronson Alcott, How Like an Angel Came I Down. Conversations with Children on the Gospels, p. 121.
27. Peabody, Record of a School, 2nd ed., p. vii.
28. Letters of Elizabeth Peabody, April 1836, p. 157.
29. Ibid., p. 160.
30. Ibid., p. 162.
31. Lord Harold Acton in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887.
32. L. M. Alcott, “Recollections of My Childhood,” p. 4.
33. Matteson, Eden’s Outcast, p. 80.
34. Emerson, Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. March 24, 1837 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939), p. 61.
35. B. Alcott, How Like an Angel Came I Down. Conversations with Children on the Gospels.
36. V. W. Brooks, The Flowering of New England, p. 232.
37. Journals of Abigail May Alcott, Houghton Library.
38. Journals of Bronson Alcott, January 24, 1828.
39. Ibid., p. 121. (In a footnote, Shepard defines “mettle” as sperm.)
40. James Russell Lowell, Fable for Critics.
41. B. Alcott, How Like an Angel Came I Down. Conversations with Children on the Gospels, p. 73.
42. Ibid., p. 307.
2: CONCORD. LOUISA IN EXILE. 1840–1843
1. Little Women, p. 234.
2. B. Alcott, The Letters of A. Bronson Alcott, December 28, 1839.
3. Robert Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire. This visit was a turning point for Emerson. In his journal, he wrote: “I visited Ellen’s tomb and opened the coffin.”
4. Madelon Bedell, Alcotts, p. 150, cited in Matteson, p. 91.
5. B. Alcott to Sam May, April 1840, Letters of A. Bronson Alcott.
6. Thoreau, The Journals of Henry David Thoreau, 1840.
7. Lydia Hosmer Wood, Beth Alcott’s Playmate, a Glimpse of Concord Town in the Days of Little Women. Alcott in Her Own Time, p. 165.
8. Letters of A. Bronson Alcott, April 16, 1840, to Sam May, “Dear Brother . . .”
9. L. M. Alcott, “Recollections of My Childhood,” p. 4.
10. B. Alcott to L. M. Alcott, June 21, 1840, Letters of A. Bronson Alcott.
11. Colonel May, Last Will and Testament, in Sarah Elbert, A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott and Little Women (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1984), p. 43.
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br /> 12. L. M. Alcott, “Recollections of My Childhood,” p. 6.
13. Ibid., p. 8.
14. L. M. Alcott, Moods, p. 36.
15. Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 127.
16. O. Shepard, Pedlar’s Progress, p. 241.
17. Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 126.
18. Selected Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, January 1842 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 262.
19. Bronson Alcott to his wife, Letters of A. Bronson Alcott, May 7, 1842.
20. Ibid., June 12, 1842.
21. Ibid.
22. Journals of Abigail May Alcott, Houghton Library. November 29, 1842.
3: FRUITLANDS. FAMILY IN CRISIS. 1843–1848
1. L. M. Alcott, Transcendental Wild Oats, p. 24.
2. Ibid., p. 47.
3. Ibid., p. 48.
4. Ibid.
5. B. De Voto, The Year of Decision, p. 32.
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