Harriet Riesen's "Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women"

Read: October 14, 2011

I joined quite a few book clubs when my good friend in California vowed with me to meet new people and make new friends by Halloween (this entry is, obviously, very delayed). The Providence Public Library was fortunately just starting a new brown bag lunch book club. The PPL received a grant, I think, to celebrate Louisa May Alcott's life throughout this fall. The whole project included field trips to Orchard House, one of Louisa's homes and the setting for Little Women, as well as film screenings, a tour of Providence circa Louisa's time, and verbal performances. One of my favorite parts about moving to the northeast and to a city are these kinds of cultural events combined in a sense of neighborhood coherency, so I was excited to join. The library provided the books to the book club members as a loan - my guess is that my copy is now in circulation. I'm always a sucker for a free book, even if I have to give it back in the end. (The downside to not having the book anymore is that this entry, as well as the following one, are dreadfully late - I didn't have the book lying around as an increasingly loud reminder to write a blog entry.) The other complication is that when I read a book for a book club, I jot down notes for the discussion and then talk out my ideas rather than resorting to writing them down in this blog. I think in the future, though, I'll attempt to blog about the books before or immediately after the discussion so that I avoid these complications. (How many blogs do you think come with pledges to do better or write more frequently? Seems like an unavoidable element of the personal narrative.)

To the book. The author, Harriet Reisen, initially researched Louisa May Alcott for a documentary film and ended up uncovering enough new material to justify a book. In the forward to the book, Reisen discusses some of this new material, including a previously lost transcript of an interview with Louisa's niece as well as the identification of some several pop fiction novels that Alcott wrote and published under a pseudonym. Reisen said that she wanted the documentary, which I have yet to see, to come from almost entirely primary sources. Alcott, an avid journalist and prolific letter writer, certainly left behind a robust enough collection to make this possible. She is also one of the first authors to suffer/enjoy rampant celebrity during her own life (there were a couple of amusing anecdotes in the book where fans would arrive at her home and want to interview the real Jo). Because Alcott did not live in obscurity, much of this material remains in libraries, particularly the Houghton Library at Harvard. With all of these primary sources, Reisen has the material to construct a narrative replete with quotes from Alcott herself and her family members, from which the book greatly benefits.

Louisa and her family were closely involved with the Transcendentalist movement in Concord. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a progressive educator more successful at lecturing about his methods than convincing people to entrust him with their children. For much of his life, he was sponsored by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Alcott family composed an important part of the literary circle Emerson built around his home in Concord. Reisen even hints that Louisa had a strong crush on Henry David Thoreau, who served as inspiration for more than one of her characters. The early part of the book pushes the theme that Louisa's childhood was not at all as bright and comforting as Little Women. Bronson proves himself unable to provide for his family sufficiently and consistently. Partly because of his personal politics (he often refuses payments for his lectures, or as he called them conversations, because he refuses to monetize education) but also possibly because of a personality disorder keeps him unfocused on day-to-day details. As an example, he becomes enthralled with the idea of living in a commune, brings his family, but does not plan thoroughly to keep the commune fed through the winter and ends up relying on local Quakers to survive. The family lives debt to debt; eventually even family refuses to loan them money. Reisen carefully trods the line between outlining the hardships and refraining from castigating Bronson. To my reading, he seemed more troubled by incomplete philosophies and probable mental deficiencies than an irresponsible reprobate, but the women in the book club generally took him to task.

The latter half of the book focuses on the tension Louisa faces between desiring independence (both without a husband and from her family) and financial obligations to her family (without which they probably could not survive). Louisa discovers early on that she can write for money, which results in the countless murder mysteries and romances  that she can jot off quickly for income. I find it interesting that the narrative of Little Women, in which Jo reaches the pinnacle of her writing career with a story about her own sisters, has so thoroughly determined how I thought of Alcott's own writing career. To the contrary, she did not really desire to write children's fiction, despite encouragement from her father and an interested editor. Even after the overnight success of Little Women, Alcott remained dissatisfied with her writing and continued to work towards some literary triumph (specifically in adult fiction). Reisen writes her literary career as a moderately-tuned down success story in which young Louisa vows to be wealthy and famous and ultimately accomplishes this beyond her wildest dreams, freeing herself from financial worries and achieving a fame that outstrips almost anything seen to this point in the history of celebrity. Despite this, I found Alcott's life rather sad. She always wanted to write that critically-acclaimed novel, and almost didn't notice the acclaim for Little Women. She was overwhelmed by the fans who treated her as a commodity. And just as she achieves enough wealth to settle her family's debts and live comfortably, first her mother dies and then her own health begins to decline. All that being said, the novel obviously pulls the reader in and successfully achieves an effective sense of empathy.

My greatest complaint with the book, which I'm noticing as a running theme of popular nonfiction, is that there weren't nearly enough sources. For example, the author would write about Louisa's feelings and thoughts at various points in her life, such as her relationship with her father, without providing citations to Louisa's own description of these things. I found myself thinking, at several points, "how could you possibly know that?" I think this is a function of the popular nonfiction book which prioritizes narrative development over academic proof. In this arena, it's more important to tell a coherent story than it is to defend every assertion. Perhaps less egregious, though just as annoying to me, was the conflation of text and author. As an English student, this was a major taboo - never assume that a thought or sentiment expressed in a piece by an author expresses that author's personal experience or thoughts. I think this is perhaps especially complicated with Alcott because she acknowledged quite frankly that Little Women is autobiographical; her elder sister began to refer to herself as Meg. In this situation, it makes a bit of critical sense to interpret Alcott's life through the text. However, this does not mean that everything she wrote can be interpreted biographically. Just because she wrote about women having adventures in murder mysteries and romances doesn't mean you can assume that Alcott herself felt trapped by conventions. It seems like an illogical circle to say that a character seems to physically resemble Thoreau, and therefore because the heroine of a text admires that Thoreau-like character, Alcott herself must have admired Thoreau. Assertions like that require mounds of citations and explications, which are obviously not suitable for a work of popular nonfiction. Perhaps I quibble, but I found it annoying, not least because Reisen had plenty of primary sources to use to explore Alcott's inner life without resorting to this kind of guessing.

Given my strong preference for British literature, I have not read much by or about Alcott, or the Transcendentalist circle. It was a pleasure to discover some of their stories for the first time and it might encourage me to read a more academic treatment. This biography was a pleasure to read, and perhaps even more of a pleasure to discuss.