Truth More Stark than Fiction
by Julia M. Klein
NOVEMBER 10, 2009 TAGS:
In Little Women, the autobiographical classic sobbed over by generations of young girls, Louisa May Alcott softened her family’s tribulations to suit Victorian sensibilities. Harriet Reisen’s Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women (A John MacRae Book/Henry Holt and Company) fills in the rest of the picture, describing a life more complicated, unconventional and tragic than Alcott’s fans might have imagined.
Like Jo March, her fictional alter ego, Alcott was a tomboy with a temper, an adventurous soul who began writing as a child and never stopped. “She was,” Reisen writes, “a protean personality, a turbulent force, a passionate fighter attracted to danger and violence.” She may even have been manic-depressive, as the clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison has suggested. Reisen isn’t certain, but she notes that both Alcott’s parents also exhibited fluctuating moods.
Unlike Jo, Alcott would never marry, or have children of her own, and the family she loved would become an ongoing financial burden. In the mid-19th century, having it all was rarely an option for women who chose to exercise their intellectual or literary gifts. But at least “spinsterhood,” that dreaded state, conferred a certain degree of freedom – to travel, to dabble in acting, to write feverishly through the night.
Drawing heavily on family letters and journals, Reisen’s intimate biography, whose companion documentary will run Dec. 28 on PBS’s "American Masters," is a moving and sympathetic look at the Alcotts and their extraordinary cultural milieu. Louisa grew up in and around Concord and Boston, near the heart of the Transcendentalist circle that dominated New England. Her mentors included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, each of whom she employed as models for literary characters. Nathaniel Hawthorne was another neighbor and friend. The Alcotts were so enmeshed in the Abolitionist movement that their home served as a stop on the Underground Railroad and a refuge for John Brown’s widow after his execution.
Bronson Alcott, Louisa’s father, was a poet, philosopher and (mostly) a seductive conversationalist and lecturer whose personality attracted ardent followers of both sexes. Reisen speculates that he may have had a homosexual or at least homoerotic relationship with one such acolyte, Charles Lane – a connection strong enough to have almost destroyed his marriage. “That there was a love triangle with Bronson at the center is undeniable,” Reisen writes.
Despite his charisma, most of Bronson’s money-making schemes, including schools and communities with a utopian bent, were dismal failures; he was better at ideas than execution. As a result, the four Alcott daughters and their mother, Abigail, experienced poverty considerably more stark than that of the fictional March family. Emerson offered financial help, as did Abigail’s relatives, and Abigail took in sewing, taught classes, did social work and put her daughters to work. Louisa’s unenviable early jobs included stints as a laundress, seamstress and servant. She would later work as a Civil War nurse, chronicling her care of the wounded and dying in the popular Hospital Sketches (1863).
By the time Louisa was in her mid-20s, the family had moved an astonishing 30 times, both to avoid bill collectors and to find affordable lodging. The gap between the family’s cultural capital and its financial wherewithal was imposing and doubtless left an emotional mark. Alcott “knew not only family affection but also dangerous family disaffection; not just domestic toil but grueling manual labor; she knew gnawing hunger and the bloody aftermath of war,” Reisen writes, in a style verging on the Victorian.
Louisa vowed to earn money through her writing, which was always quick and prolific. As her career prospered – Little Women and its sequels made her wealthy, as well as famous – she took over as the de facto family patriarch, providing for her siblings and parents.
Alcott’s literary output included far more than children’s classics. As revealed in 1942 by a rare book dealer, she also churned out high-paying pulp fiction, either anonymously or under a pseudonym. Reisen argues that “money was not Louisa’s sole motivation” for this sort of writing. In fact, the biographer says, “These psychologically complex tales of lust, betrayal, revenge, and violence satisfied Louisa’s thirst for adventure as nothing else in her life could. Her daring tales of scheming heroines and villainous suitors allowed her to explore incest, sadism, murder, suicide, swindling, transvestism, revolution, espionage, unwed motherhood, and above all power struggles between the sexes.”
Her imagination must have been as profound as her personal experience was limited. Reisen doesn’t link Louisa to any enduring love. She describes early, unconsummated attachments to Emerson and Thoreau, both much older, and a romantic friendship with a much younger man, Laddie Wisniewski, whom she met in Europe and saw periodically over the years. It was he, Reisen says, who would serve as the model for Laurie, the boy next door in Little Women whom Jo passed up to marry an older man.
By contrast, the middle-aged Louisa lived alone. “She had chosen spinsterhood,” Reisen insists, “fearing what she had seen of marriage: bad choices, love outlived, wives without rights, straying spouses, misery till death.” Instead, Alcott, plagued herself by what was likely lupus, devoted herself to caring for her nuclear family. She survived two sisters, a beloved brother-in-law, and her mother, and assumed parental oversight of a niece.
Alcott’s father, who had the same birthday, predeceased her by two days, though she was too ill to know of his death. When she died, of a stroke at age 55, “There was no one by her side,” Reisen observes – and that ending seems both devastatingly sad and wholly fitting for the writer who had carved out her own solitary path.
Like Jo March, her fictional alter ego, Alcott was a tomboy with a temper, an adventurous soul who began writing as a child and never stopped. “She was,” Reisen writes, “a protean personality, a turbulent force, a passionate fighter attracted to danger and violence.” She may even have been manic-depressive, as the clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison has suggested. Reisen isn’t certain, but she notes that both Alcott’s parents also exhibited fluctuating moods. Unlike Jo, Alcott would never marry, or have children of her own, and the family she loved would become an ongoing financial burden. In the mid-19th century, having it all was rarely an option for women who chose to exercise their intellectual or literary gifts. But at least “spinsterhood,” that dreaded state, conferred a certain degree of freedom – to travel, to dabble in acting, to write feverishly through the night.
Drawing heavily on family letters and journals, Reisen’s intimate biography, whose companion documentary will run Dec. 28 on PBS’s "American Masters," is a moving and sympathetic look at the Alcotts and their extraordinary cultural milieu. Louisa grew up in and around Concord and Boston, near the heart of the Transcendentalist circle that dominated New England. Her mentors included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, each of whom she employed as models for literary characters. Nathaniel Hawthorne was another neighbor and friend. The Alcotts were so enmeshed in the Abolitionist movement that their home served as a stop on the Underground Railroad and a refuge for John Brown’s widow after his execution.
Bronson Alcott, Louisa’s father, was a poet, philosopher and (mostly) a seductive conversationalist and lecturer whose personality attracted ardent followers of both sexes. Reisen speculates that he may have had a homosexual or at least homoerotic relationship with one such acolyte, Charles Lane – a connection strong enough to have almost destroyed his marriage. “That there was a love triangle with Bronson at the center is undeniable,” Reisen writes.
Despite his charisma, most of Bronson’s money-making schemes, including schools and communities with a utopian bent, were dismal failures; he was better at ideas than execution. As a result, the four Alcott daughters and their mother, Abigail, experienced poverty considerably more stark than that of the fictional March family. Emerson offered financial help, as did Abigail’s relatives, and Abigail took in sewing, taught classes, did social work and put her daughters to work. Louisa’s unenviable early jobs included stints as a laundress, seamstress and servant. She would later work as a Civil War nurse, chronicling her care of the wounded and dying in the popular Hospital Sketches (1863).
By the time Louisa was in her mid-20s, the family had moved an astonishing 30 times, both to avoid bill collectors and to find affordable lodging. The gap between the family’s cultural capital and its financial wherewithal was imposing and doubtless left an emotional mark. Alcott “knew not only family affection but also dangerous family disaffection; not just domestic toil but grueling manual labor; she knew gnawing hunger and the bloody aftermath of war,” Reisen writes, in a style verging on the Victorian.
Louisa vowed to earn money through her writing, which was always quick and prolific. As her career prospered – Little Women and its sequels made her wealthy, as well as famous – she took over as the de facto family patriarch, providing for her siblings and parents.
Alcott’s literary output included far more than children’s classics. As revealed in 1942 by a rare book dealer, she also churned out high-paying pulp fiction, either anonymously or under a pseudonym. Reisen argues that “money was not Louisa’s sole motivation” for this sort of writing. In fact, the biographer says, “These psychologically complex tales of lust, betrayal, revenge, and violence satisfied Louisa’s thirst for adventure as nothing else in her life could. Her daring tales of scheming heroines and villainous suitors allowed her to explore incest, sadism, murder, suicide, swindling, transvestism, revolution, espionage, unwed motherhood, and above all power struggles between the sexes.”Her imagination must have been as profound as her personal experience was limited. Reisen doesn’t link Louisa to any enduring love. She describes early, unconsummated attachments to Emerson and Thoreau, both much older, and a romantic friendship with a much younger man, Laddie Wisniewski, whom she met in Europe and saw periodically over the years. It was he, Reisen says, who would serve as the model for Laurie, the boy next door in Little Women whom Jo passed up to marry an older man.
By contrast, the middle-aged Louisa lived alone. “She had chosen spinsterhood,” Reisen insists, “fearing what she had seen of marriage: bad choices, love outlived, wives without rights, straying spouses, misery till death.” Instead, Alcott, plagued herself by what was likely lupus, devoted herself to caring for her nuclear family. She survived two sisters, a beloved brother-in-law, and her mother, and assumed parental oversight of a niece.
Alcott’s father, who had the same birthday, predeceased her by two days, though she was too ill to know of his death. When she died, of a stroke at age 55, “There was no one by her side,” Reisen observes – and that ending seems both devastatingly sad and wholly fitting for the writer who had carved out her own solitary path.
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