Six generations of "Little Women" readers, most of them female, have believed they know all about Louisa May Alcott. Of course she's Jo March, the narrating tomboy, the sister most reluctant to accept her domestic fate, the rebellious one who wanted to write and did write -- the March sister with whom fond readers (and even fonder re-readers) have most identified over all these years. To take the guided tour at Orchard House, the Alcott family homestead in Concord, Mass., is to be surrounded by Jo Marches of all ages, each eager to have her own glimpse of the sacred rooms. Here Amy drew, there Marmee sewed. Was it over there, in the cozy corner by the sitting room fireplace, where angelic, dying Beth cuddled her kittens and famously found her embroidery needle "so heavy"? Upstairs, they peek reverently at the simple half-moon writing desk, built by her ingenious father, where Alcott bore down so hard on her pen nib that she damaged her right hand and was forced to write with her left (so the tour guide, often another Jo manque, reveals). Back down the narrow stairs they file, all but gently lifting imaginary skirts.
The family she always wanted
Louisa May Alcott Little Women, Little Men, Jo's Boys Edited by Elaine Showalter The Library of America: 1,045 pp., $40
The "angel in the house," sister Elizabeth, never lived in Orchard House, though it is the setting of "Little Women," as she had died (not exquisitely, in innocent childhood, like her namesake Beth, but tragically, at age 23, of scarlet fever brought home by their mother as a consequence of nursing a poor neighboring family) a few months before the Alcotts moved in. "Little Women" was written 10 years after that, in just a few spring weeks, when its author was 36 years old. By then, Alcott was increasingly plagued by symptoms of mercury poisoning. Illness as a consequence of virtue was an Alcott family theme in life as well as in fiction. It was while working briefly in Washington as a Civil War army nurse in 1863 (an experience she mined for "Hospital Sketches," a volume based on her letters to her family, published that same year) that she contracted typhoid pneumonia, for which she was dosed with calomel, a then-common emetic containing mercury. For the rest of her life Alcott would suffer chronic and debilitating pain and fatigue, as well as bouts of mental confusion, complete with hallucinations, for which she is said to have taken opium.
When she sat down to write "Little Women," Alcott had every reason to be discouraged about her life. Her beautiful long, thick dark hair had fallen out in the course of her illness. She had become an unattractive invalid spinster, with some moderate success as a writer of romances and thrillers under the gender-neutral pen name A.M. Barnard. Her ambitions had been much larger. At age 15 she had written, "I will do something by and by. Don't care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I'll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won't!" At 25, after reading a biography of Charlotte Bronte, she noted, "I can't be a C.B., but I may do a little something yet." (For many years Abba Alcott read her daughters' diaries regularly and made approving or disapproving notations in the margins, so it may be that this modest tone was a false one that concealed a far less diffident yearning for literary immortality.) Above all, Alcott had the very practical desire to earn money to keep the household going, as her parents had become dependent on her modest earnings. (A. Bronson Alcott, the eccentric Transcendentalist, educator and writer, was never especially focused on supporting his family.) When her publisher asked her to try her hand at a book for girls, she obliged.
Over just a few weeks of May and June, Alcott produced the chapters that are Part I of "Little Women" and sent them off to her editor, Thomas Niles at Roberts Bros. (It had been Bronson Alcott's publisher first.) The book was a tremendous success from the moment of publication in December 1868, bringing sudden fame, money and an insatiable demand for sequels. The public had fallen in love with the book and its author, believing that Jo was Louisa, Louisa was Jo. She quickly wrote the second half of what now forms the complete, two-part "Little Women" for publication the following year. "Little Men" followed in 1871 and "Jo's Boys" in 1886, with several other books and stories churned out as well.
Alcott hadn't just written a book for girls; she had created a genre, and with it an identity for herself as a writer. (Henry James would soon call her "the Thackeray, the Trollope, of the nursery and the schoolroom," which Alcott surely recognized for the condescension that it was.) She would later write to a friend, "The book was very hastily written to order & I had many doubts about the success of my first attempt at a girl's book.... The characters were drawn from life which gives them whatever merit they possess, for I find it impossible to invent anything half so true or touching as the simple facts with which everyday life supplies me."
