Louisa May: A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott

Whether you agree with her conclusions or not, Martha Saxton's book is worth reading if only for the shock value. Not your ordinary, dry timeline of a book, this is written as if you had the displeasure of being an Alcott cousin or neighbor. What if you knew your neighbor never worked, on philosophical grounds, leading his wife and children to near starvation? What if you knew your cousins rarely lived in the same house for more than 2 years in a row, so that the children had no friends? I grew to absolutely despise the self-important, myopic Bronson Alcott and have sympathy for his wife's family (her father seems never to have liked the guy and tried in vain to keep her inheritance from paying off his debts). The facts of this book are very much in sync with those presented in John Matteson's Eden's Outcasts. It's just that in the telling, Matteson attempts to cut Bronson some slack. Also, Martha Saxton gives more whole quotes--feels like almost every paragraph--which gives a good idea of the actual voice of the person being described but it does make tiring reading. Whether this book leaves you angry AT Saxton or WITH her, this is not a book that will leave you uninvolved. Great fun.

I can't remember the last time a book made me cry; it was probably 50 years ago when I first read "Little Women"; Beth's death was unbearably sad, but there is a death in this book that is even more shocking and unexpected, all the more so because it is a biography, and not fiction. Louisa May Alcott (the middle name "May" was not added to her name for the lilt, as in Cheryl "Lynn," but was in fact her mother's maiden name -- a charming custom at the time, but not in the best interest of security, today, almost like my telling you my mother's maiden name is Halper) lived a mean, hard-scrabble life. Growing up in a family of four daughters, with a transcendentalist-philosopher father who did not believe in working for pay, owning property, or running a business; Louisa and her sisters subsisted on a diet of raw apples and cold water for much of their childhood, with the occasional hard cracker for fiber. Her father did believe in charity, however, so her life -- and her mother's life -- was a constant scratch for money to support the family, any way they could. Louisa was a teacher, governess, and paid companion to an invalid woman; until at last she was able to bring in enough money through her writing to keep her parents comfortable; although there were no luxuries in the Alcott homestead, eventually she was able to install a furnace. Even then, it seemed, when she was a famous author, earning large advances for her books, there was never enough money for her to feel secure. She did indeed have an older sister, who married a steady, boring young man (the Meg and John Brooke of "Little Women") and a frail sister, Beth, who met the same fate as her eponymous doppelganger in "LW", and a young, pretty artist sister, the baby and beauty of the family, named Abigail, nicknamed Abby (after her mother, who was nicknamed Abba) who changed her name to May (to distinguish herself from her mother). The world of the Alcotts in Massachusetts was populated with the era's greatest thinkers: Ralph Waldo Emerson was their next-door neighbor; as a teenager Louisa had a mad crush on a local gardener, Henry David Thoreau, a misogynistic mama's boy whom one could kindly describe as a "shrub shlub." Nathaniel Hawthorne was another neighbor; Walt Whitman made an appearence in Concord; May, studying painting in Europe, befriended no less a light than Mary Cassatt, the pre-eminent female artist of the time. The Alcotts' world was peopled with women's suffragists (Louisa voting for the first time -- in a school board election!) and abolitionists such as John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison. Louisa's greatest personal triumph was probably her service as a nurse during the Civil War; although the adventure ended badly, and left her health in ruins for the rest of her life, it was there that she used her hands, and head, and heart to heal the broken young men in the Grand Army hospital. Surprisingly, and sadly, the writing of "Little Women" was not the heartfelt outpour

I grew up on Louisa May Alcott's books-- and wanted to "BE" Jo March. Well, Saxton's biography traces the parts of Jo that are Alcott, and points out the important differences between the fiction Alcott created and the life she lived. The biography points out Alcott's troubled relationship with her family, her need to support them and feel important, and her severe disabilities later in life (the time she was writing most of her work) because of a "Mercury Cure." Saxton takes quite an antagonistic view towards Bronson Alcott, and her sympathies are quite "feminist" in origin-- but all in all, this book will be a great read, and teach you a lot about this incredible, under-rated writer who is a part of our cultural heritage.