Prior to moving here, the Alcotts had already moved twenty-three times in the prior twenty years. The Orchard House as named by the family, was purchased by Louisa May Alcott’s father, Bronson Alcott, in 1857. Taylor Barnes is an intern at the Monitor.The story takes place in The Orchard House in Concord Massachusetts. But if Alcott’s most popular novels drew on biographical material to make a neat, family-friendly tale, a biography of the troubled and spirited woman herself can be anything but. The book suffers only from such a microscopic examination that details and characters are confused in a way that they wouldn’t be in an Alcott story. Riesen’s biography makes these astute analyses having examined each curve of the writer’s career. “o many enthusiastic ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didn’t dare refuse, and out of perversity went & made a funny match for her,” Alcott wrote.) She “was addicted to popularity, and knew better than to flout convention too much,” Reisen says. (She admitted easily bowing to popular demand to have Jo marry in her fiction, though she would have preferred to have her as a strong and independent spinster like herself. Sometimes she pretended to be a gardener to avoid them.įor Alcott, writing was what her aching machines of fingers could churn out to pay the bills as much as it was a creative outlet. She didn’t even take pleasure in the hordes of fans that trekked to her home: Reisen describes her as a “curmudgeon” who turned away excited young girls. She took morphine, opium, and hashish in no small quantity. Her two younger sisters died before she did. Her family moved 30 times by her mid-20s. She was chronically sick after her war-nurse stint. Though Alcott modeled the spunky “Jo” after herself, her life was the more interesting of the two – although with far fewer happy endings besides her eventual fortune as a fiction writer. She became the “Alcott family writing manufacturer, nurse, maid, and bill payer,” in Riesen’s words. But despite being the family breadwinner, she was also the caretaker, long nursing her ill mother and at times her father, and taking on her late sister May’s (“Amy”) infant daughter. According to Riesen, Alcott was making over $2 million a year in today’s dollars. In 1871, for example, she took in $7,654 from just one publisher’s royalties. “Every penny that money can pay – and now I feel as if I could die in peace,” Alcott wrote.īut she had much more time to live and would always be far from peace, despite her fortune. Alcott even paid one of her family’s final large debts with the book’s proceeds – a decade-old doctor’s bill for treatment for young Lizzie (“Beth” to fans) at the time of her death. The American classic was an immediate hit that hasn’t yet lost its appeal to young readers. ![]() “Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.” “I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing,” Louisa wrote. Bronson Alcott prodded his daughter to turn the family’s tales into a book when a publisher was chasing after the already-popular children’s author. It was the plague that, left by her father – whose dreamy utopian ambitions were only matched by his lack of financial wits – defined Alcott’s life until adulthood. “Little Women” itself was born of the need to pay off family debts. (A televised version of Reisen’s book aired Dec. Harriet Reisen’s Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women perceptively traces each wild turn of the author’s life through diary entries, letters, and her own largely autobiographical popular fiction. ![]() She was a child of a transcendentalist, an actress, a Civil War nurse, an invalid’s governess, an elite first-class traveler of Europe, and the celebrity writer of a multitude of family tales and racy pulp fiction. The author of the timeless homey tale “Little Women” herself lived “an unusually varied experience,” in her own words. – the four young daughters and debt-ridden parents would suffer mightly from hunger, cold, and the effects of poor nutrition. But if things turned out anything like they did in real life – when father Bronson subjected his family to life at Fruitlands, an experiment in agrarian communal life in Harvard, Mass. If Louisa May Alcott’s family were alive today, they would likely try their hands at working an organic co-op in Massachusetts, keeping company with Michael Pollan, and seeking out other progressive writers of the day.
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