Marlene Wagman-Geller

Sep 30, 2024 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

 

Louisa May Alcott

 

“I would rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe.”—Louisa May Alcott

 

Some of America’s greatest authors, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau, slumber in Sleepy Hollow, a Concord cemetery. A notable grave belongs to the mother of young adult fiction, Louisa May Alcott. If, in Spoon River Anthology fashion, Louisa spoke from the afterlife, her story would involve her family, immortalized in her novel, Little Women.

The cradle of America’s literary homes is Concord, Massachusetts, New England’s Bloomsbury. The town’s clapboard houses have not changed much since the 1776 arrival of the Redcoats, since the site birthed a beloved children’s classic.

The author’s father, Amos Bronson (he went by his middle name) Alcott, was a teacher and a transcendental philosopher whose radical theories destined his wife, Abigail, and their four daughters to grueling poverty. The penury was daunting to Abigail, of the affluent May family; her great aunt Dorothy Quincy married John Hancock, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Bronson’s Temple School collapsed after he admitted a black female. Enraged parents withdrew their children, and newspapers denounced him as “either insane or half-witted.” Fleeing the tempest, Bronson left for a six-month visit to England financed by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Upon his return, the Alcotts journeyed in a horse-drawn wagon to Fruitlands, a Harvard, Massachusetts, utopian commune that consisted of thirteen members. Adherents could not wear cotton—a product of slavery; leather—it came from animals; or eat root vegetables—they grew in the direction of hell. Abigail took in boarders and worked as a seamstress. During the couple’s first thirty years of marriage, they lived on family handouts and moved twenty times. One of the family’s homes was Wayside, which they dubbed Hillside, a residence that doubled as a station on the Underground Railroad. Abolition brought the Alcotts into contact with Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman. After John Brown’s execution, his wife and daughters took refuge with the Alcotts. When the Alcotts vacated, Nathaniel Hawthorne became the next tenant. Louisa is chiefly associated with the two-hundred-year-old Orchard House which Bronson purchased for less than a thousand dollars, a cost partially furnished by Emerson. The property received its name from its forty apple trees. Due to the house’s poor condition, the Alcott women nicknamed it Apple Slump.

Bronson and Abigail proved to be devoted parents who encouraged creativity and allowed their youngest daughter, May, to paint on the walls. When Louisa showed an interest in writing, Abigail gifted her a fountain pen. An early diary entry of Louisa’s read, “I wish we were rich, I was good, and we were all a happy family.” Her father built her a semicircular desk, its surface was so small it could only hold her inkwell and a piece of paper, that sat between the windows of her very small room. a [AU: missing text]

Louisa (she preferred Lou) was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1832, on Bronson’s thirty-third birthday. The family relocated to Concord, where Emerson offered her the use of his home library; Henry David Thoreau took her on nature walks in the woods near Walden Pond. In Little Women, Louisa’s literary alter ego, Jo, states, “I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy.” When her older sister Meg admonished her to behave, as she was a young lady, Jo responded, “I ain’t.” Her litmus test for male companionship, “No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race, and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences.”

At age fifteen, because of her financially hapless father and overworked mother, Louisa was determined to contribute to the family coffers. She vowed, “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!”

During the Civil War, Louisa worked as a Union nurse where she contracted typhoid, a condition that worsened when doctors treated her with mercury that led to poisoning. She never fully regained her health. Letters home describing her experiences made it into print as Hospital Sketches, which served as her first literary success. However, her preferred genre was suspense novels, for which she used the pen name A. M. Barnard. Her stories, which earned a pittance, showcased women on adventures in the high seas and glamorous locales.

Editor Thomas Niles urged Louisa to write a novel for girls, a task she dreaded as she deemed juvenile fiction “moral pap.” Her resolve ended when Niles told her that he would publish her father’s manuscript on his philosophical theories if she agreed. In 1868 Louisa wrote, “Mr. N. wants a girls’ story, and I began Little Women. I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters.” Louisa’s literary counterpart was Jo, Meg was Anna, Amy was May, Beth was Elizabeth, and her mother, Abigail, was Marmee. Niles’s niece read some chapters and declared them “splendid.” The novel sold two thousand copies within two weeks making the author a multimillionaire in contemporary currency. Louisa noted in her journal, “Goethe put his sorrows & joys into poems, I turn my adventures into bread & butter.” With the windfall, Louisa fulfilled her father’s dream of opening the Concord School of Philosophy in his study in Orchard House, the country’s first school for adults.

Although grateful that the Alcott family was finally free of economic woe, Louisa was not comfortable with her role as a literary light. When fans knocked at her door, she pretended to be the maid and sent them away. When the first volume, covering the March sisters’ childhood, proved rite-of-passage catnip, fans clamored for a sequel that would reveal the girls’ fate. What irked Louisa was the outcry that clamored for Jo to marry a variation of Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy. She groused in her journal, “Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only end aim of a woman’s life. I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone.” Eventually bowing to pressure for Jo’s wedding, “out of perversity” Louisa “made a funny match” that failed to make readers’ bosoms heave. She anticipated the fallout, “I expect vials of wrath to be poured upon my head but rather enjoy the prospect.”

Louisa never married though she did spend time as a surrogate mother. In 1880 she became the guardian of her ten-month-old niece and namesake, Louisa May Nieriker, nicknamed Lulu. With her sister’s largesse, May had moved to Paris to pursue her passion for art where she passed away from meningitis just after Lulu’s birth [AU: not clear who is being referred to in this sentence]. After her Aunt Louisa’s death from a stroke, two days after Bronson’s passing, Lulu joined her father in Switzerland [AU: why is this important?].

 

Orchard House

After the Alcott family sold their house in 1911, the Concord Women’s Club purchased the property to memorialize Louisa’s life and legacy. Fans of Little Women make pilgrimages to Orchard House to step into the Civil War era of the March sisters. The house, where 80 percent of the furnishings are authentic, is a time capsule to yesteryear when the family walked its halls. The parlor has earth-toned wallpaper and a green patterned carpet. Portraits of Bronson and Abigail, along with May’s watercolors, hang on the walls. The formal area displays “furniture very plain” and “a good picture or two hung on the walls,” where visitors can conjure the images of the Alcott women darning their socks, playing their Chickering piano. The room holds the costumes the Alcott children wore in their home theatricals. Louisa adored her russet-colored boots to such an extent she only wrote parts for herself where she could wear them. Bronson arranged for arched niches to showcase busts of Plato and Socrates.  The parlor retains the memory of guests Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne waxing eloquent on literature and philosophy. Visitors are privy to Beth’s piano, May’s paintings, Anna’s wedding-gown, and Lulu’s toys. An autobiographical element is Louisa’s mood pillow: the author had a mercurial temper; when she put out her pillow it served as a sign for her family to give her space. When the pillow was sideways, it meant approach with caution. In a journal entry from 1860, Louisa wrote, “All of the philosophy in our house is not in the study, a good deal is in the kitchen…” The kitchen, where the family prepared their vegetarian meals, holds their scrubbed hutch table, the soapstone kitchen sink, replete with a drain, purchased from literary royalties. Branson implemented a  rack for drying laundry, and a hot water boiler. During dinners in the dining room, conversations centered on suffrage, abolition, and child labor. The dining room is the repository of Abigail’s family china, portraits of Elizabeth and Louisa, and May’s paintings. Along with the original furnishings is Elizabeth’s melodeon, (a small red organ). Before the Alcotts had taken residency of Orchard House, Elizabeth had recently passed away from scarlet fever. The shrine that her family set up in the dining room remains and includes May’s portrait of her sister and two candles. A room of one’s own was always a priority for Louisa. Her small bedchamber holds the bookcase her father built which she filled with works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Branson also built a half-moon writing desk that he placed between the two windows. On the desk’s small surface, that only had space for an inkwell and quill, within the span of ten weeks, Louisa wrote Little Women, the novel that impacted American literature and the Alcott’s lives. Gazing upon a page from the manuscript of her famous work, penned in her distinctive backward-slanted handwriting, one can hear  the scratching of a quill. Black-and-white photographs rest on antique furniture; The walls bear paintings of calla lilies and nasturtiums that May painted so her sister could see them from her bed as she convalesced from typhoid. Also present is May’s painting of an owl that hangs by Louisa’s bed. Given her immortality, Louisa was anything but a little woman.

 

A View from Her Window

From Louisa’s semicircular desk, she looked upon Lexington Road which had an elm tree that dated from the period of the American Revolution.

 

Nearby Attraction: The Concord Museum

The 1930 brick building exhibits a lantern Paul Revere used to warn his fellow Bostonians, “The British are coming!” Visitors can view the bed, desk, and chair from Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, as well as the original study where Emerson wrote his famous essays.

 

 

 

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