The family she always wanted

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 “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.”

And readers have believed that claim ever since.

Perhaps the devoted reader’s perception of “Little Women” would shift slightly if it were common knowledge that her working title before publication was “The Pathetic Family.” (The 19th century sense of pathos would have been not an ironic judgment but a straightforward description of something that evokes feelings of sympathy or sorrow at the difficulties or misfortunes of others.) The Alcott family was pathetic. But transmuted into a charming fiction, Lizzie’s ugly death became the sweet and peaceful demise of innocent Beth. Grim, scraping poverty became a game of thrift and virtuous self-denial. Louisa’s lost hair inspired Jo’s willingly sacrificed hair, which she nobly sells to aid her father in a time of need. Her sister May’s marriage six years earlier, which had been an occasion for raging bitterness and jealousy on Louisa’s part, was transformed into a warm and funny and far more ordinary sort of teenage angst when Jo is upset over Meg’s marriage. The romantic attraction Louisa Alcott felt for family friend Henry David Thoreau (there is no evidence that he or anyone else was ever romantically attracted to her), as well as her fondness for Ralph Waldo Emerson, were very likely the inspirations for the golden boy, Laurie (though Alcott always claimed he was based on a Polish lad she met while traveling in Europe).

The endless demands of running a household that fell on Alcott are distributed more fairly in “Little Women,” as the March household burdens are shared among the sisters, Marmee and Hannah, the utterly fictional jolly cook. (And how poor could the Marches really be if they had Hannah?) Alcott’s family role is more covertly represented when Jo says, “I’m the man of the family now papa is away,” in the opening pages, the first of countless references throughout the novel to Jo’s wish for independent power and maleness. A few pages later she announces, “I hate to think I’ve got to grow up, and be Miss March, and wear long gowns, and look as prim as a China-aster! It’s bad enough to be a girl, any-way, when I like boys’ games, and work, and manners! I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy.”

Jo is utterly serious in these wishes, and yet somehow this sentiment has always flown under the radar (feminist lit crit excepted). Is it possible that her declarations were seen as so naive, so innocent, that they have never attracted the censorious outrage one might expect to see applied to a popular book for children whose main character yearns for gender reassignment?

In Part II of “Little Women,” Jo’s marriage to the paternal Mr. Bhaer is emotionally inauthentic, which Louisa knew perfectly well, as she explained in a letter to a friend: “Jo should have remained a literary spinster, but so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didn’t dare refuse and out of perversity went and made a funny match for her.” That marriage is the turning point in these books, the moment when Alcott reverted to the kind of writing she had always done, charming and inconsequential stories driven by an intelligence and humor far greater than any literary gift.

Jo March is Alcott’s greatest invention. Rebellious yet lovable -- unlike her author, who was rebellious and rather unlovable -- Jo carries the novel (and, to a far lesser degree, its sequels) because she is such an original character in these cloistered rooms. Because of her, the story remains fresh and modern, and even today a bit subversive. (The subversiveness isn’t Jo’s alone. “I think anxiety is very interesting,” is surely one of the underrated Amy’s more arresting remarks.) We are charmed and thrilled by Jo’s temper, her selfishness, her ego, her refusal to do what society expects of her and, in the later books, by her nonstandard declarations and choices about such things as growing up female, marriage, child-rearing and education. (Alcott, like her father, was an advocate of abolition and women’s suffrage, and her writing provides more subtle lessons in morality and goodness than readers may recall.)

Jo has made a remarkable impression on generations of readers. Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “I believed I had caught a glimpse of my future self.... I identified passionately with Jo, the intellectual.... I shared her horror of housekeeping and her love of books.” Cynthia Ozick wrote, “I read ‘Little Women’ a thousand times. Ten thousand.... I am Jo in her ‘vortex’; not Jo, exactly, but some Jo-of-the-future. I am under an enchantment.”

By publishing this edition of “Little Women,” edited by Elaine Showalter, who contributes a thorough and informative biographical chronology, the Library of America ratifies Alcott’s significance as a writer. The inclusion of “Little Men” and “Jo’s Boys” in the volume makes scholarly sense, but reading the lesser works only reminds us that “Little Women” was a singular achievement. There is a captivating trueness in the way the book conveys its ambivalence about the very family values it seemingly celebrates. Despite all the transpositions and transmutations that make it as much a fantasy as a loving report derived from “the simple facts with which everyday life supplied” its author, “Little Women” has a genuineness the sequels lack with their ordinary writing, contrived situations and derivative sentimentality.

“Little Women” is a novel handed down from mother to daughter, aunt to niece. It may well qualify as the first children’s book of modern literature, but because it has so rarely been taught to the age group for whom it was written, it hasn’t been rendered joyless by relentless, dreary classroom examination, as have “A Tale of Two Cities” and “Ethan Frome.” Perhaps “Little Women” was never considered good enough literature for reading lists because it is such a girl’s book (although girls are expected to read boy’s books, from “Tom Sawyer” to “The Catcher in the Rye”). And so it has been set free over the decades to be cherished and adored by women around the world who first encountered whistling, contrary Jo in those battered copies of the book that belonged to their mothers and their grandmothers, a Jo struggling to be loved, created by an author who wanted only the same. *