The Annotated Little Women

by Louisa May Alcott

  One final indispensable tenet of Bronson Alcott’s vision for his utopia was to exert an especially strong influence on ten-year-old Louisa. He meant to do away with the idea of the traditional family, replacing it with a concept he and Lane called “consociate family.” The theory called upon all the community’s members to cast aside their personal preferences for their spouses and blood relations and to form a single, egalitarian family, in which no person could make a special claim on the love or loyalty of any other. The goal, Alcott told his wife, was to make each member “emancipated from the bonds of self and made free in the freedom of love.”19

  Louisa idolized her mother, Abigail May Alcott (1800–1877) and observed that she “always did what came to her in the way of duty and charity, and let pride, taste, and comfort suffer for love’s sake.” (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  Alcott brought Lane, Lane’s young son William, and Wright back to America with him in October 1842. On the first morning of the following June, now minus the wayward Mr. Wright, who had fallen in love with a lady reformer and was now pursuing his own private paradise, the Alcotts and the Lanes took possession of a farm the two men had purchased (or, as they would have said, liberated from the bonds of worldly commerce) a small distance from Harvard, Massachusetts. Hamstrung by its excessive love of virtue, Fruitlands never secured a firm footing. At its peak, its population, including the six Alcotts and two Lanes, never crested fifteen. As summer turned to autumn, the membership began to dwindle. More eager to enlist more members than to make the best of what they had, Bronson and Lane frequently departed the commune on generally barren recruiting junkets, leaving most of the crushing task of running the farm to Mrs. Alcott and the children. Asked whether the farm employed any beasts of burden, Abba replied, “Only one woman.”20

  By December, no one but the Alcotts and Lanes remained. Desperate to salvage the community on any terms, Alcott and Lane proposed to follow the example of a much more prosperous utopian venture, a colony of Shakers two or three miles north of Harvard. Relying on adoption and conversion to replenish their ranks, the Shakers had almost entirely segregated the sexes. As late autumn settled over Fruitlands, Bronson Alcott advanced the idea that his community, too, should separate along gender lines. Since the only women left at the commune were Mrs. Alcott and her daughters, Bronson was essentially proposing to separate from his blood family. Louisa wrote in her journal, “We all cried. Anna and I cried in bed, and I prayed God to keep us all together.”21 The family did not divide. However, Fruitlands dissolved only weeks later, and Bronson suffered a severe breakdown from which it took him years to fully recover.

  More significant in the long run, however, was the influence of the Fruitlands experiment on Louisa. In the summer of 1843, she had been led to believe that family was the paramount concept in human relations and had been encouraged to regard her father as a kind of über-patriarch, whose “consociate family” might grow beyond every imaginable limit, with literally no end to its diversity or size. Barely half a year later, she had seen with her own eyes how perilously fragile a family could be. Louisa May Alcott perceived both sides of this lesson: both the concept that a “family” might be constructed on some principle other than blood relations and a belief that, in times of crisis, no imperative was greater than that the family must be preserved. The two ideas would each prove integral to her later writings.

  Thankfully, the family’s seemingly endless wandering paused in April 1845 for a period of calm that was to last three and a half years. It was then, when Louisa was twelve, that her family moved into the house in Concord on Lexington Road that they called Hillside. The house, now better known by the name that Nathaniel Hawthorne later gave it, the Wayside, proudly claims to be the most literary home in America, having housed the Alcotts, the Hawthornes, and Margaret Sidney, the author of Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. All this fame was still in the future, though, when the Alcotts took possession. What mattered most to Louisa was that the new house gave her a much-coveted room of her own, which her mother “made very pretty and neat” for her and which Louisa used as a retreat when she wanted to think, to dream, and to write. Abba had given her daughter more than a sheltering physical space. Louisa wrote in her diary, “People think I’m wild and queer, but Mother understands and helps me.”22 During these years, Louisa and “Marmee,” as Louisa later called her in her journals, formed an ever-deepening bond. Not only did Abba share her daughter’s love of literature and imaginative stories, but she also sympathized with Louisa’s efforts to manage her seemingly ungovernable temper. Although there is no proof that, as in Little Women, the real Marmee took Louisa aside and confessed to her, “I am angry nearly every day of my life,” we have the transcriptions of Louisa’s journals as evidence that, just as in the novel, Abba advised her daughter to “hope and keep busy.”23 In addition, she counseled Louisa to write frequently in her journal and to write poems as a way of making herself “less excitable and anxious.” Bronson continued to lecture Louisa on morally improving subjects. However, if Louisa did better her conduct during these years, it was less to please her father than to “be a help and comfort, not a care and sorrow, to my dear mother.”24

  The Hillside house in Concord, Massachusetts. Known also as “The Wayside,” it was home to the Alcotts from 1845 to 1848. Hillside was the scene of the happiest years of Alcott’s youth. Although Little Women is set during and after the Civil War, the ages of the March sisters roughly correspond with the ages of the Alcott girls when they lived here. (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  Unhappily, Bronson failed to see the bond between Abba and Louisa as merely one of love and loyalty; rather, their closeness seemed a threat to his authority. It was hard for him to imagine why, after all his theorizing and clinically precise parenting, he should not stand first in the affections of all his children. Moreover, the stormy temperaments of both the woman and the girl were impossible for his own placid nature to comprehend. In hyperbolic frustration, he told his journal, “Two devils, as yet, I am not quite divine enough to vanquish—the mother fiend and her daughter.”25 There grew up, for a time, a rift in the Alcott family. Pleased as he was with Louisa’s “boundless curiosity, her penetrating mind and tear-shedding heart,” Bronson continued to see his other daughters as belonging more in spirit to him.26 Louisa was a child apart.

  It was wonderful, then—as well as crucially important to Louisa’s later writing—that no similar divide arose among the Alcott sisters. They were brought together both by their shared desire to help the struggling family and by Anna’s and Louisa’s passionate interest in theater. Neither May’s youth nor Lizzie’s preference for a seat in the audience were adequate defenses as their older sisters dragooned them into service. Near the end of her life, Anna Alcott recalled:

  In the good old times, when ‘Little Women’ worked and played together, the big garret [at Hillside] was the scene of many dramatic revels. After a long day of teaching, sewing, and ‘helping mother,’ the greatest delight of the girls was to transform themselves into queens, knights, and cavaliers of high degree, and ascend into a world of fantasy and romance. . . . Flowers bloomed, forests arose, music sounded, and lovers exchanged their vows by moonlight. Nothing was too ambitious to attempt; armor, gondolas, harps, towers, and palaces grew as if by magic, and wonderful scenes of valor and devotion were enacted before admiring audiences.27

  By this time, the girls had each begun to show the outlines of the personalities that Alcott was later to bring to full development in Little Women. Eldest sister Anna was perhaps the sister with whom Louisa was to take the broadest liberties in writing Little Women. By her own modest admission, Anna was not as stunningly attractive as Meg March was to be; she claimed never to have been “the pretty, vain little maiden, who coquetted and made herself so charming.” Anna later averred that Louisa intentionally beautified her for her place in Little Women partly because Louisa admired her older sister and partly because, as Louisa
herself put it, “Dear me, girls, we must have one beauty in the book!”28 But Anna disguised her plainness with her exceptional fluidity of motion and, as Emerson’s son Edward observed, a “beauty of expression [that] made up for the lack of it in her features.”29 When Bronson pictured her in his mind, he saw “her beauty-loving eyes and sweet visions of graceful motions and golden hues and all fair and mystic shows and shapes.”30

  Louisa’s older sister Anna Bronson Alcott (1831–1893), shown here in her mid-twenties, played the starring roles in the Alcott sisters’ theatricals. She dreamed of a life on the stage, but premature deafness thwarted her ambition. Louisa fictionalized her as Meg in Little Women. (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  When his thoughts turned to Lizzie, who would be immortalized as Beth, Bronson spoke of “her quiet-loving disposition and serene thoughts, her happy gentleness and deep contentment.” He also added a curious phrase: “self-centered in the depths of her affections.”31 In Little Women, Alcott notes the same paradox in Beth, “who seemed to live in a happy world of her own, only venturing out to meet the few whom she trusted and loved.” Perhaps the most naturally affectionate of the Alcott girls, Lizzie lacked her sisters’ creative spark. She was also the most inward-looking. In comparison with her three bolder sisters, she was almost emotionally inaccessible, and she liked it that way. In a family that freely read aloud to one another from their journals, Lizzie alone kept her personal jottings resolutely to herself. That Alcott herself felt a special closeness to Lizzie can be inferred from the text of Little Women, where Lizzie’s character is the only one of the March sisters not to be refitted with a different Christian name. Jo and Beth are drawn together “by some strange attraction of opposites.” Beth confides her secrets “to Jo alone” and exerts arguably more influence over her than anyone else in the March family. Yet one senses that even Louisa did not penetrate to the core of Lizzie’s flitting, elusive spirit. Timid, silent Lizzie was, and remains, the most shadowy presence in the Alcott family.

  The only known likeness of Elizabeth Sewall Alcott (1835–1858), the third of the four Alcott sisters. Like Beth in Little Women, Lizzie was quiet and retiring. Like Beth as well, she died tragically young from the lingering effects of scarlet fever. (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  To Lizzie’s muted tones, May Alcott provided a bright and energetic contrast. While a toddler, May was a child of “frolick joys and impetuous griefs,” a small whirlwind of “fast-falling footsteps” with a “sagacious eye and auburn locks.” In describing her, Bronson took special notice of May’s “word-forming tongue,” an amusing point in light of the many hapless malapropisms of her young fictional counterpart.32 When May was twenty, Louisa remarked upon her liveliness, as well as how “old & still” the house felt when she was gone.33 Strong-willed and artistically gifted, she struck some in her early years as “haughty” and “childishly tyrannical.”34 Others, like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian, fell in love with her. She was tall with abundant blond hair, although, like Amy in Little Women, she despaired over her decidedly non-Grecian nose and, as in the novel, tried in vain to cure its irregularities with a clothespin. To Louisa, May seemed born under a lucky star, as fated for frolic and delight as Alcott herself felt destined for drudgery. Sometimes with pride and pleasure, sometimes ruefully, and sometimes from mere force of habit, Louisa grew accustomed to toiling and sacrificing so that May might have better opportunities and more enjoyment.

  The youngest of the Alcott sisters, Abby Alcott (1840–1879) preferred to be known by her middle name, May. An aspiring artist, she struggled with the illustrations of the first edition of Little Women. She improved greatly thereafter and had paintings exhibited at the prestigious Paris Salon. (Painting by Rose Peckham; Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  Unable to earn the money needed to maintain their residence at Hillside, the Alcotts moved back to Boston in 1848. Here, their fortunes reached their lowest ebb. For the next half-dozen years, they were, to use Louisa’s phrasing, “poor as rats.”35 In general, both the family’s lack of means and the four girls’ acute sensitivity to one another’s needs drew them together very closely. While Bronson’s paid conversations brought in a small but welcome sum, each of the girls discovered a role to play in keeping the family going. Louisa taught school, worked as a governess, took in sewing, and, for a pittance, sold her early short stories to magazines. Anna also taught and cared for other people’s children. In addition, she became Louisa’s great “bosom friend and comforter.”36 Lizzie, already a confirmed homebody, became “our little housekeeper,—our angel in a cellar kitchen,” freeing her mother to open an employment office in Boston, thus adding some more desperately needed dollars to the family coffers.37 Still too young to work outside the home, May attended school, won prizes with her drawings, and studied to become a teacher. Though there was already little enough to go around, the Alcott home became a refuge “for lost girls, abused women, [and] friendless children.”38 In 1855, when the family took lodgings on Pinckney Street, Louisa often retreated to the house’s garret, where she would sit “with my papers around me, and a pile of apples to eat while I write my journal, plan stories, and enjoy the patter of rain on the roof, in peace and quiet.”39 Already, as she later realized, Alcott had become the prototype for “Jo in the garret.”40 Together, the four Alcott sisters gave life to their father’s observation, “Family is but the name of a larger synthesis of spirits.” 41 With a powerful sense of his daughters’ firm unity, Bronson called the four of them “the golden band.” 42

  If the support of her family was Alcott’s greatest comfort during the lean years of her late teens and early twenties, the potential loss of that stasis and stability was her besetting dread. The fear began to become real in the summer of 1856. The Alcotts had recently left Boston for the more bucolic Walpole, New Hampshire. There, true to their charitable habits, they befriended an impoverished family, the Halls, who would appear in Little Women in more germanized form as the Hummels. The Halls’ poverty was less genteel than that of their fictional counterparts; they lived above a cellar that was used as a pigsty. Alcott was working in Boston when her mother, Lizzie, and May began tending to the Halls’ sick children. She returned home to find Lizzie desperately ill with scarlet fever. Lizzie survived the initial ravages of the disease, but the fever weakened her permanently. Alcott did all she could for her stricken sister. Lizzie’s collapse struck her as if it had been an attack on the entire family. Though it was not her habit to pray in words, she called upon God to “help us all, and keep us for one another.” 43

  For a time, Lizzie rallied. However, a year after the initial infection, Alcott told her journal, “I fear she may slip away, for she never seemed to care much for the world beyond home.”44 By September 1857, Lizzie was failing fast. In the midst of her illness, Bronson Alcott chose again to move the family, this time back again for a third sojourn in Concord. This time, for the grand sum of $945, he purchased a hundred-fifty-year-old house on Lexington Road, a short walk westward from the Hillside house that had housed his family a decade earlier. Because the property featured at least forty apple trees, he christened his new home Orchard House. The structure was too dilapidated for immediate occupancy. Thus the Alcotts settled briefly into a house on Bedford Street to wait for the needed repairs to be done. Lizzie did not survive the wait. In early March 1858, she set aside her sewing needle, saying it was “too heavy” for her.45 On the fourteenth, at three in the morning, Lizzie Alcott passed away. She was not yet twenty-three.

  Orchard House in Concord was the Alcotts’ home from 1858 to 1877. Designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1962, it continues to serve as a mecca for those who love Alcott, her writings, and her family. (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  Alcott wrote a poem in Lizzie’s memory—a verse that she revised for inclusion in Little Women, in the chapter in which Beth dies. There was a stanza in the original poem, however, that Alcott did not publish, b
ut kept quietly to herself:

  Gentle pilgrim! First and fittest,

  Of our little household band;

  To journey trustfully before us

  Hence into the silent land.

  First, to teach us that love’s charm

  Grows stronger being riven;

  Fittest, to become the Angel

  That shall beckon us to heaven.46

  Alcott professed that she did not miss Lizzie as much as she had feared. She even went so far as to claim that her sister’s death had done her a service, leading her to see death as “beautiful . . . friendly and wonderful.” 47 Despite this protestation, however, Alcott felt anxious when, without the task of caring for Lizzie to hold them together, the family began to splinter. “So the first break comes,” Alcott had written when Lizzie passed.48 There were more breaks in store. May departed for Boston. Bronson immersed himself in renovating Orchard House, and Abba retreated into her memories. Anna, Louisa’s closest confidante, distanced herself still further. Less than a month after Lizzie’s death, Anna announced her engagement to a tall, refined local man named John Bridge Pratt. The couple were to have two children: Frederick Alcott Pratt in 1863 and John Sewall Pratt in 1865. In Little Women, John Brooke’s courtship of Meg strikes Jo with all the force of a betrayal. Anna’s engagement to Pratt broke upon Alcott with no less force. Although she found Pratt’s character unimpeachable—she called him “a model son and brother” and “a true man”—Alcott privately wrote that she would never forgive him for taking Anna from her.49 Whereas Jo’s perceived abandonment in Little Women is played for comic effect, the extended consequences of Anna’s engagement veered closer to tragedy.