The Annotated Little Women

by Louisa May Alcott

  For the moment, she was most absorbed by a writing assignment from the New York Ledger: an essay of advice for young women that she called “Happy Women.” In it, Alcott revealed a side of herself that the public had only partially glimpsed before: a supporter of women’s rights and an advocate of the power of women to benefit society as something other than wives and mothers. She included sketches of four unnamed women who, as she observed of one of them, were “ordinary in all things but one—a cheerful, helpful spirit, that loves its neighbor better than itself.” Although the first three—a doctor, a music teacher, and a home missionary—had all chosen lives without husbands, each had found rich fulfillment in living and doing for others. The last of the four was a veiled self-portrait: “a woman of strongly individual type” who had seen enough of “the tragedy of modern married life” that she felt best advised to “obey instinct and become a chronic old maid.” Representing her stories as her metaphorical children, Alcott affirmed that, for her, “literature is a fond and faithful spouse, and the little family that has sprung up around her, though perhaps unlovely and uninteresting to others, is a profitable source of satisfaction to her maternal heart.” She concluded by assuring her readers that “the world is full of work, needing all the heads, hearts, and hands we can bring to do it.” To women who, like Alcott herself, took no husbands, she gave the exhortation, “Be true to yourselves; cherish whatever talent you possess, and in using it faithfully for the good of others you will most assuredly find happiness in yourself, and make of life no failure, but a beautiful success.”80

  Thomas Niles, an editor at the publishing firm of Roberts Brothers, urged Alcott to write a book for girls. Alcott stated privately, “I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many.” Still, she agreed to attempt the project. (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  Alcott’s own great success was now much nearer than she dreamed. In May 1868, Bronson Alcott got in touch with Thomas Niles. The elder Alcott had himself been working on a book of philosophical observations that he called “Tablets,” and he was looking for a publisher. The two men thought it might be a clever stratagem to bring out Bronson’s book and something by Louisa at the same time. Bronson proposed that she could write a book of fairy stories. Niles was not excited by that prospect; he still wanted his girls’ book. With this nudge from Niles and her father, Alcott set to work on a manuscript she called Little Women. Abba, Anna, and May all warmed to the idea of a novel based on the domestic adventures of the Alcott girls from twenty years before, but Alcott herself remained halfhearted. She grumbled to her journal, “I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls, or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.”81 She wrote a dozen chapters before the end of June, intending, as she later confessed, to prove to Niles that she could not write a worthy book for girls. She thought the chapters dull, and Niles at first agreed. Then Niles showed the partial manuscript to his niece, who laughed over them until she cried. Sensing that he might have a great success on his hands, he urged Alcott on. Alcott flung herself into the drafting of ten more chapters and fell into one of her creative vortices. She emerged, exhausted, on July 15 with an aching head and 402 manuscript pages—the first twenty-two chapters of Little Women. Part First of the book was virtually complete. It read better than Alcott had expected: the authenticity of the story, so much of it derived from the Alcotts’ actual lives, had worked wonders. By now, the effort had become a family project: Alcott’s sister May prepared four drawings to illustrate the book. Though Alcott was satisfied with both the story and the artwork, she worried that the engravers might “spoil the pictures & make Meg cross-eyed, Beth with no nose, or Jo with a double chin.”82 Niles, for his part, was after a larger fish. Reading the manuscript over, he was now certain that the book would “ ‘hit,’ which means I think it will sell well.” He wanted Alcott to add just one more chapter “in which allusions might be made to something in the future,” namely, a sequel.83 Alcott promptly obliged, dashing off Chapter XXIII, “Aunt March Settles the Question,” which she ended with the teaser, “So grouped the curtain falls on Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. Whether it ever rises again, depends upon the reception given to the first act of the domestic drama, called ‘LITTLE WOMEN.’ ”

  Bronson Alcott in his study, as sketched by his daughter May. (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  Astonishing coincidences bound Bronson and Louisa May Alcott together. They shared a birthday, November 29, and another strange alignment was to take place at the end of their lives. But now, within weeks of each other in the fall of 1868, Alcott père and Alcott fille each achieved the greatest literary breakthrough of their lives: Bronson with Tablets and Louisa with Part First of Little Women. Tablets sold briskly and was, in Louisa’s words “much admired,” but it was Little Women that caused the publishing sensation. As Niles had predicted, Alcott’s book for girls was an instant success. The first edition sold out before the end of October, and forty-five hundred copies were in print by the year’s end. Niles pressed at once for the second volume, and Alcott began work on November 1, resolving to write a chapter a day and be finished before the month was out. She wrote “like a steam engine” and very nearly kept up with her self-imposed schedule, completing thirteen chapters by the seventeenth.84 Her thirty-sixth birthday came on the twenty-ninth. She spent it “alone, writing hard.”85 Though her pace then slowed, she managed to send Part Second to Roberts Brothers on New Year’s Day 1869.

  The greatest problem she had faced in writing Part Second involved neither time nor energy but a conflict as to content. While some especially pious readers had taken offense at the March sisters’ staging a play on Christmas, Alcott shrugged that criticism off. A complaint that irritated Alcott much more deeply appeared time and again in the torrent of fan letters inspired by Part First. Alcott lamented, “Girls write to ask who the little women will marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life.”86 Her adoring public seemed particularly bent on seeing Jo paired off with Laurie, and the prospect infuriated her. She defiantly declared, “I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please any one.”87 Indeed, it was her preference that Jo “should have remained a literary spinster.”88 She was not to have her way. Fearing the public response if Jo March stayed single, Roberts Brothers insisted that the character must marry someone. Alcott fulminated to her mother’s brother, Samuel May: “Publishers are very perwerse [sic] & wont let authors have thier [sic] way, so my little women must grow up & be married off in a very stupid style.”89 But Alcott could be stubborn, too. By way of a reluctant compromise, she “out of perversity went & made a funny match” for Jo, and Professor Bhaer was born. Alcott fully expected her sequel to “disappoint or disgust most readers.” In return for her having refused to give Jo to Laurie, she calmly predicted, “I expect vials of wrath to be poured out upon my head, but rather enjoy the prospect.” 90

  Alcott around the age of forty, in Gilded Age finery. (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  The wrath, however, did not come. What came instead were book orders, seemingly without end. By the end of 1869, some twenty thousand copies of Part First and eighteen thousand of Part Second had been printed, and that was only the beginning. From 1868 to 1882, the trade edition of Part First was to go through sixty-seven printings. Over the same period, Part Second went through sixty-five. On the wise advice of Niles, Alcott had kept the copyrights to both volumes in her own name. If the decision did not make her exorbitantly wealthy, it at least assured that she and the other Alcotts would live in comfort for the rest of their lives. A few words of context are appropriate. In 1870, a farmworker in Massachusetts was doing slightly better than average if he earned $20 a month with board. A carpenter was above the median for his profession if he took home $3 a day.91 In that year, Alcott reported receiving $2,500 in royalties for Little Women, an amount that more than tripled the following year. In January 1872
, Roberts Brothers paid her $4,400—six months’ worth of royalties from the books she had written for the company, which now included An Old-Fashioned Girl and Little Men. Crowing over her success in 1870, Niles hailed Alcott as a “magician, or rather . . . the good genius who answers all the rubbings of the magic lamp.”92

  Alcott’s sister Anna declared in 1871, “Now she has made her pot of gold she can rest forever.”93 But Alcott did not rest. Having driven herself so long to write and earn money for her family, she seemed incapable of stopping—and equally unable to grasp that superhuman efforts were no longer required to keep poverty at bay. She kept writing, often to the brink of exhaustion, turning her adventures, as she put it, “into bread and butter.”94 With irrepressible satisfaction, she mused, “Twenty years ago I resolved to make the family independent if I could. At forty that is done.”95 But her health remained precarious, and the loss of privacy that fame brought with it wore upon her sensitive nerves. “I asked for bread,” she complained, “and got a stone—in the shape of a pedestal.”96 Reporters sat on the wall of Orchard House and took notes. Artists sketched her in her garden. The intrusions were so constant and annoying that she sometimes climbed out the back window to escape them. To those who told her to accept fame as a blessing, her advice was terse. “Let ’em try it.”97

  Louisa May Alcott at the pinnacle of her success. (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  But Alcott’s success brought pleasant times as well. In 1870, having just completed another best seller, An Old-Fashioned Girl, Alcott took a second tour of western Europe, this time in the company of her sister May and family friend Alice Bartlett. She spent the late fall and early winter of 1875–76 in luxurious surroundings in New York, relishing a swirl of “clubs, dinner receptions, galleries & theatres.”98 But even as she reaped her rewards, her obligations, real and imagined, continued to dog her. Alcott could not enjoy her travels to New York without writing “a few tales . . . to pay my way.”99 During her European tour with May, the disruption of her pleasures was far more dramatic. Not long after the traveling party had settled in for a winter in Rome, dreadful news arrived from Concord: Anna’s husband, John, only thirty-seven, had died suddenly. Alcott’s extended vacation at once transformed into a working holiday. So that Anna and her two children would not be left in want, she set to work on Little Men, the first sequel to Little Women. Again, her pace was remarkable. The book, which she had not even conceived before December 1870, was published in England on May 15, 1871.

  May Alcott made this sketch of Louisa writing during their 1870–71 European tour. Alcott wrote from abroad, “May was in heaven and kept having raptures over the gables, the turrets with storks on them, the fountains, people and churches” (Louisa May Alcott, Journals, p. 130). (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  Alcott swore to become “a father” to her nephews.100 She did much to honor that pledge, including putting on plays with them and teaching them to play “Pilgrim’s Progress” as she had done as a child. Her care of Freddie and Johnny Pratt was but one of the familial roles that Alcott played. Indeed, it is hard to think of a position in the Alcott family she did not assume, especially when someone else proved unable to fulfill it. She was, of course, the family’s principal wage earner for decades. After Lizzie, “the angel of the house,” passed away, it was Louisa who assumed the mantle of caring for her aging parents. When she went to war, her father observed that he was sending his only “son” to war. In the case of Johnny Pratt, Alcott’s surrogate fatherhood eventually transmuted into legal parenthood; in 1887, she formally adopted her nephew, who thereupon changed his name to Alcott, so that he might renew her copyrights after her death.

  The need for Alcott to fill every conceivable function in her family grew ever stronger as age and death gradually wore away at the little group. Bronson, buoyed by his vegetarian diet and the resurgence in his career that began with Tablets, remained in robust health, “busy and bright as a boy” into his eighties.101 Abba was not so fortunate. Two years before Little Women, the real-life Marmee was already looking old and tired, showing “every sign of age.”102 Over time, Louisa came to accept that Abba was “never to be our brave, energetic leader any more.”103 In the early and mid-1870s, Alcott unstintingly spent both time and money to see to her mother’s needs. While her family obligations seemed only to multiply, Alcott’s literary output never slackened. In addition to An Old-Fashioned Girl and Little Men, the decade that followed Little Women saw the publication of Eight Cousins (1875), Rose in Bloom (1876), and Under the Lilacs (1878). In addition to those books for younger readers, she also produced a deeply thoughtful novel for adults that she called Work (1873), and the scintillating novella A Modern Mephistopheles (1877). During this period and beyond, she also supplied periodicals like St. Nicholas and The Youth’s Companion with a steady stream of stories, which she later published in bound collections like Silver Pitchers (1875), Spinning-Wheel Stories (1884), A Garland for Girls (1887), and the six-volume series Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag (1872–82). In her fleeting spare time, Alcott agitated for women’s suffrage. In 1879, when the Massachusetts legislature deigned to grant women the vote in school-board elections, Alcott became the first woman in Concord to register as a voter. Alcott had hoped that that honor might be claimed by her mother, but the change in the law came too late. Worn out from long years of toil, but profoundly grateful that her daughter had made her declining years happy and comfortable, Abba Alcott had died four days before Louisa’s birthday in November 1877.

  After May Alcott died in 1879, her infant daughter Louisa May Nieriker (1879–1975) became Louisa’s ward. (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  The gradual diminution of Alcott’s family circle was reflected in her fictions concerning the March family. Little Men tells of the death of John Bridge Pratt’s alter ego John Brooke. Jo’s Boys begins by announcing the death of the fictional Marmee. Yet there was one loss too painful for Alcott to reproduce in that novel. Alcott’s younger sister May, after two earlier visits to Europe, left America in 1876 for a longer sojourn to advance her studies in painting. She was never to return. In March 1878, she married a young Swiss businessman named Ernest Nieriker. In November the following year, she gave birth to a girl, whom she named Louisa May. The family’s joy did not last. Weakened by an infection she contracted during childbirth, May Alcott died on December 29, 1879. The baby, who acquired the nickname Lulu, was sent to America, and Alcott became her guardian. In the fall of 1882, Bronson Alcott suffered a debilitating stroke, and Alcott’s familial duties increased once more. Ideas for books still came in abundance, but writing was harder now. Years of using uncomfortable steel pens had crippled her right hand; she taught herself to write with her left. Even so, chronic illness and a constant cycle of daily cares slowed her production to a painful crawl. In spite of it all, she set herself about one task that she was determined to see through to the end: she would finish her Little Women trilogy.

  Alcott began work on Jo’s Boys shortly before her father’s stroke. A decade and a half earlier, she had written Little Women at a furious pace, sometimes turning out a chapter a day. The twenty-two chapters of Jo’s Boys took her almost four years. Heartily tired of the enterprise, she confessed in the book’s final chapter her desire to summon “an earthquake which should engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it.”104 While the public eagerly devoured the fifty thousand copies of the first edition, Alcott quietly rejoiced, pleased to have disposed of the March family at last. She had dated the book’s preface July 4, 1886, symbolically declaring her independence from writing the juvenile novels that she now openly denounced as “moral pap for the young.”105 She hoped that, at last, she might find time and health to write the serious books for adults that she had been turning over in her mind for years. She tried almost every treatment imaginable, from homeopathy to mind cure to opium, in hopes of regaining her long-lost vig
or.

  It was not to be. By the end of 1886, chronic illness had led her to take up residence in a rest home in Roxbury, Massachusetts, which she fittingly called “Saint’s Rest.” Much of her journal for 1887 is a chronicle of intermittent illness and recurrent depression. In the late winter of 1888, Alcott’s father’s health went into its final decline. On March 1, Alcott went to visit him for the last time. She found him in bed, weak but smiling. When she asked him the cause of the smile on his face, he gestured skyward and said, “I am going up. Come with me.” Alcott replied, “I wish I could.”106 Three days later, Bronson Alcott died. Before news of his passing could reach her, Alcott felt a sensation like a weight of iron on her head. She lay down and closed her eyes. She opened them just once more before drifting into unconsciousness. Two days later, on March 6, hours before her father’s funeral, Alcott passed away. As word circulated of her last interview with her father, it was hard not to imagine Alcott had accepted her father’s invitation.

  During the last summer of her life, Louisa sat for one last photograph. She is seated next to the actor and elocutionist James Edward Murdoch (1811–1893). (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

  Between the appearance of Little Women, Part First, until the firm was sold thirty years later, Roberts Brothers published more than 1.7 million copies of Alcott’s books. She had become, by some accounts, the most popular American writer of her generation. Nevertheless, her success was not of the kind she would have wished for herself. Throughout her career, she had been enchanted by the prospect of writing not for profit but for art’s sake, and being acclaimed as something more exalted than a writer for children. Always, however, the mundane business of life and the fear of want had dogged her, thwarting her higher ambitions. The work at which she excelled—writing wholesome stories of childhood and family—seemed paltry to her. But it was a greater talent than she realized. Her children’s novels, and Little Women in particular, are more than genial entertainment. They are companions. Admitting freely that growing up is hard and that not all dreams come true, they illustrate the virtues and teach the values that form the foundations of a life bravely and honorably lived. Alcott’s writings gently affirm that, through kindness, patience, and adherence to duty, one can create a kind of happiness far greater than the indulgence of selfish wants. As a writer, as a person, Louisa May Alcott’s greatest success lay in the invisible gifts she gave to others.