Louisa on the Front Lines

by Samantha Seiple

  “If in my present life if I love one person truly, no matter who it is, I believe that we meet somewhere again, though where or how I don’t know or care, for genuine love is immortal.”

  Chapter 12

  THE CHARIOT OF GLORY

  May 1868, Concord, Massachusetts

  Two years later

  MR. NILES WANTS A GIRLS’ STORY,” LU WROTE IN HER diary.

  Thomas Niles worked for Roberts Brothers, the company that wanted to publish Hospital Sketches, but Lu had turned him down, preferring to publish with James Redpath. This wasn’t the first time that Mr. Niles had asked Lu to write a girls’ story. He first asked eight months earlier, and Lu told him she’d try. But Lu decided she didn’t like writing for girls, and she put it aside, until Mr. Niles asked her again.

  Despite having published Success (later called Work), and earning more money for her short stories, Lu still scrambled to make enough income to support her family. When Lu returned home from Europe, she had found that her family was in even more debt. “The money-maker was away,” Lu wrote. But she found more stories to tell after her trip and got busy writing. “Got to work… for bills accumulate and worry me,” Lu explained. “I dread debt more than anything.”

  After her father had lost his job as superintendent of the Concord school, Bronson also got serious about finishing his manuscript, Tablets, in which he was trying to express his philosophical ideology. But he was a better talker than writer. And even though Bronson’s fame as a philosopher was growing—he was referred to by this time as “Emerson’s master” and the “Sage of Concord”—only one publisher was interested in his manuscript. It was Mr. Niles of Roberts Brothers. But Mr. Niles would only publish it if Lu would write a girls’ story. Otherwise, Bronson’s earning prospects were slim. Although he still toured the country giving lectures, he didn’t make much money from it.

  Bronson felt regret, knowing it was his cross to bear that he couldn’t support his family: “Alas! I wish, for her [my wife’s] sake and my children’s, I could have a pair of profitable hands and marketable wits. But no!… and I must pay the cost of such gifts as I have by the lack of such as I have not, in something like dependence on others.”

  The strain and burden of financial hardship over the years had taken a toll on Lu’s mother, who was now sixty-seven years old and in poor health. Lu believed she was in a decline. “I never expect to see the strong, energetic Marmee of old times, but, thank the Lord! she is still here, though pale and weak, quiet and sad,” Lu wrote. “All her fine hair is gone, and face full of wrinkles, bowed back, and every sign of age. Life has been hard for her, and she so brave, so glad to spend herself for others. Now we must live for her.”

  Lu wanted this year to be different and was more determined than ever to realize her dream of supporting her family and being independent. So, she took another stab at the “girls’ story,” albeit reluctantly. “I begin ‘Little Women.’… I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing,” Lu confessed. “Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.”

  Drawing on her early life experiences, Lu stuck to the facts but changed the time, place, and names. She set her story during the Civil War, now three years over, and each family member was a character. Lu was Jo. Her older sister, Anna, was Meg. Her younger sister, May, was Amy. And Lu wrote about her sister, Lizzie, as Beth. Although Julian Hawthorne would believe the character Laurie was based on him, he was really inspired by her love of Laddie.

  In her book, Lu also softened the grim reality of her family’s poverty and focused on their affection and love for one another without idealizing the girls. She wanted them to talk and act like real girls. Lu’s flair for humor shone throughout the book.

  While writing about her sister Beth’s death, Lu was able to convey how caring for someone who is terminally ill can be a painfully harsh but valuable lesson in life that matures the caretaker, like Jo in the book. This was something Lu had learned from loving John Suhre and watching him die at the Union Hotel Hospital.

  The next month, in June, Lu sent Mr. Niles twelve chapters of Little Women. “He thought it dull, so do I,” Lu grumbled. But she kept working on it. Mr. Niles told her there was a great need for “lively, simple books” for girls, and Lu hoped she could meet that need. Wrapped in her glory cloak, Lu worked in her “vortex,” barely leaving her desk and hardly eating or sleeping.

  On July 15, she finished and sent her manuscript to Mr. Niles. Lu had written 402 pages but to her detriment. “Very tired, head full of pain from overwork, and heart heavy about Marmee, who is growing feeble,” Lu wrote.

  The following month, Mr. Niles made an offer on Little Women and advised Lu to keep the copyright. On August 26, he sent her the page proofs to read and correct before the final printing. When Lu read through it, she was surprised. “It reads better than I expected. Not a bit sensational, but simple and true, for we really lived most of it; and if it succeeds that will be the reason of it.” She didn’t realize she had written her masterpiece.

  About a month later, on September 30, Little Women was released. A month after that, Lu found out that her book was selling better than expected. “Saw Mr. Niles.… [H]e gave me good news.… First edition gone and more called for.… Mr. Niles wants a second volume. Pleasant notices and letters arrive, and much interest in my little women, who seem to find friends by their truth to life, as I hoped.”

  The instant success of Little Women inspired Lu to start writing the second volume the very next day. There was one pressing question she needed to answer in the sequel. Who was Jo going to marry? In nearly all the letters she received, the readers wanted Jo to marry Laurie. Lu was perturbed. “Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life. I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please any one.”

  And she didn’t.

  “‘Jo’ should have remained a literary spinster,” Lu asserted. “But so many enthusiastic young ladies wrote to me clamorously demanding that she should marry Laurie, or somebody, that I didn’t dare to refuse & out of perversity went & made a funny match for her. I expect vials of wrath to be poured upon my head, but rather enjoy the prospect.”

  Lu’s goal was to write a chapter a day. She wanted to finish by the end of November. “I am so full of my work, I can’t stop to eat or sleep, or for anything but a daily run.”

  On November 29, Lu turned thirty-six years old. She spent it alone, busy writing. The only present she received was from her father. He had given her a copy of his recently published book, Tablets. “I never seem to have many presents, as some do, though I give a good many,” Lu noted. “That is best perhaps, and makes a gift precious when it does come.”

  On New Year’s Day 1869, Lu delivered the final manuscript to her publisher. That month, she paid off her family’s seemingly never-ending debt. “Paid up all the debts, thank the Lord!—every penny that money can pay,—and now I feel as if I could die in peace,” Lu exclaimed proudly. “My dream is beginning to come true, and if my head holds out I’ll do all I once hoped to do.”

  In April when the sequel to Little Women came out, it was a big success, receiving more good reviews and brisk sales. Mr. Niles wanted Lu to write another book, but she didn’t think she could do it. At least not yet. Lu’s health was failing. She wrote that she felt “quite used up. Don’t care for myself, as rest is heavenly even with pain, but the family seems so panic-stricken and helpless when I break down, that I try to keep the mill going.” Ever since her bout with typhoid pneumonia, Lu’s head pounded, she felt dizzy, her body ached, and a butterfly rash bloomed across her face. The doctors believed she was suffering from acute mercury poisoning, from the calomel Dr. Stipp had prescribed. (Modern doctors postulate the calomel may have triggered lupus, an autoimmune disease, for which there is no cure.) It would ultimately shorten her life.

  In August 1869, with the success of parts 1 and 2 of
Little Women, she had more than $1,000 for a rainy day after she had paid off all her family’s bills. “With that thought I can bear neuralgia gayly,” Lu wrote.

  In October, Lu was trying to write her next book, Old-Fashioned Girl, but she was so sick, she couldn’t even speak. She went to the doctor every day, and he burned her windpipe with a caustic as a remedy. Despite her illness, Lu would finish the book with her “left hand in a sling, one foot up, head aching, and no voice.” She believed that she certainly earned her living by the sweat of her brow.

  The sweat of her brow paid off in December 1869, when Lu finally had something to celebrate on Christmas. A letter from her publisher arrived with a royalty check for $2,500. “Many thanks for the check which made my Christmas an unusually merry one,” Lu wrote to her publisher. “After toiling so many years along the up-hill road, always a hard one to women writers, it is peculiarly grateful to me to find the way growing easier at last, with pleasant little surprises blossoming on either side, and the rough places made smooth by courtesy and kindness of those who have proved themselves ‘friends’ as well as ‘publishers.’”

  Fame and fortune were finally hers. Lu’s “dull book” was the first golden egg, and she achieved her goal of taking care of her family and giving them every comfort. Fans were knocking on her front door, and Lu found herself acting like her neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, scurrying away, afraid someone would spot her. Although Lu didn’t enjoy the spotlight, her father did. “I am introduced as the father of Little Women, and am riding in the Chariot of Glory wherever I go,” he noted in his journal. Later, he would travel the country giving lectures and billing himself as the “Gifted Sire of Louisa M. Alcott! Authoress of Little Women.” The venues were sold out, jammed with people eager to hear him speak. Finally.

  ALTHOUGH LU never dreamed that her work would endure for generations and that her “girls’ book” would be treasured by readers all over the world, she had dared to dream of success. “As a poor, proud, struggling girl I held to the belief that if I deserved success it would surely come so long as my ambition was not for selfish ends but for my dear family,” Lu confided to a friend. “And it did come, far more fully than I ever hoped or dreamed, though youth, health and many hopes went to earn it.”

  Epilogue

  STILL ON THE FRONT LINES

  July 1879, Concord, Massachusetts

  Ten years later

  THE SUMMER SKY WAS NEARLY FREE OF CLOUDS, AND the heat was, surprisingly, not oppressive in the small village of Concord in July 1879. This was good news for seventy-nine-year-old Bronson Alcott, who had opened his School of Philosophy and was holding “conversations” in his study at Orchard House. The thirty “budding philosophers” were comfortable as they listened to different lectures each morning and spent their free time visiting the sights, such as Walden Woods and Pond.

  “He has his dream realized at last & is in glory with plenty of talk to swim in,” Lu wrote in her journal. “People will laugh but will enjoy some thing new in this dull old town.”

  Forty-six-year-old Lu was also trying to stir up interest in something new in Concord. Lu wanted women to have the right to vote, and if she succeeded, Lu would realize a dream that she had shared with her beloved mother. Abba herself had petitioned, more than once, for women’s rights, stating, “If [women] can emancipate the slave… they must work out their own emancipation. They [women] must help make the Laws, Be educated as Jurists, Drs. Divines, Artists, Bankers. It will occupy and give dignity to their minds.”

  Two years earlier, Abba had died in Lu’s arms from congestive heart failure, her dream still unrealized. Abba’s death was a terrible loss for Lu, who was suffering from chronic physical pain from her own poor health. Lu revealed in her journal that “a great warmth seems gone out of life, and there is no motive to go on now. My only comfort is that I could make her last years comfortable, and lift off the burden she had carried so bravely all these years. She was so loyal, tender, and true; life was hard for her, and no one understood all she had to bear but we, her children.”

  To help manage her grief, Lu focused her mind and energy on women’s suffrage, which, as her mother had noted in her journal, the town of Concord was “wonderfully indifferent to.” But Lu always liked a challenge, and in the face of opposition she was always more determined. “I like to help women help themselves,” Lu explained. “As that is, in my opinion, the best way to settle the woman question. Whatever we can do and do well we have a right to, and I don’t think any one will deny us.”

  In 1877, the New England Woman Suffrage Association campaigned to allow women to vote in local town meetings on the two issues women were considered experts on—children and education. Their goal was to start on the local level to open the door for state and federal elections. Massachusetts voted to pass the measure.

  To ignite interest, Lu held meetings at her home. At the first meeting, only twelve women were expected, but twenty-five showed up. “Very informal meetings, where we met and talked over the matter, asked questions, compared notes and got ready to go and register,” Lu reported.

  Lu was leading by example. On July 23, one week after Bronson opened his School of Philosophy, Lu hurried down to the Town Hall and was the first woman to register her name as a voter in Concord. But not everyone from her meetings showed up. “I am ashamed to say that out of a hundred women who pay taxes on property in Concord, only seven have as yet registered… [a] very poor record for a town which ought to lead if it really possesses all the intelligence claimed for it,” she wrote.

  But it wasn’t too late, and in August Lu rode about town in her horse and carriage, knocking on doors and encouraging women to attend her suffrage meeting. “So hard to move people out of old ruts,” she stated.

  Despite some of the apathy, Bronson encouraged and fully supported Lu’s involvement, revealing in his journal, “I have words in favor of Woman Suffrage. I am gratified in the fact that my daughters are loyal to their sex and to their sainted mother, who, had she survived, would have been the first to have taken them to the polls.”

  By the time the town election arrived on March 29, 1880, twenty-eight women had registered to vote. But only twenty, including Lu, showed up. The no-shows were generally overwhelmed with domestic chores and child-care responsibilities. Nevertheless, the registered women voters who had arrived, many with their husbands, fathers, and brothers, were all in good spirits.

  When the time came to vote for the new school committee, the moderator announced that the women would vote first—thanks to Bronson’s suggestion. No one objected, and the women made a line, cast their votes, and went quietly back to their seats. The men watched in solemn silence.

  “No bolt fell on our audacious heads, no earthquake shook the town, but a pleasing surprise created a general outbreak of laughter and applause,” Lu recounted.

  While everyone was still laughing, the judge, who was overseeing the voting, told the men that the polls were closed. Lu thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. She noticed that some of the men “looked disturbed at being deprived of their rights.” Lu thought it was perfectly fair because the women weren’t allowed to voice their opinions on any other issue.

  One man remarked that it didn’t matter whether the men voted anyway because the women all voted just as their husbands, fathers, and brothers would have voted, implying that they couldn’t think for themselves. Lu took offense to his remark but was satisfied with the election.

  “We elected a good school committee,” Lu stated firmly.

  At five o’clock, the wives left the Town Hall and hurried home to make tea for their husbands. Lu was feeling hopeful, predicting that, in the following year, more women would turn out to vote. “The ice is broken.… [I]t is the first step that counts,” Lu wrote. “And when the timid or indifferent… see that we still live, they will venture to express publicly the opinions they held or have lately learned to respect and believe.”

  ON AUGUST 18, 1920, the Nineteenth
Amendment to the US Constitution was finally ratified, giving women the right to vote in state and federal elections. It was forty years after Lu had cast her vote, taking the first step to drive this important change. If I can do no more, let my name stand among those who are willing to bear ridicule and reproach for the truth’s sake, and so earn some right to rejoice when the victory is won. Most heartily for woman’s suffrage and all other reforms.

  Louisa May Alcott

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It has been a real pleasure for me to research and write about Louisa May Alcott, a dynamic woman whose spitfire spirit leaps off the pages of her journals and letters. Deepest thanks to Stephanie Knapp for her enthusiasm, clear vision, and guidance as we navigated the editorial waters to reveal a little-known part of Lu’s life story. Many thanks to Holly Rubino for her careful reading of the manuscript and her challenging questions. My heartfelt thanks to Jessica Regel for her encouragement and enthusiasm over the years (and for the title of this book). A big thank you to Amber Morris for the smooth transitions in the editorial production process and to Carrie Watterson and her fine-tuned editing pen.

  I also want to thank the librarians, archivists, and research assistants who helped me uncover unpublished letters that were used to develop different aspects of Lu’s experience as a Civil War nurse: Malia Ebel of the New Hampshire Historical Society, Sabina Beauchard of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Girish Naik of Harvard University, and Kimberly Reynolds of the Boston Public Library.