The first volume of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women was published on September 30, 1868. The novel was an immediate bestseller, bringing the thirty-five-year-old Alcott a cult following of teenage girls and a hero status she grew to regret. “Don’t give anyone my address,” she wrote her publisher before leaving on a European tour in 1870. “I don’t want the young ladies’ notes.” Similar thoughts occurred during the writing of the book: “I plod away,” she wrote in her journal, “though I don’t really enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters . . . ”
But the novel, along with three dozen other books and hundreds of stories, made good Alcott’s vow that, though a woman, she would make both her own and her parents’ living, and do it by writing. This vow was made necessary by Bronson Alcott, a madcap for schemes of high ideal and low pay. Recognizing that her father was unlikely to change, “Duty’s Faithful Child” (Bronson’s term for her) set aside her aspirations for serious writing and, urged on by her publisher, turned her eye to the market.
Alcott’s fiction ranged from wholesome, sentimental tales of family life to, at the other extreme, dark fantasies of romantic desire and frustration — the kind of thing that Jo, Alcott’s Little Women heroine, might have peddled to “The Weekly Volcano.” Published under various pseudonyms, Alcott’s potboiler romances often featured female protagonists determined to triumph, and dangerous if thwarted:
Never had she looked more beautiful as she stood there, an image of will, daring, defiant, and indomitable, with eyes darkened by intensity of emotion, voice half sad, half stern, and outstretched hand on which the wedding ring no longer shone. (Pauline’s Passion and Punishment)
In Marmee and Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother, Eve LaPlante attributes the highest biographical and literary significance to the above passage. The usual view, developed in John Matteson’s Pulitzer-winning biography, Eden’s Outcasts, is that Bronson Alcott was the dominant formative influence on Louisa. In contrast, LaPlante shows how Abigail Alcott’s defiant resistance to her husband’s naïve utopian plan, the Fruitlands group living experiment, salvaged the family and cemented a bond between “the most famous mother-daughter pair in American literary history”:
Louisa and Abigail were born into a world that constrained and restricted them, but they dreamed of freedom. The story of their struggle to forge a new world began with Abigail. Indeed, we cannot understand Louisa without knowing her mother . . . The imaginative child of an inspirational mother, Louisa studied Abigail’s life and character, appropriated them, and embedded them in her fictional worlds.
LaPlante says that, a century and a half on, women continue to grapple with the dilemmas faced by Abigail and given voice by Louisa in her novel — how to balance work and love, public and private, relationships and independence. Alcott scholar Anne Boyd Rioux agrees that the problems faced by the women in the novel remain relevant and compelling, as do the solutions:
Little Women is about four very different girls, and so many readers can find themselves in at least one of the March sisters. Perhaps that is why we still have today so many novels and television shows about four sisters or girlfriends trying to figure out how to grow up on their own terms . . . [T]hey can all be traced back to Little Women, the original story of four women coming of age, helping us see that we have choices in life and that different ways of growing up are valid. That is a powerful message still in a world that tries to limit our horizons to a one-size-fits-all ideal of womanhood.
Rioux is at work on Reading Little Women, due out in 2018 to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the novel’s publication. Rioux’s study will explore both the back-story and the legacy — how the book became a children’s and feminist classic, adapted and argued by generations. Gabrielle Donnelly’s The Little Women Letters is one recent fictional application of exactly that, with three imagined descendants of Jo March borrowing from her story to shape and empower their own.
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Sig Nordal 