1868 Loved by every generation of women since its first appearance, Little Women has inspired – or spawned, according to your point of view – no fewer than fourteen movies from 1917 to 2001. The book spans exactly a year in the lives of the poor but genteel March girls, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, as they make do with their mother in a large but ramshackle house in Massachusetts. Short of money ever since their father ‘lost his property in trying to help an unfortunate friend’, and now left behind while he’s away serving as an army chaplain in the Civil War, the girls do their best to support their ‘Marmee’, while all engage in various charitable and caring works at home and in the neighbourhood.
Though based loosely on the author’s own childhood, it’s not the sort of book that Louisa May Alcott might have been expected to write. Her father and mother were part of that Concord, Massachusetts circle of Transcendentalists that included Emerson and Thoreau (see 23 July). They were feminists and anti-slavery activists who had welcomed the widow and daughters of the violent abolitionist John Brown into their home, and sheltered an escaped slave on his way to Canada.
Louisa was no less adventurous. At 30 she signed up as an army nurse in a chaotic Washington hospital. Some of her earliest writings were gritty sketches of her work among the Civil War wounded, offering vivid details of the men’s wounds, their words and their callous treatment by the surgeons (they can be seen at: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/alcott/sketches/sketches.html). After that she wrote a series of sensationalist stories for Frank Leslie’s Magazine under the pseudonym of ‘A.M. Barnard’. ‘Dealing with masquerade, mesmerism, rebellion, desire, anger, revenge, and incest’, Elaine Showalter writes, ‘these thrillers allowed her to express the volcanic side of her personality.’1
In moving to write Little Women, did Alcott abandon frankness for sweetness and light? After all, this is a novel about adolescent girls in which there are no – not even coded – references to sexual maturation, and where love between the sexes is represented mainly by good fellowship. In exploiting the enormous popularity of Jane Eyre (first American edition, 1848) and America’s first bestseller, Susan Warner’s The Wide Wild World (1850), did Alcott sell her birthright to the market? Not necessarily. Showalter points out the thematic links between these popular works, with their isolated heroines who ultimately triumph through patience, and the rebellious Jo in Little Women, and her ambition – a clear reflection of her creator’s – to become an author. With the father erased and the military hospital (of which the author had first-hand experience) marginalised, ‘Alcott suppresses her own anger and ambition’ even as Jo masters her quick temper. But in volume two, Good Wives (1869), Jo achieves her ambition. She becomes the author of sensational stories for the Weekly Volcano. Maybe that’s why Gertrude Stein and Simone de Beauvoir so admired her example of aspiring womanhood.
1 Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, London: Virago Press, 2009, pp. 140, 142.