As indicated in the headnotes to other selections, much of Louisa May Alcott’s fiction was autobiographical or at least based on her own experience. A chapter of her novella “Diana and Persis” (not published in her lifetime) consists entirely of her sister May’s letters presented as those of Persis, one of the two artist heroines. The distinction between fact and fiction, often blurred in an author’s work, is especially problematical in Alcott’s case. In fact, the editors of Alcott’s Selected Fiction offer three memoirs in that volume, among them the selection that follows, “Transcendental Wild Oats.” But though these editors perhaps rightly contend that “ ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’ turns a disturbing, tragic experience into a humorous satire that ends in uplifting thought” (xliii), readers can nonetheless sense, beneath the burlesque treatment of the Fruitlands experiment, the real hardship and pain the family, including ten-year-old Louisa, endured. Would we be able to appreciate the full pathos of Louisa’s Fruitlands diary entries if we did not also have the adult perspective offered by “Transcendental Wild Oats”? The editors of Selected Fiction (as well as Alcott’s journals and letters) argue that her “character and life can be reconstructed far more accurately from letters and journals than from her fiction” (xlii), but because her father insisted that she and her sisters keep journals, and that these journals be open to parental scrutiny, she began almost immediately to construct in them a public persona. While the journals and letters may give us a more accurate account of the details of her life, the fiction may well have provided her, as theatricals provided her heroines, with a safer medium for expressing psychic truths (compare, for example, her Georgetown journal, the basis for Hospital Sketches, with her story “My Contraband,” which also derives from her nursing experience).
Perhaps because Alcott’s journal writing began as a kind of command performance (see the note from her mother inscribed in the Fruitm<nd performance (see the note from her mother inscri&ed in the Fruitlands journal entries or her May 1850 entry), it tapered off as her fame and its demands grew. After the success of Little Women, Alcott becomes increasingly terse and despondent in her journals (we can see the beginning of this process in her April 1869 entry, written after the completion of Little Women, part 2). Although she carried on a vigorous correspondence until shortly before her death, her journal dwindles into a succession of one-line and even single-word entries, mostly about the state of her health. Thus the journal entries reprinted here consist mainly of early ones. In the Boston journal entries, Alcott chides herself for “moods,” lists her favorite books and authors (including those most frequently alluded to in her fiction), records her earnings, whether from stories or from stitching, and, years later, adds a cryptic gloss. In the entries for the late 1850s and early 1860s, Alcott describes many of the events immortalized in Little Women, including her sister Elizabeth’s illness and death, her sister Anna’s marriage, and the writing of her first published novel, Moods. She also describes the outbreak of the war and her family’s intimacy with the John Browns.The Georgetown journal reveals how in one crucial instance she radically transformed her experience in writing Little Women: Alcott, not her father, goes to the war, falls ill, and has to be retrieved; unlike Jo, who heroically sells her hair, Alcott loses it to illness. Although a later entry claims “we really lived most of it,” other entries enable us to see that Alcott lived more of it than Jo did.
Unlike the sampling of journal entries, the letters reprinted here represent Alcott’s entire life, but the majority were written after she became famous and a number of them were published in her lifetime. Early letters to her mother, father, and sister Anna reveal her family loyalty, youthful exuberance, desire for independence, and literary ambition. Three letters of the 1860s indicate her response to the reception of Moods.To read Alcott’s journal entries of the 1870s, one would think that her energy was flagging, but her letters of that decade express a lively interest in women’s issues and a firm commitment to women’s rights. A number of her letters to Lucy Stone, editor of The Woman’s Journal (in which “Queen Aster” first appeared), were published, and both in public and in private she made it unmistakably clear that she could never “ ‘go back’ on Womans [sic] Suffrage.” Her letter to William Warland Clapp, Jr., is especially interesting in that she defends suffragists from the very charge leveled at Chow-chow’s mother in “Cupid and Chow-chow”—that they “do not care for children and prefer notoriety to the joys of maternity.” Alcott even tries to enlist her editor at Roberts Brothers, Thomas Niles, in the suffrage cause. Perhaps Alcott’s most amusing (and possibly disingenuous) letter is one of literary advice to an aspiring author, but her most moving, self-revelatory correspondence, with Maggie Lukens, begins with similar advice to Maggie and her sisters. The depth of Alcott’s love for her own dead sisters and for May’s daughter, Lulu, who was left to her care, finds rare expression in her last letter to Maggie Lukens and suggests the biographical truth embodied in her most enduring legacy to us, Little Women.
Those interested in reading a more extensive selection of Alcott’s journal entries and letters should see The Journals of Louisa May Alcott and The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, edited by Joel Myerson, Daniel Shealy, and Madeleine B. Stern. The journal entries and many of the letters reprinted here were first published in Ednah Dow Cheney’s Louisa May Alcott (1889).