The Road to Little Women
IN SEPTEMBER 1867, the publisher Thomas Niles of Roberts Brothers wrote to Louisa May Alcott to ask if she would write a girls’ book. She wasn’t wild about the idea. “Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters,” she wrote in her journal the following May, when she finally started writing the book that would become Little Women. She called it, at first, “The Pathetic Family,” the name she had often used for her own family. When she sent the first twelve chapters to Niles, he thought them “dull,” and she agreed. But she kept on with her story and after ten weeks had written an astonishing 402 pages. This would be what we now know of as the first part of Little Women. Niles came up with the title, which drew attention to the transitional period of the March sisters’ lives as they matured from girls to women. Niles’s opinion of the completed manuscript was much improved over his first impression. He had given several copies to girls to gauge their interest, and they declared it a success, so he was willing to offer Alcott a contract.1
Despite the young readers’ encouragement, Alcott was unsure of what she had written. After publication of the first part on September 30, 1868, she confessed that she had written it quickly “to order” and had grave doubts about its success. She was happy that the critic and writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson thought her “little story was ‘good, & American.’ ”2 But she had no idea that thousands of girls around the country would feel the same way and make writing books for them more lucrative than any other kind of writing she had ever done.
By the end of that month, the first print run of two thousand copies had sold out and the printing presses were busy making more to fill the growing demand. Niles then asked Alcott to write a second volume. She set to work again, writing nearly a chapter a day, so caught up in weaving the futures of her four March girls that she barely stopped to eat or sleep. At the New Year, the manuscript of part two was delivered to the publisher, and Alcott was soon hailed across the country as “the children’s friend.”3
THE THIRTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD Louisa May Alcott had not envisioned this career path for herself. She had grown up on the ideals of German and British romanticism and American transcendentalism, which promoted self-reliance and divinely inspired genius as the paths to literary success. Her neighbor and idol Ralph Waldo Emerson had written in his essay “Self-Reliance,” “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men,—that is genius,” and the young Louisa had copied those words into her scrapbook.4 For a girl with such a mentor, and with a father who believed in the inherent divinity of every child, regardless of gender, it seemed quite possible to grow up and become a famous novelist one day—not unlike Nathaniel Hawthorne, another of her neighbors in Concord, Massachusetts.
Louisa’s most unusual father, Bronson Alcott, was a close friend of Emerson’s. Bronson had no sons on whom he could bestow his transcendentalist principles, but he felt that girls would do just as well. He believed that genius was a “flaming Herald” sent from God “to revive in Humanity the lost idea of its destiny.” In his view, remarkable for his time, genius was innate in each child, male or female, but was stifled by fear and intolerance as the child grew. In his role as educator and father, he sought to counteract that process. No wonder that two of his four daughters grew up to pursue creative lives: Louisa as a writer and May, the youngest, as an artist. As a single-minded philosopher and writer himself, Bronson was thrilled by Louisa’s intense devotion to her writing. He believed, when she was only twelve years old, that one day her “ready genius” would “make a way . . . in the world” and perhaps even grant her fame. On her fourteenth birthday, he gave her a book into which he had copied her own original poetry, sending her the clear message that he endorsed and took pride in her literary efforts. He brought apples and cider up to her garret while she was working intensely and later built her a desk, a wooden semicircle attached to the wall between the windows in her room at Orchard House, encouraging her, as her sister May put it, to “liv[e] for immortality.” Bronson also read Louisa’s letters—written when she was away from home—aloud to Emerson and passed them on to publishers in hopes they would print them. He told her he hoped she would “have the health, leisure, comforts, as you have the Genius” to write a book that would reach “the wider circle of readers.” Her mother, Abigail, or “Abba,” Alcott, was no less encouraging. After reading Louisa’s poem “The Robin,” written when she was only eight years old, Abigail told her daughter, “You will grow up a Shakespeare!” Many years later, when Louisa published her first book, she credited her accomplishment to her mother’s unwavering support and interest “from the first to the last.”5
Not many families in America had ever so thoroughly nourished and encouraged a girl’s literary abilities. During the 1840s and ’50s, when Louisa was growing up, girls and women were warned at every turn against picking up the pen. But they were doing so in ever greater numbers, which caused the United States Review in 1853 to call on “American authors [to] be men and heroes! . . . Do not leave literature in the hands of a few industrious females.” In defense of the male-dominated sphere of literature, critics stood, in the words of now forgotten novelist Elizabeth Stoddard, “ready to sneer at every woman who aspires to make use of the talents with which God intended her to adorn the walks of literature or art.” Even more perniciously, male family members were often ashamed of their sisters or daughters who dared to venture into print. Fanny Fern wrote in her 1854 autobiographical novel Ruth Hall of her brother, the famous editor Nathaniel Willis, telling her that she had no talent and had better find some “unobtrusive employment.” Fern wrote her novel as a legitimation of her pursuit of a literary career, despite the overwhelming obstacles her family put in her way. Closer to home for Alcott, Hawthorne told his wife, Sophia, a gifted writer herself, that he was glad she had “never prostituted [her]self to the public” by becoming a published author.6
The message Louisa received from her family could not have been more different. To read her journals is to watch the slow budding of a writer who has the usual doubts and frustrations but not the crushing “anxiety of authorship” that most women writers experienced in the nineteenth century. She would write at the age of twenty-seven, astonishingly free of self-doubt or guilt, that she expected “the great authoress [Louisa] & artist [May] . . . [to] be ‘an honor to our country & a terror to the foe.’ ”7
Alcott’s earliest writings consisted of the exotic Italian-set short stories “The Rival Painters,” published in 1852 when she was twenty years old, and “The Rival Prima Donnas,” which appeared in 1854. Later that year, she published her first book, Flower Fables, a collection of stories about fairies and the flowers they befriend, based on the whimsical tales her teacher Henry David Thoreau had once told her, and that she, in turn, had told to the Emerson children when she was fifteen. With the encouragement and financial contribution of the Emerson family, she was able to convince a publisher to take a risk on the stories. It was a good bet; the book earned her a modest sum of $32. In a letter accompanying the copy of her “first born” that she gave to her mother for Christmas, Louisa indicated it was only a beginning, “for, with so much to cheer me on, I hope to pass in time from fairies and fables to men and realities.”8 This was but her literary apprenticeship that she hoped would lead to fame as a serious author.
Five years later, in 1860, Alcott was well on her way to that goal. The prestigious Atlantic Monthly, in which the work of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau had previously appeared, had published two of her stories. She had reached the nation’s utmost literary heights, it seemed, but that was not enough for her. One of her stories published in the Atlantic was “A Modern Cinderella,” which anticipates Little Women in many ways. In the story, two sisters, Di and Laura—modeled on Louisa and May—abandon their household responsibilities when inspiration strikes them, while their sister Nan, modeled on the oldest Alcott daughter, Anna (who was also called Nan), picks up the slack. In time, Di learns to become a true artist not by neglecting her duty but by embracing it, telling Nan’s fiancé, “I’ll turn my books and pen to some account, and write stories full of dear old souls like you and Nan; and some one, I know, will like and buy them, though they are not ‘works of Shakespeare.’ I’ve thought of this before, have felt I had the power in me; now I have the motive, and now I’ll do it.”9 The motive that inspires Di is the desire to support her family.
Money to augment the empty family coffers was Alcott’s inspiration as well. After “pegging away all these years in vain,” she wanted both recognition and her own literary fortune. Unfortunately, writing for the Atlantic wasn’t turning out to be the path to get there, as she had hoped. The editors encouraged her to write a “flat sort of tale.” In fact, they sought stories and poems by women as leavening for the weighty material by the magazine’s illustrious male contributors. Deflated but not beaten, Alcott continued to send in her stories, writing primarily for money and earning between $50 and $75 for each one.10 This pattern of letting out her ambitions and then drawing them in and claiming money to be her chief motivation would continue for many years.
Searching for a way to distinguish herself, Alcott also yearned for something important to do in the world. According to the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, only contact with the world would lead one to genius; locking oneself up at home or in the study was too limiting. In “Experience,” Emerson wrote, “Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too concave, and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life?” Alcott longed for experiences that would fuel her writing, and soon after the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter in April 1861, she yearned to join the young men of Concord marching off to brave bullets and cannonballs. But she had to content herself with sewing bees and lint-picking parties, helping to outfit soldiers and prepare bandages for the casualties to come. At home there were also extra duties when John Brown’s daughters came to board with the Alcotts, leaving Louisa no time to write down the story ideas simmering in her active brain. “I think disappointment must be good for me, I get so much of it,” she wrote in her journal.11
As 1862 dawned, family friend Elizabeth Peabody suggested that Louisa start a kindergarten since Peabody’s own, the first in America, had been so successful. The new editor of the Atlantic Monthly, James T. Fields, who wasn’t interested in publishing her stories, encouraged her to give up writing and gave her $40 (worth over $1,000 today) to start a school. She dejectedly agreed. Unsurprisingly, life as a teacher dependent on the generosity of others did not suit Alcott. She “long[ed] for a crust in a garret with freedom and a pen.”12 By April she had given up the school as a failure, not having made enough money even to cover her own expenses.
Despite Fields’s advice, Alcott decided that writing was her true calling and the surest way she had to make a living. Always at war with her desire to write great literature was her even keener desire to make money from it. For however much her parents encouraged her literary ambitions, they also needed her to help provide for their struggling family. Bronson was a dreamer with little concern for the practical necessities of life and utterly incapable of earning a living wage. As a child, Louisa once described a philosopher like her father as “a man up in a balloon with his family at the strings tugging to pull him down.” When she later fictionalized the utopian community Bronson started with a friend at Fruitlands, she wrote humorously but also bitterly about how “some call of the Oversoul wafted all the men away” when it was time to harvest the crops.13
Bronson’s self-reliant path to genius led to precisely the kind of neglect of others rejected by Louisa’s alter ego Di in “A Modern Cinderella.” She had grown up watching her father shift the burdens of everyday life onto the shoulders of his wife and daughters. The only occupations that did not compromise his principles were teaching and chopping wood. The former became impossible after the twin scandals of his unorthodox teaching methods and his acceptance of a black pupil, and the latter was not a reliable source of income. Louisa watched as her mother toiled to feed and clothe her four girls, and the two oldest went out to work as soon as they were able. As a result, for Louisa writing could never be a purely artistic affair. There was room in the Alcott family for only one self-absorbed genius.
Thus she turned away from writing for high cultural periodicals and toward the easiest path to financial reward: writing tales for the popular Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, known for its coverage of murder trials and sensational gossip. In 1862 she entered a contest held by the paper and won the $100 prize with her story “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment.” Set in Cuba, it is a melodramatic tale about a daring heroine who exacts revenge on the lover who cheats on her and jilts her. Two more similarly dramatic stories followed in 1863, “A Pair of Eyes” and “A Whisper in the Dark,” which Frank Leslie’s bought for $40 and $50, respectively. All were published anonymously. She called such stories “blood & thunder tales” and told her friend Alfred Whitman not to be shocked if he received a paper in the mail with one of her stories under a title such as “The Maniac Bride” or “The Bath of Blood. A thrilling tale of passion.”14 She once wrote that she thought her “natural ambition is for the lurid style,” but she feared exposure. She didn’t want her father or Emerson to know. What would they think of her? For all of their inspiring transcendentalist principles, they had also saddled her with “a chain armor of propriety.”15 She would in the coming years continue to write many such stories but either anonymously or under the gender-neutral pseudonym A. M. Barnard.
By the time “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” was published, however, Alcott had already taken another course that would lead her along a very different path as a writer. As the news from the battlefields worsened with defeats at the Second Battle of Bull Run and Antietam, Alcott’s desire to join the boys who had marched off to war intensified. When she turned thirty years old and thus reached the age at which the Union nursing corps would consider applicants, she applied. She enjoyed nursing and needed an outlet for her considerable energy. Dorothea Dix, who had been an assistant at her father’s school many years earlier and was now superintendent of the nursing corps, accepted her; and in early December 1862 Louisa got her orders, feeling like “the son of the house going to war.”16 She left the next morning and spent Christmas in the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington, D.C. There, over the next six weeks, she assisted with amputations, dressed wounds, and washed the hordes of battle-weary men whose naked bodies were rather alarming to her. In mid-January, however, her family was notified that she had come down with a dangerous case of typhoid pneumonia. When one of the other nurses died of the same disease, Bronson, who had already hurried to her bedside, rushed her back to Concord.
For three weeks Louisa’s fever raged, and she had strange and sometimes frightening dreams. Her recovery from her illness lasted for two months, but the effects of the treatments of the time, which included a medicine containing mercury, would last a lifetime. Her strong frame was wasted, and her hair, which previously extended nearly to her ankles, had been cut off on doctors’ orders. As soon as she could sit at her desk again, Alcott, wearing a small white cap, set to work revising the letters she had written home while she was nursing. They would soon be published in May and June 1863 as “Hospital Sketches,” first in the antislavery weekly the Boston Commonwealth and then in book form. Thus the first writing that stemmed directly from her own life was published, and she got her first taste of the public’s eagerness, particularly during the war, for stories of authentic experience. The sketches became an instant hit and showed her where her true talents lay. Her father, who was probably the one who first shared her letters with friends at the Boston Commonwealth, was proud of his daughter’s first literary success.
Upon her next visit to Boston with her father, Louisa was surprised to see how celebrated she was, being more used to doing hard work than receiving the royal treatment. The up-and-coming writer William Dean Howells and the philosophical and theological author Henry James Sr. both sent her letters of praise. Fields admitted he was wrong about her giving up writing and now wanted some of her work for the Atlantic. He published her poem “Thoreau’s Flute” as well as a wartime story, “The Brothers,” for which he paid her $50. Then he proposed to send her to Port Royal, North Carolina, so that she could teach contraband slaves and write about her experiences for his magazine. They were to be called “Plantation Sketches,” but she was not accepted for the enterprise.17
Meanwhile, Fields also said he wanted a novel from her for his publishing firm Ticknor and Fields, the most prestigious literary house in the United States. Did she perhaps have one in the works he could see? She did have a manuscript into which she had funneled countless hours and her greatest ambitions. She called it Moods. Having earned a highly respectable $600 for her writing in 1863, she felt she could take the time to nurture her novel into being, for this was a labor of love not business. Moods was an ambitious book about a volatile young woman who marries in haste and later regrets it. It was full of Louisa’s youthful crushes on Emerson and Thoreau and her doubts about the wisdom of marriage for someone as willful and capricious as herself. But more than that, it was a serious bid for literary immortality, a psychological romance written in the vein of Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s powerful works. Unfortunately, however, she was already under obligation to James Redpath, who had published Hospital Sketches. Redpath was willing to publish Moods, but he told her it was too long and she would have to cut it in half. She refused and sent it to Howard Ticknor, Fields’s partner, who said he liked the book but felt they had too much in the works just then. Months later a friend of the family sent it to the publisher A. K. Loring. He also wanted it cut, particularly the long passages of description and analysis. Plot-driven works were in demand, he said. Alcott was disgusted and threw Moods back in the drawer where it had stayed for the past three years.
Eventually Louisa devised a new way to shorten Moods. Unable to eat or sleep for nearly two weeks, she slipped into her vortex, as she called it, revising and reshaping Moods for Loring. But after its publication in late 1864, she looked back with regret rather than satisfaction. It was not the book she had intended it to be, “for I followed bad advice & took out many things which explained my idea & made the characters more natural & consistent,” she wrote to a friend.18 It sold well, going into a second printing, and reviewers praised the writing but found its ideas about marriage unsettling and too free. Alcott was dismayed and swore that in the future she would leave out the ideas altogether.
She then went back to a new novel she had started, called “Success,” but she soon set aside her ambition for serious recognition in order to contribute to her family’s income. (The novel would become Work, published in 1873, five years after Little Women.) Her experiment with novel writing was not a failure, but it also was not the success she had hoped for. She went back to writing her “rubbishy tales.” They paid better and were easy to write. She couldn’t “afford to starve on praise,” she wrote in her journal.19 Alcott also gave up on the Atlantic when it started rejecting her stories again, probably because they dealt with antislavery themes. She went back to writing sensation stories for The Flag of Our Union and the newly launched Frank Leslie’s Chimney Corner. She was satisfied to supply the demand for blood-and-thunder tales when, with little effort and much fun, she could crank out stories that garnered her between $50 and $75 apiece—and Leslie always wanted more.
In the summer of 1865, Alcott took an extended hiatus from writing when her long-cherished dream of traveling to Europe became a reality. Her reputation as a nurse had earned her an invitation to act as a paid companion to the wealthy invalid Anna Weld on a tour of the continent. Weld’s half-brother, George, also joined them, but he often left them alone to go on his own adventures. Over the next year, the two women visited the principal sites throughout Germany and then stayed for a longer period in Vevey, Switzerland. There Anna suffered ill health, and Louisa was frustrated to be spending her time fluffing cushions and carrying shawls instead of seeing the sights. Fortunately for Louisa, she made a new friend in Vevey, the Polish youth Ladislas Wisniewski, whom she called “Laddie.” She wrote something in her journal about a “romance with L. W.” but later scratched it out and added, “Couldn’t be.” However, it seems they mostly walked, talked, sailed, and traded English and French lessons. When he finally left for Geneva and the women went to Nice, Louisa and Anna, who also seems to have taken a fancy to Ladislas, were despondent. A few months later, when Louisa decided to go home, she went first to Paris and spent two weeks there with Laddie, seeing the sights, attending readings, and listening to “my boy,” as she called him, playing the piano for her.20
When Alcott came home in July 1866, she returned to a family as in need of money as ever. She set to work right away, writing tales for The Chimney Corner, Youth’s Companion, the Saturday Evening Gazette, and any other magazine or paper that would take her wares. She managed to dash off twelve tales in three months. Meanwhile, Frank Leslie wanted her to write a story for him every month, for $50, which she agreed to, hoping she would be able to find the time between caring for her sick mother and helping with the sewing. By the end of the year, she was happy to have paid the bills, but new ones kept coming in.
Perhaps because of overwork, Louisa fell ill for the first half of 1867 and wasn’t able to write again until June. When she was ready to resume her busy career, she discovered that a new market for children’s literature had emerged. By that fall, about the same time Niles approached her about writing a girls’ book, she was also asked to edit the children’s magazine Merry’s Museum, for $500 a year, an offer she could hardly refuse. While the book for girls wasn’t going so well, she focused her energies on the magazine and used her new salary to get her own apartment in Boston. She was busy but happy, for she finally had the quiet and freedom to concentrate on her work. She was realizing her dual dreams of independence and supporting her family. At the end of the year, more work came in as the editor of the Youth’s Companion asked her to contribute two stories a month. Thus, as 1868 dawned, Alcott counted her literary blessings and expected to make an unprecedented $1,000 in the coming year. When the white hyacinth bulb she had planted in her apartment bloomed, she took it as a sign that the new year would bring her the success and comfort she had long hoped for.
It didn’t come right away, however. By March she was back in Concord. Her mother was becoming quite frail and needed Louisa as both nurse and housekeeper. Meanwhile, her father wanted her to get to work on the girls’ story Thomas Niles wanted. As it turned out, Bronson had been negotiating with Niles for publication of a book of his own, and Niles had intimated that he would be more amenable to the idea if Bronson could encourage Louisa to write her book. Thus she returned to Concord and Orchard House and sat in her second-story room at the little desk Bronson had made for her. There she contemplated the new project while continuing to churn out the lucrative tales that provided for her mother’s comfort, which was more important to her than anything else.
Alcott had delayed beginning the new book for so long because she didn’t feel herself capable of writing it. “I could not write a girls’ story, knowing little about any but my own sisters & always preferring boys,” she wrote to a friend.21 Finally she thought that perhaps her own childhood growing up with three sisters could provide enough material. She talked the idea over with her sisters and Marmee, as she referred to her mother. They were all in favor, so she decided to give it a try. She had already written a Christmas story for Merry’s Museum about four sisters, whom she had given the nicknames of herself and her three sisters: Nan, Lu, Beth, and May. For the opening chapter of Little Women, she decided to use a scene from the story in which the girls give away their breakfast to a poor family.
Writing the novel felt like drudgery at first, and Alcott despaired of ever being able to complete it. She agreed with Niles that the first twelve chapters she sent to him were rather uninteresting—a surprising verdict considering that they contain some of the most memorable scenes of the book, such as Meg and Jo going to the ball and Jo’s reaction to Amy burning her manuscript. Niles looked for a second opinion, and he soon wrote to Alcott that his niece had laughed until she cried over those same chapters. Alcott now began to look at the project in a new light, convinced that “lively, simple books are very much needed for girls.” She wrote steadily for two months, descending into one of her vortexes, driven by Niles’s assurance that “it will ‘hit.’ ” In fact, so convinced was he that he encouraged her, against his firm’s own self-interest, to sign a contract that would give her royalties on each copy sold instead of a higher advance without royalties. He also thought a sequel might be in order and suggested that she conclude the book by hinting that one could be written, if the public responded well.22
When the proofs came back in August, Alcott read them over with surprise. The book was better than she realized, not at all “sensational, but simple and true,” and perhaps that would be its appeal.23 By the time she was done with the first part of Little Women, she decided she would be happy to write more such stories, but she didn’t expect they would pay as well as her blood-and-thunder tales.
When Little Women or, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy was published on September 30, 1868, it sold two thousand copies in two weeks. Niles’s suggestion that Alcott conclude it with some hint to a sequel prompted her to insert these lines at the end: “So grouped the curtain falls upon 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.’ ” Readers got the hint and let her know they were clamoring for more. Their letters poured in with demands to know what would happen to the four March girls, or, most importantly, whom they would marry, “as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life,” the author grumbled.24
Niles promptly ordered a sequel, and after settling her mother with Anna and her family in Maplewood, north of Boston, for the winter, Louisa moved into a room in Boston and set to work again on November 1. Inspired by her success, she planned to write approximately a chapter a day and finish the whole thing within a month. She enjoyed launching the March girls into the future and allowing her imagination greater freedom, but she quickly faced a problem as the futures she envisioned did not match up with those her readers were expecting. On one particular she was adamant: “I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please any one.” Yet she felt compelled by her publisher to marry off each of the girls, causing her to feel as if she had to finish the book “in a very stupid style.”25 She worked steadily all month, barely able to eat or sleep, stopping only for a run each day, her usual exercise.
The impression Alcott gives in her journals is that she wrote rapidly and with little or no revision. If not for the existence of two manuscript chapters of the novel, we might believe her. Although it was her practice to destroy the original drafts once the proofs were made, she saved these pages at her mother’s request, apparently for sentimental reasons. Written on blue paper with dark ink that has faded to brown, the chapters cover Amy’s trip to Europe and Laurie’s ill-fated proposal to Jo. Both of them show how Alcott, more accustomed to writing sensational tales for adults, was learning to adjust her style and content for younger readers.
In “Our Foreign Correspondent,” chapter seven of part two, Alcott made significant changes from the manuscript to the printed version, so many that there must have been an intervening draft. The original casts Amy’s wealthy English suitor Fred Vaughn in a brief, minor role, leaving him behind in London. Amy never has a chance to make up her mind about whether she will marry him, if asked. Instead, an American she met on the ship to England, Captain Lennox, follows her to the continent and tags along on their travels, becoming immensely jealous at the male attention she receives. In her letter home, Amy claims she never had any interest in him and tries to convince her mother that she isn’t a flirt toying with men’s emotions. We can’t know why Alcott trimmed down Amy’s many admirers to one, Fred Vaughn, and made him a serious rival for Laurie’s later affection, but it seems likely that she or her editor feared readers’ censure of Amy’s flirtatious behavior. Alcott also cut Amy’s descriptions of her visit to a casino in Heidelberg where the women gambled as eagerly as the men.26
In the other surviving chapter, “Heartache,” chapter eleven of part two, Alcott also felt the need to tone things down a bit, although here she made only a few minor changes, with one interesting exception. In the published version, after Jo finally convinced Laurie that she would never marry him, he got angry and turned away from her. Jo was frightened by his face and asked him where he was going. “To the devil!” was his answer, before he stormed off. But when she first wrote the scene, Alcott had a more dramatic exit in mind. Instead of simply turning away, Laurie “caught her in his arms and kissed her violently.” Jo did not respond but was subsequently frightened by “his passion.” Alcott later crossed out both references with a pencil. Apparently, she thought it prudent to remove Laurie’s physical desire for Jo, although most of her young readers would still swoon over Laurie’s intense love for Jo.27
On New Year’s Day 1869, Alcott sent the second part of Little Women to Roberts Brothers. By then she was worn out with headaches and coughs that prevented her from working her usual fourteen hours a day. In April, when the book was published, Niles quickly asked her for another, but she was worried about going into her vortex again. This was the pattern of Alcott’s writing life. She could rarely write at a leisurely pace. It was all or nothing. To write with such intensity again so soon would surely cause her to break down. With her family so utterly dependent on her, she couldn’t afford to fall ill. To make things more complicated, her fame was growing and fans and reporters were beginning to show up unannounced at Orchard House, causing Louisa to flee out the back door whenever she could.28 Meanwhile, she waited anxiously to hear from Niles about the second part of the book.
Sometime that spring, Louisa went into Boston to ask Niles directly how it was going. At the end of that day, upon returning to Concord, she regaled her parents and May—as well as her neighbors, the Hawthornes—with the story of what had happened during the visit to her publisher. Julian Hawthorne, son of the famous author who had died five years earlier, later recounted that Louisa held forth as Abba peeled apples for a pie, Bronson peeked in from his study, and May sat on the piano stool, occasionally twirling around to face the keyboard and provide a suitably dramatic chord. Louisa reported arriving at the Roberts Brothers offices to find boxes piled all around and deliverymen loading up wagons while clerks bustled in and out. Her first thought was that the publisher was going out of business and its wares were being carted off to pay its debts. When she finally pushed her way through to Niles’s office, she found him bent over his ledgers and books in a state of near frenzy. He veritably leaped over his desk upon seeing her, in Julian Hawthorne’s rather fantastical recounting, and grabbed her by the elbows. She was terrified and recoiled from his advance but was soon mollified by his excited cry that he had never experienced anything like it. “All else put aside—street blocked—country aroused—overwhelmed—paralyzed!” Just that day, Chicago bookstores had ordered two thousand copies, but that was nothing compared to the tens of thousands being shipped out. “Why, dearest girl, it’s the triumph of the century!” he told her. He was just then writing her a check, in fact, and asked her to name her figure. She came home with $1,000, and for the first time in her life, she was able to invest it instead of paying off debtors.29 That check was the beginning of the savings that would ensure her family would never want again. It was also the beginning of Louisa May Alcott’s literary immortality.