A BRIEF HISTORICAL NOTE

JO & LAURIE is a work of fiction inspired by Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, and also by the life of Alcott herself. Because Alcott chose to use her own life—growing up as a fledgling writer in a cottage full of sisters in Concord, Massachusetts—as the inspiration for her first domestic fiction, using what we now know about “Lu” Alcott has allowed us to reexamine and rethink her beloved literary stand-in, Jo March.

In general, we tried to follow the basic touchpoints of Alcott’s original story line—certainly the spirit of it—as well as her original cast of characters. From smaller details (like Amy’s infamous punishment for smuggling pickled limes into her school, her burning of Jo’s first manuscript, the scorched dress Jo was forced to wear to Sally Gardiner’s ball, and The Pickwick Papers) to the larger beats (like Beth’s death, Laurie’s rebuffed proposal, Jo’s trip to New York, and their father’s absence), we took great efforts to continually reconnect our story to Alcott’s. When we chose to depart from the world of the established fiction, or from explorations based on questions raised by the established fiction (see: Jo and Laurie’s romance), those decisions were usually inspired by Alcott’s personal history or the letters of Louisa, Bronson, and May Alcott.

The Alcott family did live in Concord, Massachusetts, at Orchard House, named for the forty apple trees Bronson Alcott planted. Lu Alcott described the home, in a letter to her editor, as “damp and earwiggy”—she wondered at how disappointed her readers would be to see it. When they were young, the Alcott children were allowed to draw on the walls, and Bronson Alcott referred to his girls as a “golden circle,” which inspired the image our Amy draws on the March girls’ bedroom wall.

Like the March family, intellectually minded Bronson and social-work-minded Abigail “Abba” Alcott had four daughters—Anna (“Meg”), Louisa (“Jo”), Elizabeth (“Beth”), and Abigail May, called May (“Amy”). Anna married John Bridge Pratt, who like John Brooke, was not a man of means. Elizabeth died of scarlet fever at the age of twenty-two. May trained and ultimately became a successful painter who married a Swiss businessman and lived in Paris until her untimely death at age thirty-nine, eight weeks after childbirth; our Amy’s brush with death was inspired by May’s own sad, sudden fate.

Both Jo’s and Louisa’s father was a chaplain in the Civil War, where Louisa herself served as a nurse, though Jo nurses only Beth. The fictional Mr. March and the real Mr. Alcott both struggled to earn a living for most of their lives, pressuring both Jo and Louisa into early careers writing for the penny press under a variety of names. (Louisa wrote as Flora Fairfield and A. M. Barnard.) Even at the height of her success, Louisa’s letters unfailingly mention the price of every expenditure she makes—including booking second-class passage to cross the Atlantic—something every writer alive can understand, including the authors of this book. (Ha!)

The romantic musician “Laurie” is, according to Alcott herself, a hybrid character. He’s based on a Polish musician, Ladislas “Laddie” Wisniewski, with whom Louisa spent time in Paris, and Alf Whitman, an actor Louisa performed a Dickens play—The Haunted Man—with at the Concord Dramatic Union.

Thomas Niles really was Alcott’s editor at Roberts Brothers Publishers in Boston. He also posthumously published Emily Dickinson, as well as most of the major American Renaissance writers. The first publication of Little Women was, indeed, a sudden and phenomenal success—a print run of two thousand sold out and went into reprints almost immediately. Alcott’s royalty, in lieu of the one-hundred-dollar advance she was otherwise expecting, became the sustaining income of her extended family for years to come.

The pressure to resolve the marriage plots of Little Women is how Good Wives came to be published immediately after (in the United States, the two books are now published as one, under the title Little Women). At the time, Louisa steadfastly and openly refused to allow the fact that her readers were overwhelmingly shipping Jo and Laurie to influence the marriage plots in the second book; she famously said, “I won’t marry Jo to Laurie for anything.” Of course, Louisa herself never married.

When our own story’s departures were not inspired by Alcott’s history or letters, they were framed by the historical context of literary or popular culture in mid-nineteenth-century America, especially in the greater Boston area, about which much has been written. Charles Dickens really did tour the United States for speaking engagements in both 1842 and 1867, traveling with his wife to speak at Steinway Hall, as in our story; Alcott did refer to “old Charley” with affection in her letters, upon hearing that he had died. Also in our story, Jo refers to feminist essayist Margaret Fuller’s “Manifesto of Femality”; there is no question Alcott would have known of that text as well. The couturier Charles Worth was a famed dressmaker of the period—especially to the uppertens—though he had no salon in New York City. Just as Meg is married in the “Worth dress,” it was the custom of the time for most brides to be married in the finest dresses they owned, as opposed to purchasing new ones. Finally, the language of flowers was a Victorian code that assigned meanings to different flowers, which were sometimes used to send messages. Though, in our case, vegetables have been quite useful as well. ☺

Finally, it is through Alcott’s own letters that we know there was a day in 1857 when the author stood at the edge of the Mill Dam, in Boston’s Back Bay, and contemplated jumping. The high highs and the low lows of one of the most successful writers the world has ever known is strangely relatable to our modern reader and writer friends, so we thought it was important to share that moment with Lu’s doppelgänger Jo in our retelling, too.

—MS & MdlC