Preface

Like so many other girls, I fell under the spell of Louisa May Alcott when my mother presented Little Women to me as if it were the key to a magic kingdom. I was taken into Louisa’s story so completely that a book with covers and pages has no place in my memory of the experience. While I was there, by my mother’s decree, normal life was suspended. Jelly omelets were delivered to my room on bed trays, and sleep was optional. At such a time, school was out of the question. Jo March was coming to take up residence in my heart, a companion for life, to endow me with a little something of Louisa Alcott’s own wise, funny, sentimental, and sharply realistic outlook.

Coming to the end of Little Women left me feeling as Louisa did when she emerged from a vortex (one of her all-absorbing periods of writing): cranky, bereft, and lamenting that never again would I read Little Women not knowing how it came out. The next long rainy weekend my grandmother, tipped off by my mother, showed up for a visit bearing the remaining seven of Alcott’s juvenile novels. I polished off one of them before the sun came out and Grandma went home; the rest by the end of the month. I had gobbled Alcott all up without coming close to satisfying my appetite for her work.

Later, my mother made me aware of Louisa Alcott, the woman behind Little Women. Mom felt deep sympathy for Louisa’s losses, which resembled her own. Her fury on Louisa’s behalf toward Bronson Alcott (Louisa’s father, whose resemblance to her father she never recognized) was as pure and freely expressed as any tirade she directed at a teacher she felt had done me wrong. So it was my mother’s attachment to Louisa’s story that kindled my own interest, and soon after I moved to the Boston area in my twenties I took myself to the Alcotts’ modest doorstep in Concord.

Orchard House is chockablock with things the Alcotts made and ate from and wore and painted and used so much that I imagine their smell must still cling to them. Downstairs in Bronson’s study are his books, his hat, his satchel, and the ingenious little mantel clock to be ignored when neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson came by to philosophize, and to take from its stand and put in his pocket when he went off on lecture tours. In the entry are palimpsests of May’s frieze of silhouettes of the famous friends and neighbors who visited. Lizzie’s picture hangs by her melodeon in the dining room where Abby’s green- and-white Coalport china set is displayed. Upstairs a trunk contains costumes the sisters made for their theatricals, including the russet boots that Louisa so prized she wrote a role requiring them for every production. But it was in her small bedroom, from the tiny semicircular writing surface where she wrote Little Women in ten weeks, that Louisa May Alcott emerged to make herself real and claim me. Over the next decade I read what ever I could find of Alcott’s scores of short stories, poems, and works of nonfiction such as Hospital Sketches, her account of her experience as an army nurse in the Civil War. Her rediscovered thrillers were coming out every year or two, at the rate of a popular living novelist, and three biographies- Ednah Cheney’s, Madeleine Stern’s, and Martha Saxton’s- told a story as full of plot and character as any the author invented, although none of them gave me the woman I glimpsed in her writing.

Louisa’s journals and letters were published at about the same time as the thrillers. In them I finally heard Louisa Alcott’s voice— not Jo March’s voice, or the authorial voice of Louisa May Alcott, but the voice of the woman who had lived and breathed and was as real to me as my friend Nancy Porter. Nancy, an Emmy Award–winning documentary film-maker for PBS, shared my enthusiasm for Alcott and thought we should bring her story to film; no one ever had. Over the next twenty years I continued my study of Alcott’s life, work, and times while we tried to put together funding for the film. By the time the National Endowment for the Humanities (and later the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, Audrey Simons and the Simons Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts) recognized the merit of our subject, I had read just about all of Louisa’s hundreds of works and could sift them for the autobiographical elements we needed to tell her story without leaving her imagination out. Susan Lacy of the PBS series American Masters agreed to co-produce and broadcast a ninety minute documentary biography, and my pleasant obsession with Louisa Alcott became a better-than-full-time job. With it came the opportunity also to fulfill my “long held dream” (a phrase of Louisa’s that came to me as easily as any words of my own) to tell her story in print.

Through writing and producing the film, I came to know the subject of this book in a way few biographers do. Nancy and I spent hours in Orchard House planning the filming, becoming as comfortable there as we would at a friend’s house. In the venerable New York apartment on East Eighty-eighth Street of Madeleine Stern and Dr. Leona Rostenberg, under the suspicious gaze of the last of the household’s dachshunds named Laddie, we filmed the nonagenarian literary sleuths (and rare book dealers) who had discovered Louisa’s pseudonym, A. M. Barnard, and with it the key to her secret literary life as a writer of pulp fiction. I become a literary sleuth myself in search of an Alcott scholar I never met— Madelon Bedell, the author of The Alcotts: Biography of a Family. In 1976 Bedell had interviewed ninety-six-year-old Lulu Nieriker Rasim, Louisa’s niece and the only person then still alive to have known her personally. Bedell’s account of the interview is in the preface to her 1980 book, but the interview itself was never published; the author died of cancer before she completed a second volume. I wondered what had happened to Bedell’s interview with Lulu, had asked various Alcott scholars about it, had even tried calling Bedells listed in telephone books. One day I picked up a used copy of The Alcotts, and out of it tumbled a carbon copy of an August 1980 letter written by Bedell herself to Michael Sterne, then the travel editor of the New York Times, proposing a story. At the bottom of the letter was a return address in Brooklyn where, more than two decades later, Madelon Bedell’s widower still lived.

Bob Bedell, it turned out, had trustingly loaned the papers to an eccentric author, who had been sitting on them for years. Nancy and I went to New York to take Bob and the author (mostly of books about nineteenth-century décor) to lunch, then went to her strangely wonderful Greenwich Village townhouse (its windows suffocated with fabrics, the walls and ceilings of each room papered in half a dozen exuberant Victorian patterns), where in the basement she kept the large battered boxes of Bedell’s files. Since she was moving soon, she agreed to let us take the papers to New England. After we left, however, she answered none of our many phone messages, e-mails, and letters. It looked as if Bedell’s work would stay in that basement— or worse, disappear in the impending move. Finally, after a good six months of anxious strategizing with the Bedell family and some blustery talk about lawyers, the papers were transferred. At present they take up half my study while en route to the Orchard House collection.

Shooting the dramatized scenes of the film was the most unusual aspect of my research. Casting actors as our subject and her family did wonders to focus them in my mind. Location filming in Orchard House, Emerson’s house, and Fruitlands brought home the material and physical reality of Alcott’s life and times. Seeing the costumes— especially the Fruitlands clothing, which had been described but never pictured— and watching them being worn, especially running at full throttle in the woods—made visible how it felt to be breathing under their weight. Eating an authentic plumcake baked by the film’s prop-master made real the pain of three-year-old Louisa when she was asked to renounce the rare promised birthday sweet.

Now that the film and the book are done— having truly gobbled Louisa May Alcott all up— I confess to feeling just about as cranky and bereft as I did as a girl when I finished reading what I believed was everything she wrote. My hope is that readers of this book will be inspired to track down the dozen or more of Louisa May Alcott’s works whose titles are known but whose whereabouts are not, to bring them forth from obscure periodicals in the backs of old local library shelves, attic trunks, even from inside the walls of old houses, as pages of Louisa’s Fruitlands diaries were, so they may be published and read as widely as their most recent predecessors have been. If they do, I may never have to run out of new work from the prodigious pen of Louisa May Alcott.