Louisa May Alcott
After my daughter and I watched both the 1994 and 2019 versions of Little Women, I wanted to learn more about Louisa May Alcott, so I read Louisa May Alcott by Susan Cheever and Tavia Gilbert. Here are some tidbits I jotted down while listening to the book:
During Louisa’s life, women couldn’t give lectures for money, they had very few rights, and they wore an immense amount of burdensome and restrictive clothing (40 lbs of it if you were wealthy). Louisa looked at 19th century marriage as a kind of domestic slavery of women, and she never married. She was an abolitionist and was involved in the suffrage movement.
Louisa grew up near Emerson and Thoreau. Emerson let her borrow books and he often supported her family financially, as her father, Amos Alcott, had trouble making money. Amos didn’t think they should eat meat or use beasts of burden for work, which made farming difficult. The Alcotts were spiritually and academically rich, but very poor, moving over 20 times.
Louisa went to Washington, D.C., to nurse Civil War soldiers. While there, she contracted pneumonia and typhoid, and was treated with mercury. She suffered terribly from mercury poisoning. When she finally recovered, she wrote Hospital Sketches, then finished Moods.
Everyone told Louisa that Moods was too long and in a dream, she saw how she could shorten it by 10 chapters without ruining it and wrote day and night for a week straight rewriting it. Later she decided she liked the original better.
Louisa may have based the character of Laurie in Little Women on both Thoreau and a Polish man she met while traveling in Europe.
Like Beth in Little Women, Louisa’s sister, Lizzie, contracted scarlet fever. The same bacteria that causes step throat also causes scarlet fever and it can become rheumatic fever that attacks the heart and leads to carditis (inflammation of the heart) and congestive heart failure. I found this interesting in light of the coronavirus also being linked to heart problems.
People didn’t believe the parts of Little Women that were based on true stories, while they praised parts she made up as “tender and true.”
When Louisa went home to write Little Women, she distracted herself with all kinds of tasks and didn’t work on the book for quite a while. I found it comforting to know that a writer as talented as her faced the same resistance I sometimes feel towards the craft. It’s also inspiring to know she eventually broke through that resistance and sometimes wrote for days straight.