Louisa May Alcott in fact and fiction

When I read The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, I noted that some of those included survive only in transcripts made by Ednah Dow Cheney.  I assumed that her book, Louisa May Alcott, Life, Letters and Journals, consisted mainly of transcripts. It was only when I finally started reading the book (a long-term resident of the TBR shelves) that I discovered it was published in 1889, the year after Alcott's death; and that it is a biography as well as a compilation of Alcott's writings. It was clear from the text that Ednah Cheney knew Louisa May Alcott. When I looked for information about Cheney, I found that she is a fascinating figure in her own right, part of the Transcendentalist inner circle, an activist in the abolitionist and women's rights movements. Her biography is the first written on Alcott. She had access through Louisa's only surviving sister, Anna Alcott Pratt (Meg), to family papers. She did note that Louisa burned many of her papers before her death, and also sorted and burned her mother's. Anna Pratt may have done the same later for Louisa's. Among the extracts Cheney included were entries from a diary that Louisa kept as a child during the utopian "Fruitlands" experiment organized by her father Bronson Alcott. The original of the diary has since been lost (or destroyed), along with letters. (Alcott amended her journals later in life, adding notes and comments, which Cheney included in her transcriptions.)

I can't remember if I have read a full biography of Louisa May Alcott before. I found this an interesting outline of her life, and I enjoyed reading Alcott's own words. It is certainly not a rigorous scholarly biography. Cheney seems to have felt the need to defend Alcott, against accusations that her early writings were too sensational and immoral, or too full of slang; and also to assure her readers that Alcott was a true woman. Though she had no children of her own - and apparently didn't really care for children - still she had "the mother-nature strong in her heart..." At the same time, she allowed Alcott to speak for herself, and that keeps the book from turning into hagiography. I was surprised to read in a diary entry from the period when Alcott was writing Little Women, "Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters..." In 1877, as she was writing Under the Lilacs, she said in another entry that she was "tired of providing moral pap for the young." And she complained, a lot, about how hard she had to work, and how easy other people had it, particularly her youngest sister May (Amy). She noted at one point that "she [Anna] has her wish, and is happy. When shall I have mine?"  On one birthday she wrote "I never seem to have many presents, though I give a good many." By then she had become the main financial support of her family, which led her to exhaust herself in writing. I was reminded of Margaret Oliphant, churning out books and articles for her family's support, and sometimes complaining about it all.

Cheney's biography made me want to read one of Alcott's novels, and I chose Jo's Boys, published in 1886. I read it many times growing up, but it's one I re-read less often these days. Learning that it was Alcott's last novel piqued my interest. It is the third story of the March family, opening ten years after Little Men. Plumfield has now become part of Laurence College, funded by the estate of old Mr. Laurence. He has gone to his reward, as has Marmee. In real life, Louisa had also lost her sister May, the original for Amy. A touching Preface states that "since the original of that character died, it has been impossible for me to write of her as when she was here to suggest, criticise, and laugh over her namesake. The same excuse applies to MARMEE." Professor Bhaer is the president of the college, Mr. March its chaplain and resident philosopher. Meg has a house on the campus and acts as a den mother for the women students. Laurie and Amy have also built a house there, which is a center for art and music.

Reading this novel right after Cheney's book made it clear how much Alcott took straight from her own life for this book. Jo has become a famous author after writing "a little story describing a few scenes and adventures in the lives of herself and her sisters - though boys were more in her line..." The success of this Little Women-ish book allowed Jo to fulfill her dream: "a room where Marmee could sit in peace and enjoy herself after her hard, heroic life." That was exactly Alcott's wish for her Marmee, achieved through her own writing. With the runaway success of Jo's novel and the books that follow, fans deluge her with letters and camp out at Plumfield to see her. One woman visitor who forces her way in tells her, "If ever you come to Oshkosh, your feet won't be allowed to touch the pavement" - almost the exact words a fan spoke to Alcott herself in 1875. Jo however considers herself "only a literary nursery-maid who provides moral pap for the young..." Like her creator, Jo prefers "little Charlotte Brontë" to George Eliot. "I admire, but I don't love, George Eliot," she tells one of the women students who aspires to be a writer.

I was also reminded, reading this, of how subversive Louisa May Alcott could be. Laurence College is integrated, accepting African American students, including freed people from the south. It is also co-ed, and the women students are there to learn. The point is made more than once that women can study just as hard and as well as men. Many of the women students are preparing for careers - some out of necessity, and others by choice. While Alcott gave less attention to the girls who first appeared in Little Men, we get one of my favorites, the harum-scarum Nan, now studying to be a doctor and determined to remain a spinster. Meg's daughter Daisy, the rather bland twin sister of Demi, is set for marriage and domesticity, but her younger sister Josie is determined on a career as an actress. Amy and Laurie's daughter Bess, who will never have to earn a living, wants to be a sculptor. In the last chapter, Alcott tells us that Nan, Josie and Bess all achieve their goals. Alcott was an active worker for women's suffrage, organizing the women of Concord to vote in local elections. Nan argues for women's suffrage, and Demi supports her, pointing out that Meg, Jo and Amy vote in every election. And we also get the wild and wicked Dan, who can't settle down to anything but finally decides to dedicate himself to working among Native Americans. There is a fair bit of "noble savage" stereotyping, but Alcott also has strong words for the way "those poor devils" have been treated by the government, "cheated out of everything, and waiting patiently, after being driven from their own land to places where nothing will grow." It reminded me of her daring to marry the Boston blue-blood Annabel in the Eight Cousins books to a Chinese merchant, in the face of rampant anti-Asian prejudice.

Speaking of Eight Cousins, Cheney's book includes a long letter from Alcott describing a Christmas spent helping Abby Gibbons distribute food and toys in New York City. It was written in December of 1875, a few months before she began working on A Rose in Bloom, which mentions Abby Gibbons's work. I do love tracing connections like this.

Two quick quotes, to end with. As a child, Alcott listed among her vices, "Love of cats." And in Jo's Boys, the chapter "Plays at Plumfield" begins, "As it is impossible for the humble historian of the March family to write a story without theatricals in it as for our dear Miss Yonge to get on with less than twelve or fourteen children in her interesting tales..." Having finally read Our Dear Miss Yonge, I appreciate the truth of that statement! (It does make me wonder too if Alcott ever read Anthony Trollope - she knew his dear platonic friend Kate Field.)

Sunday miscellany: Bookish connections, reading & baking, and a Christmas present

Good morning from a stormy Houston! Our ridiculous winter heat wave has finally broken, but the cold front is bringing us some treacherous weather. We're under a tornado watch, and with the terrible storms in the Dallas area, I'm keeping an ear out for the weather alerts. My sister in El Paso just sent a picture of her backyard deep in snow - not quite a white Christmas, but close.

I was amused by a couple of bookish connections in the last couple of days. First, in the Christmas chapters of Orley Farm, Anthony Trollope wrote about children "who could not hurry fast enough into the vortex of its dissipations." That made me laugh, not just with the eager children, but because it reminded me of Jane Austen. In gently critiquing the novel her niece Anna was writing, Austen wrote,

Devereaux Forester's being ruined by his Vanity is extremely good; but I wish you would not let him plunge into a "vortex of Dissipation". I do not object to the Thing, but I cannot bear the expression; - it is such thorough novel slang - and so old, that I dare say Adam met with it in the first novel he opened... (Letter, Sept. 28, 1814)

Trollope uses a similar phrase later in the book, "a vortex of ruin and misery."  He was a big fan of Austen's novels, but he died two years before the first edition of her letters was published, so he could not have seen this. I wonder what he would have thought of her advice to a fellow author.

Second, have you ever had a quotation from a book niggling away in the back of your mind?  It drives me crazy, until I can pin it down. From the massive biography of William Lloyd Garrison, I learned that Louisa May Alcott's father Bronson was a supporter of Garrison's work, and that her maternal uncle Samuel May was one of his closest friends and allies. I knew that there was at least one reference to Garrison in Alcott's novels, but I could not for the life of me track it down in the nine I own. I came across one completely by accident in Rose in Bloom, while trying to find a different quote about obligatory Christmas presents.

[Rose's] heroes ceased to be the world's favorites; and became such as Garrison fighting for his chosen people; Howe, restoring lost senses to the deaf, the dumb, the blind; Sumner, unbribable, when other men were bought and sold; and many a large-hearted woman working as quietly as Abby Gibbons, who for thirty years has made Christmas merry for two hundred little paupers in a city almshouse, beside saving Magdalens and teaching convicts.

Oh, the satisfaction of tracking down an elusive quote!  (Being more of a print reader, it never occurred to me until just now that I could easily search the digital editions of her books.)

Third, Melanie posted something from Little House on the Prairie in her Christmas greetings. It mentions little heart-shaped cakes that Mary and Laura find in their Christmas stockings, along with a tin cup and a stick of striped candy each. Every time I read about the Ingalls' family Christmases, I am struck by how grateful they were, for so little. Anyway, the mention of the cakes sent me off to find my copy of The Little House Cookbook, which includes a recipe for the cakes.

My copy has the same style cover as the books themselves - the familiar yellow.

Leafing through this, with all the familiar Garth Williams illustrations, has made me want to pull the books off the shelf again - and also bake some little cakes. They're made with lard, though, and I'm wondering if I can substitute shortening.

Finally, I only received one book for Christmas (not counting the one I bought myself, which hasn't arrived yet). It's one I've been wanting to read for a while:

I hope you are all enjoying the holiday weekend. Going back to work tomorrow will be a bit of shock, I have to say.

Eight cousins and how they grew

Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom, Louisa May Alcott

The box-set of Louisa May Alcott books that my mother gave me for my eighth birthday included Eight Cousins, so I feel like I grew up with Rose Campbell and her aunts, uncles, and especially those cousins.  I still have my worn-out copy with its broken spine, though years later I discovered it had been bowdlerized, like the set's edition of Little Women, so now I also own an unedited edition.  It was some time before I learned there was a sequel, Rose in Bloom, which I then checked out of the library on a regular basis.  It was even longer before I finally had my own copy.  (Oh, those pre-internet days, when I couldn't just click on a website and buy books from across the centuries and around the world.)  I usually read both these books together now, since as I have mentioned before, I love sequels and series.

Eight Cousins introduces us to thirteen-year-old Rose Campbell, recently orphaned after the death of her father.  She has been brought to live with her great-aunts while she awaits the arrival of her new guardian, her uncle Alec.  Living close on the "Aunt-Hill" are the families of four other Campbell brothers, who between them have produced seven sons, who rather overwhelm Rose at first.  Aunt Myra, a croaking old hypochondriac, produced the only other girl in the family, who died at a young age, possibly from her mother's constant doses of medicine.  Rose also finds a friend, later an adopted sister, in Phebe, a foundling who works as a maid for the great-aunts Plenty and Peace (who perfectly fit their names).

Rose in Bloom opens some five years after the first book.  Rose, Uncle Alec and Phebe are returning from three years in Europe.  Rose is about to turn twenty-one, when she will inherit a fortune from her late father.  As she settles back into the tight-knit web of family, she must decide what course her life will take, and what use she will make of her riches.  Phebe, trained as a singer in Europe, is determined to make her own way, especially after she falls in love with a young man whose family doesn't welcome a daughter-in-law out of the poor-house.  Meanwhile, the other cousins are also finding their own way into adulthood, careers, love and marriage.

I have read these books so often that they have really imprinted themselves on my literary DNA, so I am not the most objective reader.  I absolutely dote on Uncle Alec, one of the best foster-fathers in literary history.  Actually, I think he is something of a stand-in for Alcott herself, who raised one sister's daughter Lulu and adopted another's two sons.  As she wrote in Eight Cousins,

in this queer world of ours, fatherly and motherly hearts often beat warm and wise, in the breasts of bachelor uncles and maiden aunts; and it is my private opinion that these worthy creatures are a beautiful provision of nature for the cherishing of other people's children.  They certainly get great comfort out of it, and receive much innocent affection that otherwise would be lost.

She goes on to say, "Dr. Alec was one of these, and his big heart had room for every one of the eight cousins, especially orphaned Rose and afflicted Mac."  Mac is afflicted with eye problems threatening blindness, but also with a stern disciplinarian of a mother, Aunt Jane.  Uncle Alec's unconventional parenting is contrasted not just with Aunt Jane's, but also with Aunt Clara, who spoils her only son, the handsome but lazy Charlie.  Aunt Jessie, on the other hand, matches Uncle Alec in her warm heart and motherly wisdom, and the two often join forces not just with Rose but with the boys as well, and with Phebe.  They both want to raise strong, healthy, pure, and happy children.  They advocate rational dress especially for Rose.  In a very funny chapter, Aunt Clara tries to convert Rose over to the current fashions, while Dr. Alec stops just short of advocating Bloomerism.  His worst horror is reserved for the corsets Clara has smuggled in.  He wants Rose to romp and play, he forbids her to drink coffee or take Aunt Myra's tonics.  And his training continues even after she grows up.  In Rose in Bloom, he frets that she spends too much time in Society, and he all but censors her reading, warning her away from those dangerous yellow-backed French novels.  If he wasn't such a love, he might stray over into Aunt Jane territory.  These books are definitely on the moralizing end of the Alcott scale, with lessons in every chapter, usually coming from "Uncle Doctor."

They are unusual though in that Rose is Alcott's only wealthy heroine, at least in the young adult books.  The Campbells are one of the leading families in Boston society, descended from Scottish gentry (much play is made at one point of "our blessed ancestress Lady Margret" when one of the cousins wants to marry unsuitably).  Their riches come from generations of sea trading, which still employs three of the uncles (and in the end Archie, the eldest of the cousins).  Among Alcott's other heroines, Amy in Little Women marries money, but only after bravely facing poverty as a child.  Fanny in An Old-Fashioned Girl is rich, though she is not the heroine, and in the second half of the book her father loses the family fortune, and she has to learn from Polly how to be happy in poverty (as she wasn't in wealth).  Here Rose has to learn to manage her money, from the first book where Dr. Alec teaches her to balance accounts, to the second where she inherits her fortune.  She decides to make philanthropy her life's work, bravely facing not just society's ridicule but even the teasing of her own family.  One of her projects, two houses of rent-controlled apartments "for poor but respectable women" might have benefited Alcott's other heroines - both Jo and Polly live in boarding or rooming houses.  At the same time, Rose learns that her wealth, combined with her beauty, draws fortune-hunters and acquaintances hanging out for rich presents. She also has to face three aunts, hoping to win her for a daughter-in-law.  Today we tend to be squeamish about first cousins marrying, but it doesn't seem to worry Alcott or her characters here.

In contrast to Rose and her fortune, we have Phebe the foundling.  Her story is typical for an Alcott heroine.  She is hard-working, determined to get an education, grateful for favors, always cheerful, and gifted with music.  When her education and training as a singer are complete, she insists on making her own way, and trying to pay Uncle Alec and Rose back in some way for all they have given her.  She is too proud to accept her lover against his family's wishes, but of course in the end she proves her worth and is welcomed with open arms.

I also have to mention an even more unconventional match.  The Campbells' ships trade with China, and in the first book Rose visits the warehouses full of teas, porcelain, and other exotic merchandise.  There she meets Fun See, a young Chinese merchant who has come to the United States to learn English with the trade.  Alcott presents him in stereotypical terms, "from his junk-like shoes to the button on his pagoda hat . . . altogether a highly satisfactory Chinaman."  Rose keeps expecting him to present her with "a roasted rat, [or] a stewed puppy..."  However, in the second book, See falls in love with Rose's friend Annabel Bliss, and she with him.  Rose, still obsessed with the Chinese diet, points out that when they move to China, Annabel will have "to order rats, puppies, and bird'-nest soup for dinner."  Everyone accepts the match, which as a younger reader I simply took in stride. Now, however, knowing about the virulent anti-Chinese sentiment in America at the time Alcott was writing, I am struck by her audacity in having a young American woman, from a good Boston family, marry a member of a despised minority, a man of another race.  I do wonder how Alcott's readers, or their parents, reacted to this in 1876.  Perhaps the comical way she presents Fun See - and Annabel, who like her intended is short and plump - made the match palatable.  I don't think she could have gotten away with a young merchant from Africa.

There is so much more to say about these books - Cousin Mac's love for Emerson, Cousin Charlie's sad fate, Rose's lessons in housekeeping, the visits to "Cosey Corner" in Maine - but this post is long enough already.  They are just such fun, and I expect I will be reading them still when I am as old as Aunt Plenty.

Louisa May Alcott's short stories

A Garland for Girls, Louisa May Alcott

While I suffer occasional crises of conscience about the size of my TBR stacks, I still regret the books that got away - the ones that in a temporary fit of reform I talked myself out of buying, only to realize my mistake later.  I am still haunted by the copy of Edward R. Murrow's This is London that I left on the library sale shelves.  Sometimes these books turn up again, when I least expect them, like a bit of bookish lagniappe.  This book of short stories by Louisa May Alcott was one I had put back on the shelf and regretted ever since.  Though I had downloaded an e-version, I was very pleased to find the actual book again recently.  I don't know if it was looking for fictional Fourth of July celebrations, or maybe a stressful week, but I suddenly found myself in the mood for Alcott.

This book was published in 1887, the year before she died.  It includes seven stories, as the title suggests, all about girls, and each with some flower theme. Though I have been reading Alcott's books for almost 40 years now, I have never read any of her short stories before.  I have found that not all novelists can write short fiction.  So I was pleasantly surprised at these stories, which seem like concentrated essence of Alcott.  They have that unmistakable authorial voice, natural and colloquial, sometimes sentimental, sometimes didactic.  The stories have familiar elements of Alcott, young women like the March sisters or Polly Milton struggling against adversity, rich girls like Rose Campbell trying share their blessings.  There are sudden illnesses, reversals of fortune, marriage proposals, budding writers, country girls and city sophisticates, loving mothers and sisters.  The stories have all the pleasures and virtues of Alcott's writing, as well as some of its faults.  The moralizing definitely gets rather heavy-handed in some of the stories, particularly the drippy "Little Button-Rose," about a winsome poppet named Rosamond who goes to stay with elderly great aunts and a flighty cousin while her parents are traveling.  Naturally she becomes a ray of sunshine in the home, making peace with a crotchety old neighbor before falling ill with scarlet fever (due to the selfishness of the flighty cousin).

Two of the stories were particularly interesting to me.  In "Pansies," three girls are spending a summer holiday with Mrs. Warburton, "a delightful old lady" who "loved young people, and each summer invited parties of them to enjoy the delights of her beautiful country home, where she lived alone."  On a rainy morning, the girls gather in the library, reveling like Jo March in its riches, discussing what they are reading and debating what makes a good book.  Mrs. Warburton is drawn into the discussion, and I think she speaks for Alcott here.  One of the girls, Carrie, is chided for preferring Ouida to George Eliot or Charlotte Yonge.   Their hostess gives her highest praise to a book I'd never heard of, Thaddeus of Warsaw by Jane Porter, which I learn from Google was published in 1803 and is considered one of the earliest examples of historical fiction. Sir Walter Scott also comes in for praise, as does Maria Edgeworth.  Henry James is dismissed as even duller than Samuel Richardson, "with his everlasting stories, full of people who talk a great deal and amount to nothing."  Considering the kind of books that Alcott wrote, it's a little disconcerting to hear her characters dismiss novels about "people as they are, for that we know, and are all sufficiently commonplace ourselves, to be the better for a nobler and wider view of life and men than any we are apt to get. . . "  Apparently historical fiction will provide that nobler and wider view.  I fear Mrs. Warburton would not approve of my reading, since she warns against "promiscuous novel-reading," advising the girls not to "be greedy, and read too much."  She also cautions against "book-loving lassies [who] have a mania for trying to read everything, and dip into works far beyond their power."

I very much enjoyed "Poppies and Wheat," the story of a European tour like Amy's in Little Women.  Ethel Amory, a spoiled seventeen-year-old, is traveling with family friends, Professor and Mrs. Homer.  She is accompanied not by the French maid that she wanted, but by a chaperone, Jenny Bassett, a few years older than herself, a governess who welcomes the break from teaching and the opportunity to travel.  In this take on the Ant and the Grasshopper, as the party travels through Ireland and Britain before moving on to the Continent, Ethel frivols away with light-hearted friends, shopping and playing.  Jenny, on the other hand, reads and studies, under the guidance of the Homers.  In the end, she is rewarded with an invitation to join them in Italy for the winter, while Ethel, realizing how she has wasted her time, sails sadly for home, her trunks full of cheap tarnished trinkets.

After so many years of reading and re-reading Louisa May Alcott, it was a pleasure to come across a new-to-me book of hers.  I will be keeping an eye out for more of her short stories.  With all due respect for Mrs. Warburton, I think I'll also look for Ouida's novels.  I see several are available through Project Gutenberg.

The Fourth of July in fiction

I was sitting in traffic this morning, looking forward to the July 4th holiday coming up (even though going back to work on Friday will feel a little weird), and I started thinking about some of my favorite fictional Fourths.  The ones I came up with are all from children's books, the best-loved ones that are still on my shelves:

My all-time favorite is probably in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little Town on the Prairie.  De Smet, the little town on the Dakota prairies, has survived the Long Winter and is growing daily as new settlers arrive to stake their claims.  It is prosperous enough to have a celebration on the Fourth, though Ma is disappointed that it will just feature horse-racing, not the picnic with the traditional fried chicken that she would prefer.  Laura and Carrie are thrilled to go with Pa, to enjoy fireworks, eat pickled herring, listen to a reading of the Declaration of Independence (which they all know by heart, of course), introduce Carrie to lemonade, and watch that young Wilder boy win a buggy race with his team of perfectly-matched Morgans (which they win in spite of the heavy peddlar's wagon they're pulling).  In Farmer Boy, set ten years earlier, Almanzo's whole family goes to the Fourth celebrations in the town of Malone.  There he is taunted by his mean cousin Frank because he doesn't have a nickel to buy lemonade.  When he asks his father for the money, he gets a homily on hard work, but he is rewarded in the end with a half-dollar.  Surprisingly for Farmer Boy, which I've seen described as food porn, there is no luscious description of the picnic lunch that Mother packed (reading this book always leaves me hungry and craving apple pie, which they eat for breakfast).

The only Fourth I can remember in Louisa May Alcott's books is in Eight Cousins.  Rose and Uncle Alec are spending a delightful holiday camping with the boys and the perfect Aunt, Jessie, on Campbell's Island.  But Rose decides to return to the aunts' house and send Phoebe, her friend the family's maid-of-all-work, off to the Island to enjoy a rare holiday on the Fourth.  She has to trick everyone, including Phoebe, to accomplish this.  While she nobly enjoys "a quiet, busy day, helping Debby, waiting on Aunt Peace, and steadily resisting Aunt Plenty's attempts to send her back to the happy island," everyone else on the "happy island" is fretting because she isn't there, particularly Phoebe, who doesn't enjoy her holiday at all.  Kindly Uncle Mac finally drags her out of her slight martyr complex to watch the fireworks.

I also like the Fourth of July with Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind-Family, who celebrate on New York's East Side in the early 1900s.  All the familiar elements are there - flags, bunting, firecrackers -  but the family feasts on potato kugel rather than hotdogs and apple pie.  (In the next chapter Mama takes the girls to Coney Island for the day, with a picnic lunch that includes limburger sandwiches.)

One of the very nicest Fourths takes place in Philadelphia in the 1820s, in Jane Flory's Faraway Dreams.  Maggy Mulligan has been rescued from the Seafarer's Safe Harbor, an orphan's home, by Miss Charlotte Sutcliffe, a milliner, who has taken her as an apprentice.  Miss Sutcliffe has a tiny workroom in a house shared with her sister, whose pompous husband and spoiled daughter hate having a relative in trade but depend on her earnings.  Miss Sutcliffe is an artist whose bonnets are much in demand, and Maggy slowly grows to love the beautiful fabrics and the creative work, as well as her gentle mistress.  After long summer days of hard work, Miss Sutcliffe declares that they will take a holiday on the Fourth and enjoy the whole day: "The prospect was exciting. Independence Day was celebrated all over the country, of course, but nowhere with more enthusiasm than in Philadelphia where the Declaration had been signed."  It is a day of pure delight, start to finish.  I loved this book as a child, checking it out over and over again from the library.  I was so happy to find a copy again a few years ago, and to find that it is still a joy to read.  Jane Flory wrote another of my favorite childhood books, One Hundred and Eight Bells, about a young Japanese girl growing up in Tokyo in the early 1960s.  It was my introduction to Japanese holidays like New Year's, which sounded particularly fun.  Sadly, her books have probably been purged from most libraries these days.

Any favorite fictional Fourths to add to the list?

Little Women and me

Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

As I've mentioned before, when I was eight or so my mother bought me a box set of Louisa May Alcott's novels. I never read them as obsessively as I did the Little House books, but I have probably read Little Women at least twenty times. I've known Meg, Jo, Beth & Amy almost all my life. As soon as I sit down and open the book, I am right back in their world and their lives. I wore out the original copy from the set, and it was only when I bought a replacement that I realized how heavily the copy I knew had been edited, to remove much of the moralizing, particularly about alcohol (like the discussion at Meg's wedding). When I re-read now, I come across scenes or lines that still seem new because they were missing from the familiar version that I read so often.

I know many people who never re-read a book, because "I've read it, I know what happens, why would I ever need to read it again?" I admit that I've read some books so many times that I feel like I've worn them out, but someday I'll open them up again. In general, though, a familiar book can seem quite different, because I'm reading it in a different context or from a new point of view. While I enjoyed the story of Little Women just as much this time around, I was also reading it in light of The Pilgrim's Progress, which I had just finished. No wonder that book felt so familiar. It is one of the major themes of the first part of Little Women, from the opening chapter, where the girls accept their mother's suggestion that her "little pilgrims" should "begin again, not in play, but in earnest, and see how far on you can get before father comes home." And of course in the chapters that follow their adventures echo Christian's, and there are constant references and allusions to Bunyan's work. My favorite was naming John Brooke "Great-Heart," as he prepares to escort Mrs. March to Washington, much as Bunyan's character guided Christiana and her children through their travels.

Perhaps because I was looking for Bunyan, I noticed for the first time how many other authors and books the March family reads. I first learned about Mary Elizabeth Braddon from Alcott, and I picked up Lady Audley's Secret in part because Fanny in An Old-Fashioned Girl curls up with it on a snowy day. In Little Women alone, there are references to Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Yonge, Shakespeare, Maria Edgeworth, Fanny Burney, Goethe, Boswell and Johnson, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Hannah More, and of course Alcott's beloved Charles Dickens. And if there is no overt reference to Jane Austen, I don't think I ever appreciated before how perfectly Aunt March plays Lady Catherine de Bourgh to Meg's Elizabeth, with John Brooke as a much sweeter but much poorer Darcy.

In my bowdlerized original version, it was never clear exactly what Marmee is doing in "the rooms," where she works "getting the boxes ready to go tomorrow" and "cutting out blue flannel jackets." Now I gloat over knowing that, like her real-life model Alcott's mother, Marmee works with the New England Women's Auxiliary Association, supporting the work of the Sanitary Commission in the Civil War. The Alcotts' cousin, Abigail May, was the head of the Boston branch and a tireless worker for the cause. She is mentioned twice in connection with the work in George Templeton Strong's Civil War diary (though he disapproved of her as a strong-minded woman). Likewise, I didn't know for years that the Fair where Amy organizes the flower booth is raising funds for work among the South's newly-emancipated slaves, nor that at the end of the book Plumfield accepts a mixed-race child, "a merry little quadroon, who could not be taken in elsewhere." I would love to know the reasoning behind these editorial decisions. It can't just have been about shortening the book.

It was also interesting to read this again after having read The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott (Joel Myerson & Daniel Shealy, editors). Through her letters, I felt like I got to know something of the models for the Marches. And in Amy's letters home from Europe, I could see echoes of Alcott's own, particularly from a trip abroad in 1870-1871, which took her to Vevey, where Amy and Laurie meet again. I was reminded too of Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad, with Amy and Flo bouncing in rapture from side to side of the railway carriage, and Uncle Carrol rushing out to buy his dog-skin gloves and be shaved à la mutton-chop, so he could fancy "that he looked like a true Briton."

I recently read about someone who loved Little Women as a child but found it unreadable as an adult, because of all the boring pilgrims' talk. I'm glad to find that I still love it, even all the moralizing, lectures and life-lessons. I think that's because, like Jo's unsensational but successful stories, "There is truth in it . . . humor and pathos make it alive."

Under the lilacs with Louisa May Alcott

Under the Lilacs, Louisa May Alcott

When I was 8 years old or so, my mother bought me a box set of Louisa May Alcott's books.  It included the Little Women trilogy, Eight Cousins, and Jack and Jill.  It was years before I discovered the sequel to Eight Cousins, A Rose in Bloom, or my favorite of Alcott's novels, An Old-Fashioned Girl.  It was also years before I discovered that the Nelson Doubleday editions in my set had been bowdlerized.  Cutting out all the temperance moralizing in Little Women, for example, makes for a much shorter book.

Along with the Little House books, I read Alcott's books over and over, and I still re-read them from time to time.  Lately I've also been exploring her dark side, with her "sensation" novels like A Long Fatal Love Chase.  But until now I had never read Under the Lilacs, though it was included in my box set.  I can't remember at this point if I tried it and didn't like it, or I just never got around to reading it.

Under the Lilacs was published in 1877, between A Rose in Bloom and Jack and Jill.  It opens with two little girls, Bab and Betty, arranging a tea party for their dolls (which may be one reason why I never got too far into the book).  The sisters, Bab the sharp and sometimes naughty one, and Betty the simpler and sweeter one, are types that appear in Alcott's other books: Jo and Beth in Little Women, Daisy and Nan in Little Men, Molly and Merry in Jack and Jill.  Alcott actually seems to prefer the Jo type, or at least she makes those characters more interesting.

The tea party is interrupted first with the arrival of a standard white poodle, and then a young boy, Ben.  Ben and his dog Sancho were once part of a circus act with his father, who went west on business some time ago and has never returned.  Ben and Sancho, having fled the circus, are on the road, but thieves have taken all their possessions and they are hungry and weary.  The girls take the two home to their mother, Mrs. Moss, who immediately takes Ben in, feeding and clothing him before arranging a job with the local squire.  Used to the excitement of life on the road, Ben, like the boys who come to Jo's school in Little Men, finds it hard to settle down to humdrum work.

The widowed Mrs. Moss is the caretaker of a large house in the village that has stood empty for years.   The sudden arrival of its owners, Miss Celia and her brother Thornton, becomes quite an occasion.  Miss Celia offers Ben a more congenial job that includes helping to care for her brother "Thorny," recovering from an illness that has left him weak and fretful (much like Mac in Eight Cousins).  Thorny finds amusement and occupation in teaching Ben, who has never attended school, while at the same time Ben helps him to a more active and healthy life.  Like Phebe in Eight Cousins, Ben becomes part of the family, both in the big house and in the village.

I gave my niece a copy of An Old-Fashioned Girl a few years ago, which my sister thought was too preachy.  It can't compare with Under the Lilacs, which like Jack and Jill is an improving story with strong moral lessons.  I don't think this is Alcott's best or most interesting book, but it is a very typical one, with echos of her other books, and I am glad to have finally read it.

A correction: I got one of the plot elements wrong.  Ben doesn't meet the sisters at their tea party, but a couple of days later, when ther mother takes them into the estate's old coach-house.  There they discover him camping out with Sancho, and Mrs. Moss shows her Jo-like motherly heart in deciding on the spot to take him home.