Despite repeated requests from editor Thomas Niles to write a story for girls, Louisa May Alcott (1832–88) resisted. She had already published poems, stories, pulp fiction, and books, among them her popular “Hospital Sketches,” an account of her short stint as a Civil War nurse in Washington. In her journal, she noted just after beginning what would become her most famous work, “I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters; but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.”
After finishing the book in 10 weeks, both Alcott and her editor initially judged her story to be “dull.” The rest of the world disagreed, and, today, “Little Women” is considered a classic, beloved by readers more than 150 years after its publication.
Louisa May Alcott, the author of “Little Women.” Public Domain
Beginnings
As a child, Alcott was encouraged to write by her mother. Her family’s near-impoverishment—her domineering father, Bronson Alcott, was prominent in the Transcendentalist movement but had difficulty earning a living—was another spur to her writing. She viewed it as a way of escape from poverty or, as she once wrote, “of tak[ing] Fate by the throat and shak[ing] a living out of her.”Because New England’s culture at that time and its flowering of books and bookshops, authors and publishers, Alcott was surrounded by a great number of literary tastemakers and influential books. Here are a few that helped shape her thinking and writing.
A Living Library
Of all American authors, Alcott surely had the most profound early education in literature. Her father’s friends included such luminaries as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller. Thoreau instructed Alcott in nature and biology, Emerson in literature, and on both of them she developed an adolescent crush.She also read their works. Later, for example, Alcott would write that “Emerson remained my ‘Master’ while he lived—as for many another—than he knew, by the simple beauty of his life, the truth and wisdom of his books.” When she was 17, she wrote in her journal “Reading Miss Bremmer and Hawthorne. ‘The Scarlet Letter’ is my favorite. Mother likes Miss B. better, as more wholesome. I fancy ‘lurid’ things if true and strong also.”
Soon she was writing what were then called “sensational books,” which we today might describe as gothic tales.
The Old Books
In 1885, to librarian Viola Price, Alcott remarked, “I read no modern fiction. It seems poor stuff when one can have the best of the old writers.”
This penchant for classic authors revealed itself in Alcott much earlier. At 19, she compiled a list of “books I like,” writing down such works as Carlyle’s “French Revolution“ and ”Miscellanies” and “Hero and Hero Worship,” “Plutarch’s Lives,” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”
This inventory should astound not only today’s college sophomores but the rest of us. Its profundity, especially when we bear in mind that Alcott was meanwhile working at odd jobs to help keep the family’s finances afloat, is remarkable.
Title page of "The French Revolution" by Thomas Carlyle, first English edition, only printing (1837). Public Domain
The plays of Shakespeare, Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” and other classics are also mentioned in her letters and journal. Two near contemporaries, Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, were favorites as well as fairy tales. She also liked to read aloud from “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”
‘My Chief Idol’
Illustration of Goethe as a classical poet by Fidus (1901). Public Domain
Alcott was a young teenager when she encountered one of the chief literary influences of her life, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The book that introduced her to the German writer was Bettina von Arnim’s “Goethe’s Correspondence With a Child,” a fictionalized account of a girl’s adolescent infatuation with writer:
“About that time, in browsing over Mr. Emerson’s library, I found Goethe’s ‘Correspondence With a Child,’ and at once was fired with a desire to be a Bettine, making my father’s friend [EMERSON] my Goethe. So I wrote letters to him, but never sent them; sat in a tall cherry-tree at midnight, singing to the moon till the owls scared me to bed; left wild flowers on the doorstep of my ‘Master,’ and sung Mignon’s song under his window in very bad German.”
At age 45, looking back at her childhood journal, Alcott wrote of this entry that it was her “first taste of Goethe.” Having read “Wilhelm Meister” three years later, a book significantly bestowed on her by Emerson, she then noted “from that day Goethe ha[d] been my chief idol.”
To make the German writer Goethe her literary star seems an odd choice for a bred-in-the-bone American writer like Louisa Alcott, yet those of us who were childhood readers may identify with Alcott’s passion as we recollect the stories that stoked the flames of our own imaginations.
In “Jo’s Boys,” one of the sequels to “Little Women,” Alcott sums up what books meant to her: “Take some books and read; that’s an immense help; and books are always good company if you have the right sort.”
What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to [email protected]
