“Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it,” Louisa May Alcott confided to her journal in 1868, while writing Little Women. Deemed more than “interesting,” the semiautobiographical novel became a classic in Alcott’s lifetime and remains so today. Each year some thirty-five thousand fans descend on Orchard House—the place in Concord, Massachusetts, where Alcott wrote and set her bestseller—looking to imagine the lives of the March girls, as well as that of their creator. Suffice it to say that Alcott has never lacked for devotees, especially among biographers. In this vein comes Susan Cheever’s Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography, which looks at the way in which Alcott walked the fine line between domestic expectations and artistic aspirations, sketching the story of how a tomboy who “never liked girls” became a beloved author of literature for young women, and by extension a feminist role model.
Cheever is no stranger to the Concord literary scene. In American Bloomsbury (2006) she delivered the intersecting lives and loves of the transcendentalists in short, gossipy vignettes. Alcott made frequent appearances in that book, typically mooning after her two secret crushes, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who also play a significant role in Cheever’s new book.
Louisa May, the second of four sisters, was born on November 29, 1832—which makes her a steady, hardworking Sagittarius, Cheever notes. She shared a birthday with her father, Bronson, whose inability to hold down a job kept the impoverished family continually on the move, back and forth between Concord and various other destinations, including an unsuccessful half year at Fruitlands, the family’s experiment in utopian living at a farm in Harvard, Massachusetts. Remarkably, the family moved twenty-nine times before settling at Orchard House, or “Apple Slump,” as Alcott dubbed it. To bring in money, Alcott began publishing melodramatic stories—“blood and thunder” tales, she called them—under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. These were successful and lucrative. After a brief, life-altering stint as a volunteer Civil War nurse in Washington, DC, Alcott began to make her mark as a writer, releasing the acclaimed Hospital Sketches (1863), based on letters she’d written home as a nurse, followed by the less popular novel) Moods (1864), about a love triangle involving two men strikingly similar to Emerson and Thoreau.
It was only at the urging of an editor that she grudgingly sat down to write Little Women. To her surprise, the book was a hit—so much so that in 1875, on attending the Women’s Congress in Syracuse, New York, Alcott despaired of being “kissed to death by gushing damsels.” She never tired of writing, though, and eventually published more than three hundred stories and a dozen novels. Her last journal entry before she died in 1888, at age fifty-five, was “write a little.” Alcott long battled a mysterious chronic illness, and death wasn’t a complete surprise, although spookily it came only days after her father passed away. “I am going up. Come with me,” he reportedly said to Alcott the last time they saw each other. Of this, Cheever sums up: “Death is a mystery, but life is filled with light and clarity.”
Anyone looking for a comprehensive portrait of Alcott’s life will be better off with John Matteson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning dual biography of Louisa May and her father, Eden’s Outcasts. Cheever’s “personal” approach leads to a free flow of thoughts and observations, some of which are so trite as to seem ironic. “We all grieve when we lose someone close; sadness is normal,” she comments on the death of Alcott’s sister Lizzie. “An engagement is supposed to be a happy occasion. Love makes the world go around,” she continues, in reference to the engagement of another sister, Anna.
In her more insightful moments, however, Cheever reflects on the process of writing—as she experiences it as a biographer and as she imagines it must have been for Alcott. It’s in these passages, when she shows herself grappling with the facts of and myths about Alcott’s life, that her asides add value. “Every biography has a story imposed on the facts by the biographer,” she writes, making a point that Alcott would have appreciated. Cheever’s own aim, as she admits, has been to tell “the story of how a woman finds her place in the world”—and in this she succeeds, providing a glimpse of how Alcott found her voice as a woman and a writer. Unfortunately, Cheever never finds her own voice in this book.
Erica Wetter is a graduate of the CUNY Writers’ Institute. Her writing has appeared in Orion, Bust, and The Georgia Review, among other publications.
