The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Kept down by Little Women?
Louisa May Alcott’s rediscovered essays suggest an intellect to equal Austen’s
When we were growing up, there were plenty of books we read on our own, and one of them, for me, was Little Women (1868). It was famous, it was for girls, and every library had lots of copies. It was easy to read, and the best part about it was that you could attach yourself to any of the four girls: Meg, the beauty; Jo, the independent one who likes writing; Beth, the sweetheart; or Amy, the youngest, who wants to be an artist. I was an only child, and I think, for me, reading Little Women was like observing one of our neighbouring families in more detail than was possible by visiting or peeking through the window (even though I liked to try). The other book series I enjoyed, the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and children’s horse books, had no literary pretensions, so I think Little Women also showed me not only how to depict different personalities in a way that was complex and understandable, but also what it felt like to be alive in a historic period that I knew was important.
When I was young, I knew nothing about the sad and dramatic life that Alcott herself endured, but now that I have been writing for many years, I can clearly see how her character and experiences meshed when she began to write. She wanted to be independent, she wanted to explore, she wanted to help her family, because her father, Bronson, or Amos Bronson, was well-meaning but unable to provide for them most of the time (let’s call him a prescient and intelligent vegetarian pre-hippie). He was also friends with three American writers who lived in their neighbourhood and who have now been immortalised by their own unique inventions: Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Because of these connections, Alcott would have understood that writing was a form of independent expression that challenges readers and also shows the author herself what she is really thinking and feeling. But owing to the financial ups and downs of her family, whatever Alcott wanted to express in her work often had to be put aside so that she could write something that made money.
Alcott hadn’t wanted to write a girls’ book – she thought that the essays and the books she was writing under her pen name, AM Barnard, were more interesting. But her editor prodded her and when she finally got started, she experienced something that I’ve also experienced – imagining the characters,
Her ‘Hospital Sketches’ is perhaps the most interesting depiction of war I have ever read
setting and plot of your book carries you away, and after a bit, and maybe a rough start, the words and ideas seem to flow out of you and onto the page. Who you are and what you know seeps into everything you write, even when you aren’t trying to make a statement. Little Women turned into a pleasure for Alcott, and sparked Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886). I can relate to that, too. Every writer knows that you can’t predict which of your works is going to make money and which is going to fade into the background. You always retain a different attachment to each one, but as your career progresses, you learn more and more about how your readers feel by understanding which ones they prefer.
I think that, for readers, one of the most fascinating things about Little Women is what Alcott may be divulging about her own life. I think I’ve read it five times, most recently when I was asked to write an essay about one of the sisters. I chose Amy because I noticed things about her that I hadn’t noticed before – that in a lot of ways her life prefigured the modern lives of girls (school, ambition, bullying, relationships, coming up with her own way to navigate the complexities of her existence while her parents are overwhelmed with other issues). Certainly, Jo, with her literary ambitions, resembles Alcott herself, and Amy resembles her artist sister May. But the danger of allowing your friends or family into your work is that characters have to behave like characters – with good qualities and bad ones, in order to make the plot interesting. The thing is, as hard as you try to keep them out of your work, because you are fond of them or loyal to them, they are what you know – and when I was writing my essay about Amy, I wondered if May ever read Little Women and was annoyed by the portrayal of Amy.
But maybe she was happy or amused to be included – a friend of mine appeared in my 1984 novel Duplicate Keys, as well as in the novels of the Last Hundred Years trilogy, and a short story or two. Part of the reason was that sometimes I had to include a soldier who had actually seen war. A few years ago, he said to me, with a laugh: “How many times are you going to kill me off?” I replied: “You write what you know,” but I should have said: “You write what you want to know.”
It seems to me that one of Alcott’s principal characteristics was her curiosity, and “Hospital Sketches”, an 1863 essay about her experiences during the Civil War, reveals that – she knows it’s dangerous, she knows that anything could happen, she knows she will see lots of things that are sad and maybe even traumatic, but she wants to help, and more than that, she wants to find out what there is to know. The way she writes about what she witnesses as a nurse is maybe the most idiosyncratic and interesting depiction of war that I have ever read – she is alert to the torments and also the absurdities of the day-to-day life of the hospital and how the patients and the nurses do their best to put up with them. She has a woman’s perspective; she doesn’t write about courage or strategy, victory or defeat, she writes about the peculiarities of survival. We know that her experience must have been traumatising, but her fascination with details keeps her going.
Alcott’s work, especially Little Women, is much loved, but it doesn’t gain her the respect that we accord to Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf or George Eliot. I think that her essays – a selection of which are being republished – show that she was at least as interesting and original in her way of looking at her world as these three are. She offers a view of the 19th century that we haven’t seen before, and that is extremely enlightening.