Louisa as Scribbler

In this episode, we pull back the curtain to take a peek at Louisa at her writing desk. We will trace the development of her writing style, the desires that pushed her to write, and the arc of her professional career.

Welcome to Let Genius Burn, a podcast series about the life and legacy of Louisa May Alcott. I’m Jill Fuller and I’m Jamie Burgess. Thank you for joining us for Episode 4:….“Louisa As Scribbler.” In today’s episode, we pull back the curtain to take a peek at Louisa at her writing desk. We will trace the development of her writing style, the desires that pushed her to write, and the arc of her professional career.

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The house is hushed, the bedroom door upstairs on the right is closed. Inside her room, Louisa sits at her half-circle desk, a homemade shawl wrapped around her shoulders, a green silk cap jammed crookedly onto the thick brown hair falling down her back. When you look at her, notice her ink-stained, calloused fingers, the words blooming out from her pen as it moves rapidly across each clean sheet of paper. Step around the manuscripts strewn across the floor, and over the tray of tea and food her mother has left, untouched and cold. I want you to know that her leg is flaring with pain, but that she ignores it. I want you to know that her thumb is permanently crippled from pressing her pen too hard on the page but still she writes. She will go out this evening for her daily jog, but otherwise she will not leave her room today. She is living inside the story she’s creating, listening to her characters, unaware of anything outside the scenes she sees in her head. This isn’t an Instagram photo, a romanticized portrait of a writer, coffee cup steaming in amber light falling across a perfectly positioned page. This is gritty, physical work, at a time when women are supposed to do anything but. As a writer, Louisa threw herself onto her pen and the page like a battering-ram, determined to wrest financial security, personal escape, and self-expression from her writing.

Louisa called it her “vortex,” this complete abandon of body and mind to her creative work. At her desk, Louisa was free to descend into an abyss outside her body, outside her daily life. “To describe her creative process, Louisa used the imagery of a whirlpool, with its connotations of downward spiral and chaos,” writes biographer John Matteson. Within the vortex, she admitted she was “quite possessed by my work.” Oblivious to tiredness or hunger, Louisa’s body turned into a machine that allowed her to write non-stop until the work was finished. It could be days or weeks until she resurfaced, pale, trembling, and exhausted. Only then did her body respond to the punishment her writing had inflicted. "After three weeks of it I found that my mind was too rampant for my body, as my head was dizzy, legs shaky, and no sleep would come," she mused after working on her first full novel, Moods, in 1861. “Louisa’s headlong rushes into creativity, followed by periods of irritable despondency,” Matteson continues, “seem to have been the pattern of activity that she found most conducive to her art.”

Louisa depended on the vortex to create, but the lack of time and freedom to do so was a source of frustration for her. Due to the Alcott’s precarious financial situation, Louisa worked a variety of menial jobs in her teens and twenties to bring much-needed cash into the household. In Boston in 1855, she wrote in her journal, “Began another tale, but found little time to work on it, with [teaching] school, sewing, and house-work.” Louisa craved long stretches of solitude and quiet for her work to flow and savored any opportunity to enter her vortex. “I am in my little room,” she wrote from Boston in 1868, “spending busy, happy days, because I have quiet, freedom, work enough, and strength to do it.” When responsibilities came knocking, she (reluctantly) put her pen aside to let her stories simmer until she had time to get them out onto the page. “You ask what I am writing,” she penned in a letter to her sister Anna in 1860. “Well, two books half done, nine stories simmering, and stacks of fairy stories moulding on the shelf. I can’t do much, as I have no time to get into a real good vortex…” She continued to feel this frustration into middle age, as she nursed her parents, financially supported Anna and her family, and adopted May’s daughter Lulu as her own. Her struggle to find personal freedom apart from her familial duties rings startlingly relevant today for many women writers and artists, especially those who also have day jobs, family to care for, and laundry and debts piling up. “It is with real sorrow I find her compelled by circumstances to leave her desk for the kitchen,” her mother confided, “but life is full of sacrifice for women.”

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We first see Louisa as a writer when she is 10 years old, living at Fruitlands, her father’s failing utopian community. The family is dressed in thin linen, subsisting only on apples, bread, and water. Winter is coming and barely enough harvest has been gathered to feed the community. As hunger and cold set in, and her parents’ marriage began to unravel, Louisa recorded her thoughts, feelings, hopes, and miseries in her journal, which became an outlet for the emotional, anxious girl trapped in an unstable living situation and facing an uncertain future. In 1850, Louisa wrote, “In looking over our journals, Father says, ‘Anna’s is about other people, Louisa’s about herself.’ That is true, for I don’t talk about myself; yet must always think of the willful, moody girl I try to manage, and in my journal I write of her to see how she gets on.” Besides her journal, Louisa also wrote poetry as birthday gifts for family members, fairy tales to entertain the neighbor children, and plays for her and her sisters to act out. Writing was a way to weather the storms inside and out; her mother observed that Louisa’s writing was a “safety valve” for her. She found inspiration for her writing in Nature and by closely observing human behavior as well as within her vibrant imagination. Even into adulthood, she created fantastical stories, from fairy tales to murder mysteries, that allowed her to have control over a situation and express her most volatile feelings by spilling them out onto paper. Writing, like the natural world around her, was a comfort and companion during difficult times, something to help her make sense of life and her own topsy-turvy inner landscape.

In her teens, Louisa’s writing shifted from merely a personal pursuit to a deliberate effort to write professionally. In the late 1840s and into the 1850s, the Alcott’s settled into the deepest poverty they would ever experience, moving to rented houses more than 20 times, never able to pay off their debts or find steady income. Desiring to help her family rise out of the miserable poverty they’d been in for most of her young life, she decided her writing would be the way out for all of them. Yet a successful writing career was far from inevitable. Most women at this time did not hold professions, as women were expected to marry and care for a household, refraining from participating in public life. Although writing was one of the few ways women could earn their own income, it was not encouraged. In 1830, Nathaniel Hawthorne (who would later be Louisa’s next-door neighbor in Concord) lambasted women writers, whom he deemed “a damned mob of scribbling women.” According to Lyndall Gordon, author of a biography on Emily Dickinson, Hawthorne was mocking sentimental fiction, but also attacking “the indelicacy of public utterance. A woman writer stripped herself ‘naked.’” Women who wanted to write serious fiction, including Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot, had to do so under male pseudonyms. Nor was writing a guarantee of prosperity and stability. While Louisa’s decision was fueled by a desire to provide for her family, it is noteworthy that this goal did not lead her to give up her scribbling to settle on a more stable profession or seek marriage prospects. In 1862, James T. Fields, the editor of The Atlantic, told her, “Stick to teaching; you can’t write,” which may have been as much of an admonition to stay in her sphere as it was a critique of her writing abilities. Ever headstrong, Louisa replied privately to Fields’ advice: “I won’t teach, I can write, and I’ll prove it.” From an early age, she boldly rejected the options open to women of her day- primarily marriage or teaching- to profit by her pen and live independently, a decision of astounding self-confidence and determination at a time when women were not expected to have a career. Throughout her life, she sacrificed time, finances, and opportunities to care for her loved ones, but she refused to set her writing aside as an impossibility. Instead, she resolved to make a career as a writer.

Before she wrote her most famous book Little Women in 1868 and 1869, Louisa spent decades honing her writing skills, finding her voice, and writing whatever she could to break into the market and create a career with her pen. Not limited in her imagination or propriety, Louisa began to write and publish a variety of stories in popular magazines and newspapers, from sentimental romances like “A Modern Cinderella” to salacious “blood and thunder” stories with strong female leads like “Behind A Mask, or A Woman’s Power.” She madly “scribbled,” as she called it, developing her writing style and voice with every piece she created, experimenting with style and form, piecing together an income with each submission like a patchwork quilt. Because her family needed the money, she was attuned to what the reading public demanded and wrote what would sell best. “They are easy to ‘compoze’,” she told her friend Alf Whitman in 1862 of a blood-and-thunder tale, “and are better paid than elaborate and moral works of Shakespeare.” She tracked how much she was paid for each piece in her journal, tallying up the amounts she had earned at the end of each year. “I am trying to turn my brains into money,” she stubbornly wrote to her father.

Louisa once admitted that “my natural ambition is for the lurid style. I indulge in gorgeous fancies and wish that I dared inscribe them upon my pages and set them before the public.” In fact, she did. Throughout the 1860s, alongside the romances, domestic dramas, and realistic war stories she sent out, Louisa published pulpy popular fiction in periodicals, what biographer Madeleine Stern called her “dark, delicious, delectable dramas.” Readers of Louisa’s thrillers in Flag of Our Union and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper turned pages and followed plotlines filled with murder, kidnapping, torture, drugs, and angry women struggling against the patriarchal rules of society. Yet Louisa did draw the line at attaching her name to the lurid stories. Many of her known thrillers were published under the male-sounding name of A.M. Barnard, thereby protecting her reputation as a respectable woman. A friend once recollected a conversation with Louisa where she mused on how family friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and her father would receive her shocking stories. “I shall always be a wretched victim to the respectable traditions of Concord,” she concluded. Though later she would publicly deem her popular fiction “rubbish,” through them, she gained essential “narrative powers” as well as “emotional catharsis,” according to biographer Madeleine Stern. Louisa herself had an eye on growing as a writer with each piece she wrote in her early career in the 1850s and 1860s. In 1854, she published her first book, a collection of fairy stories titled Flower Fables, which had a small print run of 1600 copies. She presented a copy to her mother for Christmas that year, with a note that, instead of crowing over her first success, reflected her determination to further develop her writing: “I hope to pass in time from fairies and fables to men and realities.”

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Washington, D.C., Union Hotel Hospital, December 1862, age 30. Whenever she can spare a moment, Louisa, now a nurse for the United States army, writes letters home. While poultices cool, soldiers sleep fitfully, and food for her patients heats up, Louisa snatches a few minutes “on stairs, in window seats and other sequestered spots favorable to literary inspiration” to jot down her impressions of the Union Hotel Hospital and describe her nursing work for her family waiting for word back in Concord, Massachusetts. It is mid-way through the Civil War and Louisa has joined the war effort to serve the wounded soldiers flooding into the nation’s capital from the Fredericksburg battlefield. Though she had no way of knowing it, her dispatches home would lead to a significant turning point in her writing career, setting the stage for her most famous work.

Her nursing career ended only six weeks after it began when she contracted typhoid fever in January 1863 and was forced to return home. By April, she was strong enough to start compiling her letters home into a series of essays called “Hospital Sketches,” which were published in the periodical, the Boston Commonwealth, in May and then compiled into book form in August. The book told the story of Tribulation Periwinkle, a young woman leaving home for the first time to work as a Union army nurse. “Trib” is Louisa’s literary alter ego, years before Jo March ever came to be. During her time as a nurse, Tribulation records her experiences at the hospital with both wit and deep emotion as she passes from innocence to worldliness, witnessing the horror and tragedy of war firsthand, while still maintaining positivity and a sense of self-deprecating humor. The conversational first-person writing, genuine emotion, and realistic descriptions and characters established Louisa as an extremely talented writer, capable of recognizing and expressing the humor and tragedy of reality. Hospital Sketches became her first major success, lauded by critics and snapped up by the reading public.

Her mother, Abigail, astute as always about her second-born daughter, wrote, “This success will embolden her, I hope, to greater effort. Sure am I [that] success awaits some special achievement…I predict that she does not fail to establish a stable position among authorships.” Abigail was right- Hospital Sketches opened the door of opportunity for Louisa. Within months, her novel Moods had been accepted for publication and several editors were asking for stories. She was finally able to write professionally; after being offered a teaching position, she gleefully responded, “Now my time is fully occupied by my pen and I find story writing not only pleasanter than teaching but far more profitable.” Although she had made good money before Hospital Sketches came out, her earnings had been piecemeal and unpredictable as she cast her net out to publications. Now, editors were seeking her out and requesting her writing- a dream come true for Louisa. She wasn’t rich by any means and hadn’t abandoned her experimentation or her popular fiction; in fact, most of her “blood-and-thunder” tales were written and published in the mid-to late-1860s, after the success of Hospital Sketches; the success of her book may have helped contribute to her desire to use the A.M. Barnard pseudonym for her shocking thrillers. Yet her letters and journals at this time show a writer who has finally gained the self-confident ease of a professional who no longer has to “beg her wares,” as she put it.

A few years later, in 1868, a publisher asked Louisa to compose “a girls’ story.” This request, unbeknownst to Louisa, would make her name and her fortune. Louisa wasn’t eager to break into the market of juvenile literature, nor did she think she could adequately fulfill the request. In her journal, she wrote, “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.” However, she never missed an opportunity to earn a paycheck. After six weeks in her vortex, Louisa ended up creating an immortal piece of literature and fictional characters as real as the family they were based on. Within Little Women we find the legacy of Hospital Sketches; both works demonstrate that Louisa’s most successful writing came from material drawn from life, from her memories, from her observations and critiques. Years later, Louisa herself mused, “…the Sketches never made much money, but showed me ‘my style’, and taking the hint I went where glory waited me.”

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“There is no easy road to successful authorship,” Louisa wrote to an aspiring writer in the late 1870s. “It has to be earned by long and patient labor, many disappointments, uncertainties and trials.” Louisa didn’t believe in genius that sparked like a lightning flash. For her, “Genius is infinite patience.” Genius occurred when a writer put in the hours, learned through trial and error, and experimented with style to develop one’s own. Louisa had done just that, developing her professionalism over decades of work. Louisa’s writing after Little Women heralded financial and professional success, but less personal fulfillment. Louisa’s letters and journals reveal a successful but discouraged writer, writing more for security than personal desire or self-expression. Because of Little Women, Stern wrote, “her market would widen, but her themes would narrow.” After 1868, Louisa wrote almost exclusively for the juvenile market for twenty years. “Though I do not enjoy writing ‘moral tales’ for the young, I do it because it pays well,” she commented. Her productivity after 1868, when part 1 of Little Women was published, was astonishing; in 20 years, she wrote and published 10 books and dozens of short stories, primarily in children’s literature. These included two more books in the Little Women series: Little Men and Jo’s Boys, as well as other children’s titles and series, such as An Old-fashioned Girl, Eight Cousins, and Rose in Bloom. While her niche was firmly established, Louisa did occasionally break away from children’s books to publish another novel, called Work, and several stories for adults. “Transcendental Wild Oats” is a barely-veiled autobiography about her family’s experience founding a utopian community when she was a child; the novelette “A Modern Mephistopheles,” published in 1877, contained the dark overtones and murderous plot devices of her earlier thrillers. In her journal, Louisa wrote, “Enjoyed doing it, being tired of providing moral pap for the young.” The novelette had been written as part of a No-Name Series, in which famous authors wrote a story anonymously. After its publication, Louisa delighted in the guessing surrounding it. “I enjoy the fun,” she said, “especially when friends say, ‘I know you didn’t write it, for you can’t hide your peculiar style.” Little did they know how well she’d honed that style a decade before.

Yet her physically demanding writing routine took a toll as her health declined in the 1870s and 1880s, most likely due to the calomel she had received for treatment after her typhoid fever. She resisted entering a vortex, fearing a breakdown in her health. When she tried to write, her body often rebelled. “Began again on ‘Jo’s Boys,’ she wrote in her journal in 1884. “Wrote two hours for three days, then had a violent attack of vertigo and was ill for a week. Head won't bear work yet.” While earlier in her life, she had written rapidly, finishing Moods in a month and Little Women in six weeks, writing projects took her longer as the pain in her body increased. Jo’s Boys, her last full-length novel, took her eight years to complete. Yet even in the midst of severe pain, writing was an outlet for her. Thinking about the plot of Jo’s Boys while sick in bed in 1886, she told her doctor “he had better let me get the ideas out then I could rest.” The doctor agreed, saying “Rebellious brains must be attended to or trouble comes.” Louisa’s instinct was correct; her head soon felt better and she “had some pleasant hours when I forgot my body and lived in my mind.”

Her declining health and the deaths of her mother and sisters “leave me no heart for cheerful fiction,” she wrote to a friend in 1880. Interestingly, Louisa did not explore her griefs and personal challenges through her writing by turning those “sad facts” into literature, as she had done when she was younger. Professionally, she had difficulty breaking away from juvenile literature. Since she was established as a children’s writer, the reading public expected her to produce more charming children’s books; with her sisters’ families and an aging father to support, it’s likely that children’s literature was too lucrative to break away from. Or maybe she was merely too tired and sick to attempt a creative project that would require her to go so deep inside herself. It is tempting to wonder what else Louisa may have produced or the professional risks she might have taken if circumstances had been different and the independence she had always craved had truly been hers.

From crafting jolly tales to journaling her worries and struggles, Louisa spent her life meeting herself on the page. Writing, she said, “is my salvation when disappointment or weariness burden and darken my soul…” Through introspection and observation, she explored herself and the world she struggled to fit into, while her vivid imagination allowed her to express what was unvoiced inside of her. Though writing physically taxed her body, it gave her mind a freedom she always craved. Through determination, hard work, and stubborn willpower, her passion became a doorway into an independent career, as she depended on her mind, talents, and voice to support the ones she loved and developed into a true professional with a pulse on the reading public’s tastes. Yet her career also limited her creativity, becoming a burden as well as a gift. Through her writing, Louisa strove to prove her existence to herself, to claim a right to her thoughts and desires in a world that expected women to stay silent. Fortunately, her words still exist for us today, as luminous as ever.

Stay tuned for our conversation but first… In the spirit of the Alcott’s strong beliefs and actions for social justice, each week we are highlighting an organization we believe in and asking for your support. For this episode, we are supporting the UW Odyssey Project, which offers University of Wisconsin-Madison humanities classes for adult students facing economic barriers to college. The UW-Madison Odyssey Project takes a whole family approach to breaking the cycle of generational poverty through access to education, giving adult and youth learners a voice, and increasing confidence through reading, writing, and speaking. Please consider donating to the Odyssey Project today. You can find more information and the links to the UW Odyssey Project in the show notes and on our website, letgeniusburn.com. Thank you!

We’ll see you next week for Episode 5: Louisa As Activist. You can chat or get in touch with us on Instagram and Facebook @letgeniusburn. Before we go, don’t forget to check out and donate to the UW Odyssey Project this week. You can find information and links to donate in the show notes or on our website, letgeniusburn.com, where you can also find more information about Louisa and her world on our website at www.letgeniusburn.com.

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Louisa as Scribbler

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