Louisa as Legacy

At the time of Louisa May Alcott's death, she was known to most as the "children's friend," an author of children's books and particularly books for girls. As time passed and scholars made the connection between Louisa May Alcott and the lurid thrillers she wrote under pen names, Louisa's legacy took on new dimensions. Today, we can appreciate Louisa May Alcott as the feminist and forward-thinking woman who is also the author of a famous novel called Little Women. This episode discusses Louisa's legacy and how it has changed over time.

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Transcript

 Welcome to Let Genius Burn, a podcast about the life and legacy of Louisa May Alcott. I’m Jamie Burgess, and I’m Jill Fuller. And today, we’re talking about the rediscovery of Louisa May Alcott as a literary author in the 21st century. This is Louisa as Legacy.

[Jill]

On a bitter Tuesday morning in March, Anna Alcott stood in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. She knew this place too well. She had stood in this very spot just two days before, saying goodbye to her father among his esteemed colleagues and friends. The dirt over his grave was still fresh. Now, it was time to say goodbye to Louisa who had died only two days after him. Only close friends and family were there, according to Louisa’s wishes for a simple service. Several lifelong friends paid tribute, and poems were spoken over her coffin- the sonnet “Duty’s Faithful Child” that Bronson had once written for her, and one titled “Transfiguration” that Louisa herself had penned after her mother’s death, with lines that read: 

“But ere the sense of loss our hearts had wrung

A miracle was wrought;

And swift as happy thought

She lived again -- brave, beautiful, and young.”

But for Anna, Louisa was gone and with it, the family of her childhood. Anna had lost her husband years before, but her two sons were with her, as was her youngest sister May’s child, whom they called Lulu. Lulu was born in France, but came to live with the Alcotts 8 years before. She was nine now, and Anna was in her mid-fifties. She knew the girl would now go back to live with her father in Switzerland, and the thought of losing more family was difficult to bear.

For two decades, Louisa’s health had suffered. Her later journals detail her attempts at recovery, her hopes on her good days, and her despair on her hardest ones. “Poorly…” she journaled on July 20, 1887. “Shut in on all sides by infirmities. Small dark world to live in after so much freedom and strength all these years. Ah me!” In 1887, at the age of 54, she spent the last year of her life in a respite home, trying homeopathic remedies for her many ills. She had left her beautiful mansion on the coveted Louisburg Square in Boston in order to find some calm and healing, but the doctor, Rhoda Lawrence, did not deliver the cure she needed.

Louisa believed her health issues stemmed from mercury poisoning contracted during her illness as a Civil War nurse, but her obituary in the New York Times cited spinal meningitis. In the years since her death, scholars have posited other possibilities. In the introduction to Louisa’s letters, biographer Madeleine Stern offered that perhaps Louisa was dying from intestinal cancer. Others have proposed a diagnosis of lupus or other auto-immune disorders. Whatever the cause, Louisa was essentially an invalid, barely able to write for an hour a day. She longed for the health and vitality of her youth, when she had so loved to run.

But the end of her life found her exhausted and spent. Her years of toil had taken their toll. She was no longer the vibrant Jo March of her stories. Jo was just a character in a book. Louisa was a woman, and at age 55, she looked like a woman of 70.

Louisa, fearing the end was near, had made her plans. In June 1887, 9 months before her death, she prepared her estate for her two nephews and her niece, adopting Anna’s younger son Johnny and writing instructions for renewing her copyrights, so Johnny could continue to manage her legacy for years to come. “What a funny muddle a little money makes!” she wrote to her publisher, Thomas Niles. To Johnny, she advised him to change his name after the adoption went through, writing, “If I pop off before its done you lose your copyrights, as you are not my heir till the Alcott is tagged on to the string which makes John a kite with a long tail.”

When Louisa May Alcott died on March 8, 1888, she was a beloved celebrity author of children’s stories. She was one of the richest and most popular writers of her day, her name synonymous with children’s literature. In the introduction to Little Women Abroad, Alcott scholar Daniel Shealy writes, “During the years 1868-1886, she earned, on book publications only, royalties of approximately $103,375, equivalent to over 2.25 million today. This did not include payments for poetry, stories, serials, or European editions of her works.” Louisa achieved the success of her wildest dreams. The money required an enormous amount of attention and management. Her writings--everything from her letters to her published works--would be in demand.

[Jamie]

In 1883, five years before Louisa’s death, another children’s author had arrived in Concord. Her name was Harriet Lothrop, though she wrote under the pen name Margaret Sidney. Lothrop and her husband, Daniel, owned a publishing company together, and Lothrop wrote the popular Pepper novels, such as the Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, first published in 1881. Two years later, the couple purchased the Wayside House, previously owned by both the Alcotts and the Hawthornes. They were no strangers to literary history, and they wanted to preserve the house and its legacy for future generations.

Next door to the Wayside House was the brown house- Orchard House- where the Alcotts had lived for nearly 20 years from 1858 to 1877. The Alcotts sold the house to William Torrey Harris, an educator who had taken a deep interest in Bronson Alcott’s career and teachings. Harris eventually became the U.S. Commissioner of Education, serving under four different U.S. presidents. He is credited with founding the first permanent, public kindergarten in America, following the legacy of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who was one of Bronson Alcott’s first assistants in his school. A generation later, the world was finally ready for Bronson’s ideas about education. They were welcomed readily when presented by William Torrey Harris.

But Harris didn’t live at the Orchard House, and by 1900, the old house was falling into disrepair. This didn’t stop the hordes of tourists who walked up the lawn to peek in the windows. Harriet Lothrop could see that interest in Louisa May Alcott’s life and work had not faded in the 12 years since Louisa’s death.

Lothrop purchased the Orchard House from William Torrey Harris in 1900 for the sale price of one dollar. Along with the Women’s Club of Concord, Harriet Lothrop raised funds to open Orchard House as a museum. It opened to the public in 1911. The Women’s Club became the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association, which owns and operates the museum today.

Anna’s sons, Fred and John, donated much of the original furniture, artwork, and belongings to the museum. The Women’s Club used photographs of the family in and around the house to place items where they had been in the Alcotts’ time. Visitation was consistent, proving Louisa’s fame. Louisa had been a private person; now the doors of her home were flung open to any paying member of the public.

On one end of the horsehair sofa at Orchard House, there is Louisa’s original “mood pillow,” which is referenced in Little Women. An oblong pillow of orange velvet, the legend says that when Louisa was in a good mood and accepting visitors, she propped the pillow upright. But when she was in her vortex, or not feeling well, she would lie the pillow on its side, and that meant to give her space. Visitors could peek through the front windows of the living room to read Louisa’s emotional state on her mood pillow before knocking on the door.

While it’s a quaint example, what the mood pillow really stands for is Louisa’s desire for privacy, without having to ask for it. People began to feel entitled to Louisa’s life, as though she was obligated to welcome and entertain them. They felt so at home in the pages of her books, they could not imagine that the author’s home was not as comfortable a place to settle in.

But Louisa was a private woman, and there is a certain irony to the way people have flocked to her since her books became so popular. Orchard House is not the only one of Louisa’s homes to have become a museum. In 1914, the red farmhouse at Fruitlands also opened to the public, purchased by art collector Clara Endicott Sears as a place to preserve the history of the Transcendentalist movement. Visitors can still see the rooms where Louisa and her family faced some of their darkest days, where Louisa took cold water baths and ate bread and water in the terribly cold winter of 1845. Fruitlands still stands as a testimony to the cost of an idea.

There are also many plaques dedicated to Louisa May Alcott throughout the eastern United States- at the place of her birth in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and at her final home on Pinckney Street in Beacon Hill. Even the marker in Spindle Hill, Connecticut, that commemorates the birthplace of Bronson Alcott mentions Louisa’s name in font as large as his own.

[Jill]

Louisa’s life has been of interest to scholars and the public since before her death. In 1884, she was featured in Louise Chandler Moulton’s book called Our Famous Women: The Lives and Deeds of Distinguished American Women of Our Time. Because Louisa was still alive and busily writing, Moulton said, “We are too near at hand for perspective, and too much under the spell of a sympathetic personality to be able to anticipate the judgments of posterity.” The piece would instead “gratify...the general curiosity about a general favorite.” Louisa herself crafted a short autobiographical story of her childhood in 1888, right before her death, and was published posthumously. The amusing anecdotes and detailed stories provide us with a welcome image of Louisa as a child, tramping over hill and dale, and plucking chicken feathers to decorate hats for dolls. In these few pages, Louisa tells stories we otherwise would not know, but the picture it paints leaves out the many challenges a young Louisa had lived and sorrowed through.

In 1888, the year of Louisa’s death, Ednah Dow Cheney published the first official biography of Louisa, called Louisa May Alcott: The Children’s Friend, as well as a heavily edited collection of Louisa’s journals and letters. Both books painted a picture of Louisa “minus the rough edges, as the genteel spinster Aunt Jo,” an image Louisa herself had created in her book Aunt Jo’s Scrapbag, according to Harriet Riesen in her biography The Woman Behind Little Women. Cheney’s biography, which left out key facts about the more difficult aspects of Louisa’s life and the depth of her writings, fed into the growing myth of Louisa May Alcott as simply “the Children’s Friend.” It’s not that Louisa wasn’t a friend to children. She certainly made her living by telling entertaining, lively, and realistic stories to a young audience. It’s that she was so much more than the children’s friend. The books for which she was best known—Little Women, Old-Fashioned Girl, Little Men—were a small part of her oeuvre, but at the time Cheney wrote her biography, the world had yet to know of more.

[Jamie]

In 1929, two women crossed paths in New York City for the first time. Their names were Madeleine Stern and Leona Rostenberg. According to the New York Times, “They regarded each other with mutual disdain: Ms. Stern was a lowly college freshman, and Ms. Rostenberg, a senior at New York University, was not Ivy League.” Then, they met again as graduate students at Columbia. They embarked together on a life of research and scholarship that changed how Louisa May Alcott was read and understood.

Through literary sleuthing, they discovered that Louisa May Alcott had written under pen names, and that the potboilers produced by Jo March in Little Women may have been more than fiction. Leona Rostenberg describes the deafening silence of Houghton Library at Harvard in the 1940s, when she went to learn more about Louisa’s pseudonym. While reading some letters from a publication entitled Flag of Our Union, she describes, “I immediately felt cold and hot and strangely faint.” She was on the path to discovering Louisa’s secret, nearly a century later. When she found the name—A.M. Barnard—she writes, “My wild warwhoop shattered the heavy silence of the manuscript room of Houghton Library.”

Rostenberg was not immediately allowed to read the Flag of Our Union, which was in safekeeping for the duration of World War II. But soon, Madeleine Stern was offered a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a biography of Louisa May Alcott and gained access to what was previously kept hidden. Her biography was published in 1950, and is still considered a definitive explanation of Louisa’s life.

Stern and Rostenberg continued to compile lists of Louisa’s thrillers. They eventually published a collection called Behind A Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott in 1975, which included several of the dark and twisted tales Louisa wrote before she made her fortune with Little Women. This was followed by other collections of Louisa’s thrillers, as well as articles and books of literary criticism and analysis on Louisa’s new, complex literary image.

Rostenberg referred to herself as “The Little Grandmother of the Alcott Revolution,” and indeed the discovery of the thrillers was a paradigm shift for the way that we read Louisa May Alcott’s works. Uncovering this darker, more lurid side to Louisa helped give depth to the saccharine lightness of her juvenile fiction, shifting/broadening her reputation during this period. The first two collections of thrillers were published during the second-wave feminism movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a time ripe for reassessment of an author  whose Little Women had begun to be rejected by the feminists of the day, with its “perfectly disgusting, banal, and craven service to male supremacy” as discussed in Stephanie Harrington’s 1973 article “Does Little Women Belittle Women?” Enter the thrillers and the flurry of scholarship that followed. “The work of Stern in identifying and recovering Alcott’s sensation fiction,” Judith Fetterley wrote in her 1979 essay “Little Women: Alcott’s Civil War, “provides an important context for the reading of Little Women and for an understanding of the implications of its style…” Even today, the four sisters and their creative, welcoming home draws readers into a world that is familiar and comforting, yet also challenges us with relevant and timely questions, as Rioux explores in her book. Questions about female independence and fulfillment, questions about what constitutes “female literature”, and “deep feelings of identification” can all be pulled from the text 150 years later. Far from straightforward, the book is contradictory in its themes and messages, continuing to spark debate over its relevance today. Opinions run strong over how Little Women reflects (and doesn’t reflect) our modern perspectives and ideals- a mark of truly great literature. The thrillers, and the publication in the 1990s of more of Louisa’s earlier works such as A Long, Fatal Love Chase and The Inheritance, paved the way for these new debates and interpretations of Louisa and her works. The thrillers proved that Louisa, as Stern wrote in 1985, “was a more complex human being and a more adventurous writer than had once been supposed…”

In the 1980s and 1990s, Madeleine Stern, Joel Myerson, and Daniel Shealy edited and published Louisa May Alcott’s letters and journals. These two collections gave both scholars and fans precious insight and entry into Louisa’s mind and experiences. Yet there are still unanswered questions and unknown details that can only be found in the original papers. Many of these originals, however, were burned by Louisa herself in her later years as she carefully curated what could be accessed by the future. Knowing the extent of her fame, Louisa was aware of the possibility that her papers would be read by others. She feared gossip more than anything, so she destroyed many of her writings, as well as her mother’s journals and letters, since they contained details about her marriage that Louisa did not feel was for public consumption. She had known the way the celebrity machine worked, and she was correct: her journals and papers live in the Houghton Library at Harvard where they are accessible to researchers with any interest in the Alcotts whatsoever while her edited journals and letters sit on shelves across the world. It would most likely have shocked Louisa to know her private thoughts and correspondence would be dissected again and again for insight to her psychology.

[Jill]

Louisa’s fame for the writing of Little Women has hardly wavered in the past 150 years as the book’s presence/ influence has spread from the page to the screen. The first two film adaptations of the book arrived in 1917 and 1918. Then, in 1933, Katharine Hepburn starred as Jo in the first full-length version with sound. Another version, in 1949, starred June Allison and used the same script as the Hepburn film.

Since then, there has been a film version of Little Women made for each generation. And when the book gets remade and rediscovered through film, Louisa’s works attract more attention. Visitation at her museums increases. She once again is launched into the forefront of the public imagination. And with each adaptation, her legacy changes slightly. In the 1994 version of Little Women, for example, the script contained references to Abigail Alcott’s philanthropic works. In the 2019 version directed by Greta Gerwig, Gerwig framed the whole story from Jo’s publisher’s office, blending the lines between fact and fiction, changing the way we see Jo and her story. These changes represent the changing values between generations of viewers. Nowhere is this more evident than in the scene where Jo turns down Laurie’s proposal. In the early versions of the movie, Jo and Laurie have a long talk beneath a tree. Jo cries and apologizes for not loving Laurie. She breaks both of their hearts, and it is unfathomable to the viewer that Jo might not love someone who is so obviously marry-able.

As feminism has evolved, so has the Jo-Laurie dynamic. Jo has gained strength in these scenes over time. In the 1994 version, we see a young Christian Bale forcefully kiss Jo while the two are standing at a fence, a scene that many viewers have found uncomfortable to watch. And in the 2018 PBS masterpiece version, Jo and Laurie walk and talk together, rather than staying still. Laurie is becoming the more emotive character, begging for Jo’s hand. Finally, Timothee Chalamet brought his signature emotional embodiment to the scene, with a physicality that hadn’t been seen before in other versions. He cries, tosses his hair, and shouts at Jo, spittle flying from his mouth. He is the one who is desperate for her. To me, at least, the evolution of this rejection shows that modern viewers are able to relate to Jo’s right to choose her husband rather than with her disappointment at not being the one.

Little Women continues to resonate with readers and artists. As Anne Boyd Rioux argues in her book Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, “just as Hemingway claimed that all of American literature (by men) came from Huck Finn, we can also say that much of American women’s literature has come from Little Women.” Famous authors across the world cite Jo March as their literary inspiration, including Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Zadie Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, Jhumpa Lahiri, Doris Lessing, and Patti Smith. By giving personalities and agency to young women, Louisa May Alcott effectively gave agency to generations of artists and writers, allowing women to see in the mirror of Little Women their own creative potential.

A less well-known, but no less important example, is Maggie Lukens. In December 1883 or January 1884, a young woman in Pennsylvania named Maggie Lukens sent a letter in the post, east to Massachusetts, to the home of famous author Louisa May Alcott. This wasn’t the first time Maggie had written to Ms. Alcott. In 1871, thirteen years before, Maggie and her four sisters, ranging in age from 17 to nine, had started on a literary endeavor inspired by their favorite book, Little Women. Motherless and living with their father in the small town of Brinton, Pennsylvania, the sisters had the idea of creating their own newspaper, based on the “Pickwick Portfolio” in Little Women, to pass the time and practice their writing skills. They called the paper “Little Things.” Within two years, the handwritten family newspaper had grown to 1000 subscribers. The girls, savvy marketers even at a young age, reached out to famous authors to ask them to subscribe and endorse the paper. One of the writers they contacted was Louisa May Alcott herself, who responded with enthusiasm. “I admire your pluck and perseverance and heartily believe in women’s right to any branch of labor for which they prove their fitness,” she wrote. Not only did she subscribe to the paper, but the correspondence continued; four letters made their way from Orchard House to Pennsylvania between 1871 and 1874. Louisa’s letters were short but kind, as she was obviously impressed with the girls’ entrepreneurship and creative independence. “I like to help women help themselves,” she once said to them. The Lukenses kept the newspaper going until 1874, when they were able to sell it to another children’s periodical. In the last letter Louisa sent them in the 1870s, she agreed that “Though I was sorry to lose the little sheet I think you were wise to give it up.” That was the last surviving correspondence between them for ten years, until Maggie wrote to Louisa again in 1884. Six letters passed from Concord to Pennsylvania in the next three years. Maggie’s letters don’t survive, but Louisa’s are intimate, raw, and vulnerable, sharing personal sorrows and her beliefs on death, women’s rights, and spirituality. Biographer Daniel Shealy calls them “the most philosophical and personal of Alcott’s extant letters.”

As we explored in Episode 6: Louisa As Celebrity, Louisa was not comfortable with fame or interested in promoting herself; she grew irritated with the nosiness of autograph-seekers and hated to get her photograph taken. In her surviving letters, there is no evidence of any long-lasting correspondence between Louisa and any of her fans. Except for Maggie and her sisters, who connected with Louisa and her books and reached out to her in a way I can only dream of doing. In researching the Lukens sisters and the story behind these letters, I was struck by the impact of Louisa’s legacy, not just in its far-reaching influence on society or American literature, but also in how it has been experienced on a personal, individual level, unique to each of us. That was true for Maggie Lukens, as it has been true for countless others, including myself. Would I have seen myself in the books I read without the driven, creative female archetype Jo March led to? How would I view my experiences as a woman without Louisa’s example? How would my creative path look different without Louisa’s presence and example? These are questions I return to, never sure I want to know the answer.

[Jamie]

When she was 15, a young and determined Louisa had told the universe, “I will do something by−and−by. Don't care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I'll be rich and famous and happy before I die!" Her premonition--or perseverance--led her to more fame than she cared to have.

After Louisa’s death at 55, her youngest sister May’s husband Ernst Nieriker came to visit his child, Lulu. Despite Anna’s wishes, Nieriker insisted that Lulu be returned to him. The following year, Anna took the child to Switzerland where she left Lulu in her father’s care. Lulu lived in Switzerland for the duration of her life. She had one child and died at the age of 96 in 1975. Lulu’s descendants are scattered throughout Europe now and own much of May’s original artwork.

Anna’s boys remained in the Concord area. Due to changes in U.S. copyright law, John Pratt Alcott eventually lost the ability to keep the copyrights for Little Women. Little Women, and the rest of Louisa’s juvenile fiction, entered the public domain. Works published later on, such as the thrillers and letters, can be copyrighted by the family estate. Some of Anna’s descendants still live nearby and engage with Orchard House as a way to promote Louisa May Alcott’s legacy.

At first, that legacy was that of a children’s author and “The Children’s Friend.” As we know, Louisa’s life could not be contained by these simplistic labels. She was larger than life: a feminist, a suffragette, an abolitionist. She was also a loving and devoted daughter and sister. She was a brilliant writer who could take whole lives and transform them into relatable stories for her readers. Yet as we’ve attempted to show during the course of this podcast series, Louisa’s influence and contribution to history extended beyond her most enduring novel. As a literary celebrity, she helped to move forward women’s suffrage and advocated for women’s independent careers and education. Her adult works pushed boundaries of her day, and still give us considerable insight into the psyche of a nineteenth century woman. Her example as a writer and independent woman continues to inspire us.

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