Life Planning 101 with Louisa May Alcott (Little Women, Part 1)

In Part 1 of our discussion on Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, we welcome editor Sarah Blackwood to discuss the importance of Alcott's family background; her distinct authorial voice in books, journals, and letters; and how her time as a Civil War nurse led to her emergence into the publishing world. 

Sarah Blackwood is Professor of English at Pace University, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century US literature, visual culture, and representations of selfhood. She is the author of The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2019), as well as the introductions to the Penguin Classics editions of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913) and The Age of Innocence (1920). Her criticism has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Little Women, go to https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393876734.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter at @TNL_WWN and Bluesky at @nortonlibrary.bsky.social. 

Transcript

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host, Mark Cirino, with Michael Von Cannon producing. Today we present the first of our two episodes devoted to Louisa May Alcott's Little Women as we interview its editor, Sarah Blackwood. In Part One, we discuss Alcott's fascinating family life, her literary aspirations, and the publication of Little Women; we explore this great novel and its historical context, its status in children's literature, as a feminist text, a marriage plot, among other genres; we also discuss the famous four March sisters, their characterization, and their growth. Sarah Blackwood is Professor of English at Pace University. She is the author of The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the 19th Century United States, as well as the Introductions to the Penguin Classics Editions of Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country and The Age of Innocence. Her criticism has appeared, among other places, in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New Republic. It is so great to have her with us today. Sarah Blackwood, welcome to the Norton Library Podcast.

[Sarah:] Thank you so much for having me.

[Mark:] Oh, we're so delighted to have you, and we get to talk about your edition of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. And I'm very much looking forward to this conversation, but maybe we could start with the author herself. Who was Louisa May Alcott, and what really do we need to know in order to approach this novel?

[Sarah:] Well, Louisa May Alcott is just a fantastic, genius 19th-century writer, who's also profoundly approachable, and you – to use a contemp – to contemporary parlance, relatable, honestly. She was a member of the Alcott family, which is actually a very, um, the Alcott’s are a very important family, uh, in the 19th century, partly because they are at the center of a few really interesting currents of thought in the 19th-century U.S.: Transcendentalism, educational reform, and also, like, utopian experiments in communal living. She has a father, Bronson Alcott, who is actually pretty well regarded as a philosopher, even today. He's an educator. He runs a couple schools, they all close because his ideas about education were pretty advanced for the era: he was open to the critique of Christianity; he was committed to racial equality; he wasn't squeamish about discussing the human body; and then later, he tries his hand at spearheading a utopian commune. And um, and then her mother, um, Abigail, is from a very distinguished Revolutionary-era New England family, but by the time she's born, the family has lost their money. And her family probably was hoping that she would marry for money. Um, she doesn't, and she stays single for longer than was usual at the time. Then she falls in love with Bronson, and they get married, and they have this kind of marriage that Louisa describes as, uh, “love in a cottage.” Um, and Abigail was in – incredibly smart. I don't think she's really gotten her due in the same way that Bronson has as a thinker herself. And then in the family there were these four girls, um, just like in Little Women. And, um, it was a very boisterous and fun home: self-reflection, education, agency for all four girls was really encouraged. And so that's the kind of atmosphere that Louisa grows up in, um, and is a part of her entire life; she never really leaves the family home.

[Mark:] If we're going to think about Bronson Alcott's philosophy and his work...

[Sarah:] Mmhmm

[Mark:] ...for instance, do we see a clear manifestation of that in Little Women? Did Louisa reject any of her father's teachings and her – his concepts or is she a product of them?

[Sarah:] That's such an interesting question, and I'm going to have to say both, really. You know, there's actually been a fair amount of scholarship on the very close relationship between Bronson and Louisa, and especially, like, the close intellectual relationship that they shared. And um, and so, and you see in, um, in Little Women, you see a lot of his, um, footprint, I guess. She is – when she – there's a great scene, uh, where the character, Amy, has this very negative experience in a schoolroom and the March family, the family in the book, uh, they kind of all come aroun – they sort of like, you know, sort of circle around her and support her against, like, the school, which is kind of following this – this 19th-century punitive, uh, corporal punishment, um, trying to make Amy feel ashamed for something that she's done at school. And this family is like, absolutely not; that's not what we do at school. And that is definitely something that Bronson, you know, was – that's part of his philosophy. He was really trying to change how children and young people were educated. At the same time, if you notice in Little Women, there is no father. And Alcott, she started drafting a novel before she wrote Little Women, and it was called The Cost of an Idea, and it was – she – in her journals, there's some notes that it was kind of, like, about her father. And Bronson was, like, this quintessential guy who had a lot of ideas about everything, and a huge number of ideas especially around, like, family life and domestic life, but he wasn't actually that great with any kind of follow through. He wasn't good at making money, he didn't really help in the day-to-day, like, manual tasks of the home, and I think Louisa noticed that, um. And, um, and so, like, when you say, like, “Where is he?” He's, like, both very much there in her – in her thinking but also, I think, she recognized that there were real limitations to how he, um, approached life in that very heady, philosophical way.

[Mark:] In his education model, where did the education of girls enter into it?

[Sarah:] This was a very nice part of his – of his model: he just believed in education for girls and agency and independence. And he really encouraged all four of his girls to sort of, you know, like, full throttle on reading, reading and absorbing the most, you know, kind of important works of, you know, the, you know, history and present. And – and you know in the family, the Alcott’s, they also, they had – they had, um, neighborhood and family relationships with some of the big names from Transcendentalism: Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson; um, Henry David Thoreau is a teacher of Louisa's for a couple years; Louisa was definitely around Margaret Fuller, who actually worked as an assistant in one of Bronson's schools. So, they were kind of surrounded, and they were like a part of this philosophical group of people. And so – and Bronson really, he thought the girls should be, um, totally central in that. Um, and, um, and then the other thing, again, there's always with Bronson there's like a – a positive and then also like a maybe not so positive sort of element. You know one of the things he did with his own children is he kept these really intense journals where he was observing what they were like at different ages, so from the time they were babies through toddlerdom, etc. And the journals, he's just – he's kind of approaching his own daughters as subjects in – in some ways. And I think one – one thing I noticed you know I – I sort of absorb – I kind of got really into reading Louisa's journals and letters while I was preparing the introduction, and I think you can see Bronson had this intense drive towards self-reflection and a kind of almost, like, trying to get outside myself—like, Emerson calls it, “the me and the not me.” And I think Bronson was, like, constantly trying to get into that “not me” space so he could observe, you know, what's happening: how does, you know, how – how does personality develop; you know, how do we understand, um, people's behaviors. And he used his girls as those subjects. And you can see effects of that on – on Louisa, in her journals, where she also was very given to self-reflection, but the journals also reveal, I think, um, how stressful that could be, especially for a young person, where you – in her early, some of her early journals from when she's really a child, she's chastising herself for her temper; she's, like, noting that she said something mean to one of her sisters; and, you know, and she's really kind of, like, she's being self-reflective to an extent that I could imagine was maybe – was emotionally difficult to experience.

[Mark:] Your introduction to the Norton Library Edition of Little Women suggests that reading the journals of Louisa May Alcott gives you the impression that she was a precocious literary talent, she had aspirations from a very young age, and she had talent and ideas from a very young age. Would that be fair to say?

[Sarah:] Absolutely, yeah. And I really, I would encourage anyone interested in Little Women to pick up a copy of the – of the journals—which we can get in hard copy, there's an – there's an edition—as well as her letters. And you know, one thing that's remarkable about both the journals and the letters, uh, is that you can really, clearly hear her voice and so, together with her novels and stories, you get this very full sense of Alcott as a – as a person. But you know, like, when and – when it all kind of comes together, the art that she produces in her fiction as well as her – all the writings drawn from her real life, it kind of all comes together and – and you get this picture of someone with a very beautifully strong will and set of ambitions. You know, like one of my favorite entries in the journal, which is the one – one of the ones that I open the introduction with, she writes, she's 12 years old when she writes this, and she writes, "I have made a plan for my life." [Laughter] Um, and it's just so great to encounter that, um, you know from – from such a distance, and you can just really hear the sort of desire that animates her, I think, across her life. And you know, the journals are also really full of all these little anecdotes and vignettes from her life that she turns into fictional scenes in Little Women. So, like another one that I love is that a few times across – across her life, she actually writes about how much she loves to be in her garret, her attic, writing and eating apples. Um, and one of the first ones that you run into is—I think, she was around 23 when she wrote this in her journal—she writes, "I am in a garret with my papers around me and a pile of apples to eat [Laughter] while I write my journal, plan stories, and enjoy the patter of the rain in the roof." And then years later, she goes in—so – that – she's 23 at the time when she writes that—and years later, she goes in and annotates that specific journal entry and writes under it “Jo in her garret.” So, you can see she really identifies with Jo, the character, in Little Women.

[Mark:] That's great. So, Little Women, I think, to most readers takes up so much space in our conception of who Alcott was. Where would you place that in terms of her bibliography, in terms of her career?

[Sarah:] You know one thing that's really fascinating about Louisa May Alcott is that, you know, she writes Little Women, which is a gigantic bestseller, just really a profoundly well-selling novel, um, but then she keeps really plugging away, and after Little Women, she writes 18 more books, um, which is to me, I feel like is really, um, kind of remarkable.

[Mark:] Sure.

[Sarah:] But you know, she – she starts publishing very early. She publishes her first story in a magazine in 1852, um, when she's 20 years old. It was titled, The Rival Painters, and she described it in her – in her journals as great rubbish. [Laughter] But she got $5 for it, and you know, they needed the money. The other, I mean, the thing I don't think I've mentioned yet about the Alcott's is that they were poor, they did not have money. And so then for about 15 years after she publishes that first story, she's writing a lot of magazine stories; she publishes a book of fairy tales that she used to tell, um, Emerson's daughter; uh, she wrote two novels, one was not published in her lifetime and then the other was; and she started two others. So, that's what she's doing before she even kind of begins Little Women. And the turning point is actually, she writes this book that is tied to another major moment in her life, which is that she enrolls in the Civil, she enrolls as a nurse, or sorry, enlists as a nurse, um, for – in the Civil War, and she goes and works in a hospital in Washington D.C., nursing injured soldiers. And she actually contracts typhoid pneumonia; she gets really sick, and, um, has to come home. But after that experience, she writes this book called Hospital Sketches. And that is a very popular book, and it kind of puts her on publishers' radar. And so, that's how, um, you get, um, a publisher, which is actually somebody her father was talking with about publishing one of his books. He reaches out to—this publisher, um, Thomas Niles—he reaches out to Louisa and says, "I need somebody to write a girl's book. Can you do that for me?”

[Mark:] With that in mind, when you say this is a spectacular success, so I'm seeing that the publication history of Little Women is 1868/1869. I have the impression that some people when they consider Little Women, they really focus on Part One...

[Sarah:] Right.

[Mark:] ...and there's – there's two parts to it. So, how did it come about, and how do you approach it as a scholar?

[Sarah:] Yeah, it's interesting. I actually have a funny anecdote where I recently saw my niece, who is a huge fan of Little Women, and she had a copy of Little Women: it's the original language, it's not an excerpted copy, but it – it's just Part One. Um, and I was like, "Oh it can, you know, it keeps going. [Laughter] You, like, you know, get the other part." And so, I mean, part of it is, um, it's interesting to think about, you know, the two parts are published very close together in time, and Alcott wrote the whole thing very quickly, just in the matter of months. And so, the first part is – comes out in 1868, and then the second part—and it's titled Little Women—the second part, um, comes out in the U.S., it's Little Women too, Part Two, but in the – in England it's – in the UK it's published as Good Wives, and that title is – it kind of helps show exactly like kind of what's happening there. So, you know, Part One of Little Women is very much kind of about girlhood, and I would say, like, it's sort of about, like, play, education, socialization. Um, and then Part Two is about womanhood in a certain way, which is – this is – Part Two is where you really get the – the courtship and marriage plots and kind of investigation of domestic life. So, I think it's – I think you're right to say that many people who aren't necessarily, um, scholars or, you know, or lay people, they might really think of Little Women as, like, the – the children's story, the girls story that ends with a wedding, but it doesn't – it doesn't—it's kind of like Austen—it doesn't go into the realities of married life, which is kind of what happens in Part Two.

[Mark:] Did Alcott design one and two from the very beginning, or did she add Part Two after the success of the first part?

[Sarah:] She did not design this book at all. I mean the publication history is fascinating. As I mentioned before, the editor says, "Can you write this girl's story?" And she says yes, and then she just doesn't do it for a couple months cause she doesn't really want to write this book. Um, it's not – she says, um, in –  in a someplace in her – in her journal, she says like, you know, “I don't know any girls and I don't want to know any girls other than my sisters.” I'm paraphrasing, um, but you know, so,  she's not – she's not enthusiastic. Uh, but then the publisher comes back around, and he nudges her again, and she's like, “All right, I'll write it.” And she writes Part One in, um, 3 months—uh, handwritten 400 pages in 3 months. And so, you know, you can see some of the marks in the novel, I think, of that quickness. Um, she's just kind of, like, going full throttle.

[Mark:] The vortex, right?

[Sarah:] Yes, yeah, the vortex. She falls into that vortex just like, you know, just like Jo does in her garret. And then it's very quickly successful, and so when she writes Part Two, she's, uh, doing it again, the publisher is like, "We need another – we need another you know, we need to keep – keep going with these characters, write us Part Two.” So, you know, it's – she's not really sitting down and, like, has this, like, careful, aesthetic plan. And you know, in one – another spot she, Louisa May Alcott, kind of —this is a little bit famous—but she notes, she says, “People are writing to me because they want me to marry Jo and Lau – and the character Laurie.” And she writes in her journal, “I won't marry Jo to please anyone.”

[Mark:] Mmm.

[Sarah:] Um, and she – so that's when – that's when she's sort of starting off, like, writing Part Two. And so, she kind of – she really – she understands there's this readerly expectation and there are these genre expectations about stories for girls, but you can see she's, like, not interested in fulfilling them.

[Mark:] That's great. What – really helpful thing that you write about in your introduction, is that you refer to the novel as a bit of a patchwork.

[Sarah:] Mmhm.

[Mark:] And you've already started talking about it in this discussion, which is that this kind of touches on several different genres: like a girl's book, a coming-of-age novel, there are economic issues, there's an autobiographical element. How do you approach it? Is it unwieldy? Is it – is that part of the novel's charm? How do you describe all of the various elements?

[Sarah:] I think it's totally charming. I mean one of the things I love about Louisa May Alcott's work is that she's not precious about her – her own status as a creative person. Um, and I really like her approach to art, um, as a part of life. And she, um, you know, she has another place where she talks about how, you know, she has all this housework she has to do—she's really in charge of the family home, um, for the most part, her entire life—and she's, like, “You know, sometimes, like, a lot of times I just have to, you know, I have to mop the floors and, you know, and – and be in the kitchen, and what I do is I simmer ideas for stories while I'm doing it.” And she really, her whole life, she, like, keeps that connection of, you know, this sort of – she never has that sense of like, “I'm going into my, you know, I'm going in and I'm, you know, nobody bother me, I'm an artist, I'm – I'm more important, you know.” And so, the patchwork part I find very charming. And I actually really think – you know, you can see she's working within these genres that are, um, sometimes kind of conventional genres. When Thomas Niles asks for the girl's book, it's because there's this, like, best-selling serial adventure novel, um, series featuring this character, Oliver Optic, at the time, and it's for boys. And so, the publishers are just like, they just need to make money. And there's something similar there, I think, to today's YA, um, market, where a lot of the genre actually follows the market, right. Like, so it's like, what does the market need? And the – the – the art part of it is very much, um, connected to, um, marketing and kind of creating a reading demographic, um, just so that we could sell some books. Um, and so that's, like, an interesting area. But Alcott, she – with every single genre she touches on in this book—children's literature; um, the sort of, uh, Künstlerroman, the idea of like a novel that's about the development of an artist; the marriage plot—she does something new with each of those genres. So, I love how she shows familiarity with genre conventions, and then this really light touch and ability to revise those conventions.

[Mark:] I’m fascinated to hear that you said that the Alcotts weren't wealthy and that the publisher was interested in this novel as a money-making venture, because really money is on page one of the novel and then it filters through the rest of the narrative. So, in terms – how do you think the novel addresses economic issues of this period, and how do the various characters and all the decisions that they have to make, how does money relate to that?

[Sarah:] Right, it's very – that's such a fascinating question. You know, the Alcotts, um, even, you know, they were, I guess, maybe what we would call now the genteel poor. Um, they weren't, um, the absolute sort of bottom of, you know, classed society, but they were not well off, and it's not an exaggeration to say that sometimes they didn't really have enough to eat. You know, they moved 20 times bef – bef – in the years before Alcott published Little Women, so they really – they didn't have security. But at the same time, her mother, um, who—Abba, who also went by Marmee in – in the – in the Alcott's family life—she worked, um, for many years as what we might now call a social worker. She was helping lower-class women find wage work. And the whole family was always very devoted to, basically, class solidarity, I think, um: helping other people and strengthening their community through inclusivity, warmth. They were anti-racist, they weren't just anti-slavery, they were anti-racist. They were very active in helping support recent immigrants, from Germany and Ireland, um, in particular, with basic necessities. And they're doing all of that even while they're incredibly financially precarious themselves. And then also in Little Women, you see Louisa's consciousness of the fact that women in general are always financially precarious, they are put into this dependent state, um, where they don't have a lot of options for figuring out, you know, for independent life where they can kind of support themselves financially. And so yeah, so you know, all of the little – the genre, the children's literature, the marriage plots, they're all wrapped up in money because Louisa is showing how much, no matter how much we want to read these stories about these girls with gumption and a drive towards independence, they're gonna get plugged into this social system that basically, you know, sends them down the drain of financial dependence and, you know, compulsory heterosexual marriage.

[Mark:] Yeah, that's a great point, and it's gonna lead us to what I would love to end this interview on, which is a brief discussion of the characters, specifically the four sisters.

[Sarah:] Mmhmm.

[Mark:] And when you're talking about this as a feminist novel and how it's talking about the financial dependence of women, it seems like this novel has become a real icon of feminist literature, in particularly the character of Jo.

[Sarah:] Mmhmm.

[Mark:] And is – I mean, do you – you see that as...

[Sarah:] Yes.

[Mark:] ...her in particular, right. So, tell us, let's talk a little bit about the sisters. And I mean, are they archetypes, are they autobio – are they extracted from Louisa May Alcott's autobiography, or how do you see them?

[Sarah:] I mean the sisters are –  they start off as types, but then she really spins them into something much, much more rich. And they also are very much connected to her real-life sisters. So, you know, you can kind of a – attach each character typologically to the specific sister she actually grew up with. Um, you know, Jo – I mean one of the ways to put it is that, of course, the depressing and, uh, structure or the maybe gritty, realist structure of the novel shows us that the two options for women at the time are marriage or death. And that's like, those are the options, right. But, of course, inside the novel, you see these girls doing all kinds of creative resistance against that, um, kind of, you know, structural containment. And Jo, the figure of Jo, um, has been so, you know, she is this absolutely – she's this sort of, you know, tempestuous young woman full of anger and vim and, you know, physically rambunctious, um, often saying that she doesn't want to be a girl at all, you know. And then she has this creative drive towards, um, becoming a writer, and she fulfills that drive in the novel. And, you know, and she has been so important to, I mean basically, you know, just hundreds of women writers across time. And actually, um, the scholar Anne – Anne Boyd Rioux has a great, um, book where there's a chapter where she kind of actually articulates almost every – she kind of digs up and finds so many women writers who are thanking Jo for providing a – a model for the writerly life: from Susan Sontag to Ann Petry to Maxine Hong Kingston, you know, it's just a huge number of especially contemporary writers. And it's basically, like, here is somebody who's showing us, um, how to want more than what the world wants to allow us to have. But then even beyond Jo, even for example, Meg, the mo – who's described as the most womanly of the Little Women, and she's kind of the most sort of mother-henish, and you know – and you know, she's headed towards kind of the love in – love-in-a-cottage kind of marriage, but she has a number of absolutely fantastic scenes that just show – they just pick up the rock and show you all the worms underneath the domestic contentment. Like her scene where she attends a ball and she's made to feel embarrassed for taking pleasure in her own beauty: just an absolutely significant moment of, like, feminine life. Um, and then later after she's married, kind of having a similar experience, um, where she's so – she's trying to make jelly, and she can't get the stuff to gel. And it's like this – you know, she gets all these scenes of being a young mother and the difficulty of young motherhood and the difficulties of marriage, um, that are really gnarly and very modern, like the most modern, you know, some of the most mod – like you know, modern representations of motherhood and, um, and marriage. And you know, and even, you know, Beth, like her – you know, Beth is a tough character because she's so selfless that it's hard to be like, “here's an empowered young woman.” But she has this kind of beautiful, caring, artistic quality; she's a musician. And I am actually often surprised a number of my students when I teach this text really identify with Beth, um, in this kind of introverted way, which I think is kind of interesting. And the most controversial sister has always been Amy, who, um, who I think actually the Greta Gerwig movie adaptation, with Florence Pugh playing Amy, has kind of finally put it to rest. Like she really – Gerwig's movie I think does a fantastic job showing how interesting the character of Amy really is. And Amy is just a great character through which you can explore the – the comp – the complexity of fem – what I would call fem so – sociality, um—the dresses, the skirts, the, like, the exchange of favors and luncheon invitations—and, um, and you know, and how complex that whole world is and how rarely anybody takes that world seriously.

[Mark:] You keep saying, like, complexity...

[Sarah:] Mmhmm.

[Mark:] ...which leads me to believe that even if they started as archetypes, these are not static characters; they change over the course of the narrative. There's even that scene where Mr. March...

[Sarah:] Mmhmm.

[Mark:] ...comes back and says, "Wow, you're all different." 

[Sarah:] Yes. [Laughter]

[Mark:] And he sort of observes them at the end. So, do we think that Alcott was conscious of that, of creating these really fleshed out, fully developed, complex characters?

[Sarah:] It's another kind of place where she's really, I don't know, experimental in her approach, even though this is a quite, you know in some ways, it's quite a conventional novel. But yes, I think so. And one of the, you know, one of the things you see, each of the girls, they maintain the structure of the family; like, they all stay very close. And in some stories that might reflect, what you say, is like a static, you know—they never leave the family home or whatever. But there's something in Little Women where there's that attachment to the – this kind of structure that allows each of them to really, like, grow and change, um, and experience a lot of negative emotion. That's one thing that is actually really lovely about this book is it does not shy – it I think it's misread often as very much about a kind of sunny, you know, pious, you know, story about, you know, kind of good, you know, white, Christian girls, you know, on their path. Um, but the – the book is really full of a lot of, like, the hot, negative emotions: jealousy, shame, um, sorrow, you know. Um, and so, the – and each of the girls can re – they really experience those moments. Um, Jo has such a low point, basically two-thirds of the way through the book. It's very moving, it's my favorite sort of part of the, you know, the book as a whole. And you know, and she has to kind of figure out the sort of only way out is through; she has to get through this. And so yeah, they all like really, um, sort of change in that way. They're not static at all.

[Mark:] Sarah Blackwood, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast to discuss your edition of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Thank you, Sarah.

[Sarah:] Thank you so much for having me. I love talking about this book. [Laughter]

[Mark:] The Norton Library Edition of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, edited by Sarah Blackwood, is available now in paperback and e-book. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.

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