Marmee & Louisa (38 page)

Louisa’s social criticism did not entice her publishers, so she always went back to churning out “rubbishy tales, for they pay best, and I can’t afford to starve on praise, when sensation stories are written in half the time & keep the family cosy.”
¹⁰³⁶
Seventy-five dollars she received in February 1865 for a story called “A Marble Woman” made “things comfortable at home with wood, coal, flour, clothes &c.” Poverty clearly motivated her “intense literary productivity,” according to Madeleine Stern and Daniel Shealy.
¹⁰³⁷
Louisa, like her heroine in
Work
, “tried every means then available of making money, from teaching to nursing, from domestic service to sewing, and especially, and always, writing.”
¹⁰³⁸
Louisa could only be satisfied when she had “paid up the debts . . . & made all things easy” for her parents.
¹⁰³⁹
That spring she “paid debts of course, & went to work to earn more . . . sewed, cleaned house & and wrote a story.”
¹⁰⁴⁰
She was relieved that her mother, in her mid-sixties, could still enjoy reading, writing, and stationary housework. Bronson was also home that winter, having forgone his western tour because of his job superintending the Concord schools, which he would soon lose because parents complained that he did not attend church. Anna, who was pregnant again, often
brought her toddler to visit his grandparents and Aunt Lu at Orchard House.

By April 1865 the Confederacy had fallen, William T. Sherman had marched across Georgia and South Carolina, and Robert E. Lee had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. After four years, more than six hundred thousand lives lost, innumerable wounded, and widespread despair, the Civil War was over. Less than a week after the surrender, President Lincoln was shot dead.

Three weeks later, on May 8, Lucretia May, who had become like a sister to Abigail, “nearer and dearer . . . than any female friend in the world,” died at home in Syracuse, at roughly sixty years of age. It is unclear when Lucretia and Abigail had last seen each other, although Abigail noted frequent visits of Lucretia’s children and grandchildren to Orchard House in the 1860s. Not long after Lucretia’s funeral, Samuel Joseph visited with his wife’s younger brother Charles Joy Coffin, according to a letter from Charlotte May Wilkinson to her brother. “Father . . . had a very touching time with Uncle [Charles, who] clung to him in a very affecting way & w[oul]d not let him go till the very last moment.
¹⁰⁴¹
Father said he seemed wonderfully like [our] mother. He came up in his room . . . in the morn and lay down on the bed and cried.”

Samuel Joseph, in his late sixties, was unwell, too. He had difficulty walking and seemed “very delicate” to his old friend Garrison.
¹⁰⁴²
Loath to rattle around his “Old House” on James Street Hill, Samuel Joseph invited Charlotte’s family to join him. Like her unmarried cousin Louisa, Charlotte, the only May daughter, assumed the burden of caring for aging parents. Her banker husband, Alfred, had already “purchased the old but beautiful homestead now occupied by Mr.
¹⁰⁴³
May—the house, grove, and eight acres of land, all for a little more than we gave for our birds’ nest at Roxbury” near Boston, Garrison told his wife, adding that “Mr. Wilkinson must be doing a lucrative business.” Charlotte, Alfred, their four small children, three maids, one cook, and two nurses moved in with Samuel Joseph, an arrangement that soon “exhausted” Charlotte, according to a daughter. The next year Charlotte and Alfred spent several months in Europe, courtesy of his rich father, who financed his son’s increasingly lavish lifestyle. Their children stayed with Samuel Joseph, whom the grandchildren “adored,” and Lucretia’s sister Charlotte G.
¹⁰⁴⁴
Coffin, who came from Boston to assist her brother-in-law.

Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, Abigail spent several months in the Chelsea home of her daughter Anna, who gave birth to her second child, John Sewall Pratt, in July 1865. This left Louisa to cook and scrub for her father at Orchard House. As she explained in her journal, “Mother passed most of the month with [Anna] so I had to be housekeeper & let my writing go.” On one occasion, Louisa reported, her sister May agreed to “turn housekeeper” for a few months “when I offered to pay her $25,” a third of her usual fee for a short story.
¹⁰⁴⁵

One sunny afternoon a band of Civil War veterans, replete with drums and fifes, marched along the road that passes Orchard House. Abigail, back from Chelsea, had set out fresh lemonade and plum cakes for them. The soldiers halted in front of the house and Louisa, who had been watching for them, became “the center and soul of the scene,” her neighbor Julian Hawthorne observed.
¹⁰⁴⁶
“Her greeting to the officer was cordial but brief; her chosen place was with the rank and file; she mingled and talked with them; those great black eyes of hers dimmed and brightened by turns.” Talking with the soldiers, “she was far away on the battlefields and in the hospitals, amid the wounded and the dying. . . . A kind of grandeur and remoteness invested her simple, familiar figure. . . . During that ten minutes’ halt she lived a lifetime.” After the company marched away Louisa did not stir. “At last her old mother went up to her and put an arm gently round her waist. Then the tall girl faltered and drooped, and rested her forehead on her mother’s shoulder; but she recovered herself quickly and passed hurriedly up the pathway to the porch of the old house and disappeared within.”

That spring, according to Bronson, Louisa was “a good deal worn with literary labor” and eager for “some diversion to recruit her paling spirits and fancy.” She dreamed of traveling to Europe, as many of her cousins were able to do. But a woman without means could not travel abroad without employment to pay her way. Margaret Fuller had first gone to Europe, at thirty-six, as a tutor. Louisa was now thirty-two. Learning that a wealthy young Bostonian named Anna Weld, an invalid, needed a paid companion for a yearlong tour of Germany, Switzerland, France, and England, Louisa, being “something of a nurse,” accepted the post.
¹⁰⁴⁷
She and Anna Weld and the latter’s brother boarded a ship headed for Liverpool on July 19, 1865. The “dear home faces” of Louisa’s cousins Lucy Sewall, Samuel E. Sewall’s doctor daughter, and John Edward
May, who waved good-bye to her from the wharf, “made my heart very full as we steamed down the harbor & Boston vanished.”
¹⁰⁴⁸

Louisa soon found Anna Weld “very hard . . . to manage,” requiring “the patience and wisdom of an angel.”
¹⁰⁴⁹
For nine months they toured London, the Rhine region, and parts of Switzerland and France, ending up in Nice in the spring. On May 1, 1866, Louisa, having given her notice and found a replacement for herself, left the paid position, collected twenty-five dollars for the English publication of
Moods
, and wrote to relatives requesting money. Just before heading to Paris from Nice she received a hundred dollars from her uncle Sam, and other relatives likely contributed to her solo travels. In Paris she enjoyed a two-week romance with a young Polish man she had met in Switzerland. Then she returned to London for two months. “I suppose you will avoid [Charles] Lane” in England, her father surmised, correctly, in a letter.
¹⁰⁵⁰

At home in Concord, Louisa’s absence left a crater.
¹⁰⁵¹
Bronson had returned from his annual trip exhausted. “The wicked West used you foully up,” Abigail reproached him.
¹⁰⁵²
He wrote to Louisa, “A little of that rare comfort which [Abigail] knows so well to administer will soon restore me. I find all [in the family] prosperous, [and our] debts never less. . . .” In fact, he was deeply in debt and eager for her return. He occasionally succumbed to guilt for not supporting his family. The previous year he had described “my wife over-burthened with household cares, and little [money] to do with.
¹⁰⁵³
 . . . Alas! I wish, for her sake and my children’s, I could have had a pair of profitable hands and marketable wits.” Still, his endeavors “in my Temple School and at Fruitlands” were divinely inspired; they “partook as largely of the spirit and ideas of the Nazarene Teacher, as any [endeavors] known to me in my time.” But “I must pay the cost of such gifts as I have by . . . dependence on others.”

Louisa, fully aware that a year was far too long for the Alcotts to be without their breadwinner, sailed home from England in July. “Dear” John Pratt, who was waiting on the wharf to meet her boat, accompanied her on the train to Concord, where she found her father, “Nan & babies [Freddy, age three, and twelve-month-old Johnny] at the gate” of Orchard House, “May flying wildly around the lawn & Marmee crying at the door.” Louisa threw herself into her mother’s arms. She had brought Marmee an olive-wood album of flowers and leaves she had
collected and pressed across northern Europe. With it she gave Abigail a poem she had written:

As children in the summer field

Gather each flower they see
,

And hurry back with eager feet

To lay it on their mother’s knee
,

So I, by ruin, lake, and lawn
,

Found flowers in many lands
,

And gladly hasten home to lay

My little nose-gay in your hands
.
¹⁰⁵⁴

Abigail seemed “sick & tired,” looking much older than Louisa remembered, and “Father as placid as ever.
¹⁰⁵⁵
Nan [was doing] poorly,” perhaps on account of her deafness, “but blest in her babies.” Her sister May was “full of plans as usual.” In her father’s eyes, Louisa seemed “disabled” from her travels.
¹⁰⁵⁶
She needed rest, he felt, to recover “strength and spirits for future works.”

But there was no time for rest. Sensing her family’s desperate need for money, Louisa set to work. Alone at her desk in her bedroom she imagined how it felt to be a woman locked in a passionate, brutal relationship, to consider murder or suicide, and to be compelled to torture her spouse. By the end of August she had sold a bodice ripper with a strong, vengeful heroine to
The Flag of Our Union
, which published it pseudonymously that fall. Jean Muir, in “Behind a Mask: or, A Woman’s Power,” is a governess of nineteen whose life was darkened by “some wrong, or loss, or disappointment.” Driven to assume various roles in order to subdue powerful men, she exults, “There is a power in a woman’s wit and will! What fools men are!” Like many heroines in Louisa’s sensational stories, Jean Muir “uses the mask of femininity and the persona of a little woman to enact a devastatingly successful power struggle with a series of men who are clearly perceived as a single class and an enemy,” Judith Fetterley observed.
¹⁰⁵⁷
Louisa’s ease in inventing such characters makes “clear the amount of rage and intelligence Louisa had.” In the summer of 1867 Louisa allowed herself a short vacation with her sister May on the coast north of Boston, which she funded with half of a
fifty-dollar gift from her uncle Sam. She “gave Mother the rest for bills.”
¹⁰⁵⁸
Several months later Abigail wrote Samuel Joseph a “painful letter,” in his view, describing “all the [Alcott] family disabled.”
¹⁰⁵⁹
He promptly sent them a hundred dollars. Anxiety over money—where it went and how to earn more—plagued Louisa, too. “Bills accumulate and worry me,” she wrote in her journal. “I dread debt more than the devil.”

Thirty-five years old, Louisa had worked hard for twenty years. Still she did not have the luxury of following her grandfather May’s familiar dictum, “Life is not given to be all used up in the pursuit of what we leave behind us when we die.” Paradoxically, her own father’s imperviousness to material objects had produced in her a lust for money. For years Louisa had been on a course antithetical to her grandfather’s, using up life in the pursuit of wealth. Even as a teenager she had promised her friends, “I will write a good book, be famous, go abroad, and have plenty of money!” While she enjoyed writing and had earned more than anyone she knew, she feared that her success was coming too late to achieve her goal of providing her mother with comfort and security.
¹⁰⁶⁰
She paid for an operation on her mother’s bad eyes, yet Abigail remained “sick” and “feeble.”
¹⁰⁶¹
Louisa wrote, “I never expect to see the strong, energetic ‘marmee’ of old times, but, thank the Lord, she is still here though, pale & weak, quiet & sad.
¹⁰⁶²
All her fine hair gone & face full of wrinkles, bowed back & every sign of age. Life has been so hard for her & she so brave, so glad to spend herself for others.”

Relief came in September with two offers of well-paid work. Horace B. Fuller, a Boston publisher for whom she had written, asked her to edit the children’s magazine
Merry’s Museum
for five hundred dollars a year. At the same time, an editor at the publishing firm Roberts Brothers, Thomas Niles, offered her the same sum “to write a girls book.”
¹⁰⁶³
He explained, “Lively simple books are very much needed for girls.” Increased literacy among women in America, then estimated at 80 to 90 percent, had produced a new literary market. White women, according to the historian Barbara Sicherman, had “attained near literacy parity with their male counterparts, erasing a [significant] gender gap that had existed at the time of the nation’s founding.” In recent decades hundreds of female schools had opened. Women increasingly wrote textbooks, books of advice, poems, and novels. Nurses’ influence grew after the
Civil War. Teaching, which had been largely a male profession in colonial America, was now 60 percent female.
¹⁰⁶⁴
The “golden age of American children’s fiction” had begun.
¹⁰⁶⁵

The idea of a girls’ book did not thrill Louisa. Her first response, in private, was, “I could
not
write a girls’ story, knowing little about any but my own sisters & always preferring boys.”
¹⁰⁶⁶
She told Niles, “I’ll try,” but accepted the job editing the children’s magazine, which covered her expenses and paid her parents’ recent debts. She “set up housekeeping for myself” in a Boston apartment on the top floor of 6 Hayward Place, which she called “Gamp’s Garret,” after a nurse in Dickens’s
Martin Chuzzlewit
, near the office of
Merry’s Museum
. May, who was painting and teaching drawing, joined her there for the winter. Louisa edited the magazine, wrote an essay on women’s rights, and produced more pseudonymous thrillers for the editor Frank Leslie. She wrote a sentimental story for
Merry’s Museum
about four sisters who donate their breakfast to the poor. She gave her fictional sisters her family’s actual nicknames—Nan, Lu, Beth, and May.
¹⁰⁶⁷
Louisa and May were “the two busiest young women in Massachusetts,” their sister Anna wrote to a friend.
¹⁰⁶⁸
“Louisa writes for a dozen different papers & magazines & is rapidly earning fame & fortune. Her European experience furnishes her with rich material, and everybody seems ready to buy everything she writes,” while May “has settled down into a sober old lady, her whole soul absorbed in her art of which she is a most successful teacher.”