Marmee & Louisa (39 page)

The year began “cheerfully for us all,” Louisa observed in January 1868. “Father and Mother [are] comfortable at home; Anna and family [are] settled in Chelsea; May [is] busy with her drawing classes of which she has five or six, and the prospect of earning $150 a quarter. . . . I am in my room, spending busy, happy days, because I have quiet, freedom, work enough, and strength to do it. . . . May and I are both earning.” Louisa could even afford a housekeeper for Orchard House, refreshing Abigail’s memory of luxuries she knew as a child. Learning at Christmas that Marmee “feels the cold in the Concord snowbanks,” Louisa sewed her a flannel bathrobe.
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Louisa’s health seemed restored. She accompanied her father to the annual meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society to hear a lecture by Wendell Phillips, her uncle’s friend.
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“Glad I have lived in the time of this great movement, and known its heroes well,” she said. “War times suit me, as I am a fighting May.”

In February her father met with Thomas Niles in Boston to discuss
Tablets
, a volume of personal philosophy that Bronson had composed and hoped to publish. Niles mentioned his admiration of Louisa’s “literary ability, rising fame and prospects,” suggesting he might be more likely to publish
Tablets
if Bronson’s daughter produced the book for girls.
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Bronson may have conveyed this to Louisa, who knew how deeply insecure her father was about his writing. “I wish I could write as I feel and think,” he said in his thirties; a half-century later he added, “It [is] my settled conviction that I should not venture a sentence in print.”
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Louisa may have concluded that she could help her father rehabilitate his image while earning five hundred dollars for less work than the magazine demanded. At the end of the month she “packed for home as I am needed there. I am sorry to leave my quiet room, for I’ve enjoyed it very much.”

Meanwhile, Bronson commenced a flirtatious correspondence with another young woman. Ellen A. Chandler was a teacher of teachers at the Normal School in Framingham that Samuel Joseph once ran.
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At twenty-two, she was less than one-third Bronson’s age and younger than his youngest daughter. He escorted Ellen to lectures and meetings and wrote to her, “I am delighted with my pupil’s docility and could relish ‘talking’ long on such charming terms. . . . I am pleased too at finding an adept at dipping into books, and should like to get a glimpse at her. . . . Suppose she were to write me how that happens.” He promised to attend a lecture by Emerson “on Monday evening when I hope to get a glimpse of your face again.”
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He “value[d] her acquaintance above price.”
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He praised her “charm. . . . I only wish—if I may write it—that you were nearer that I might partake the oftener.
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 . . . My last Conversation I find gave much pleasure to a large and brilliant company. I only wished for a single young maiden.” He sent Ellen a poem addressed to the “fair enchantress” who “reveals my youth’s fond promise that my age conceals.”
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Her visit to Orchard House was “the bright incident in my summer,” he went on.
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“When young women cease to interest and charm me I shall know that it is time for me to withdraw from this world.”
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About two months after Louisa’s return to Concord, she turned “the brains that earn the money” to plotting the book for girls. “Marmee, Anna, and May all approve my plan,” she wrote in her journal in May. The plan was to create the happy family she had wished for at Fruitlands, when she was ten years old. The family would have four girls, like hers and her mother’s.
A single boy, more privileged and educated than the girls, would play a brotherly role. At the heart of the family would be a mother like Abigail.

The father would be a minister, away serving troops in the Civil War. The war seemed an effective backdrop because its effects lingered across America. Hardship was widespread in 1868. Families were decimated. Although the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution formally abolished slavery, living conditions for most of the four million people freed from bondage had not improved.
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The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments gave black men full rights as citizens, but in truth they had few civil rights. Reformers who had worked together for decades were divided. Some abolitionists, including Garrison, felt “our work is done.”
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Louisa’s relatives and many others felt the battle was not over, that the war had not achieved their aims. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony created the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 “to secure equal rights to all Americans, especially the right of suffrage, irrespective of race, color, or sex.” Samuel Joseph, who organized an auxiliary Equal Rights Association in Syracuse, observed, “Had we such women as Lucretia Mott and Angelina Grimké in the Legislature, there would be more wisdom there than we have today.
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When I look through the nation and see the shameful mismanagement, I am convinced that it is the result, in part, of the absence of the feminine element in high stations.” Samuel E. Sewall added, “The denial of this franchise is the most serious wrong done to women.”
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At an 1867 Equal Rights Association meeting, the escaped slave and activist Sojourner Truth observed, “There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.”
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In this time of chaos and upheaval throughout America, Louisa had an urge to create an idyllic portrait of family life, almost as if to salve the nation’s wounds. Like her uncle Sam and her mother, Louisa was able to perceive injustice and to nurture and heal those who suffer as a result.

But before she began her girls’ book, she had to give her fictional family a home. Louisa’s childhood and youth had played out in a string of crowded boardinghouses and rented and borrowed homes, none secure. The girls in her story needed a stable home like the frame house
on Federal Court in which her mother was raised, in a Boston that was a pretty country town. Louisa had fond memories of the minister’s house in South Scituate in which she had spent several early summers, as well as the sprawling Victorian with the wraparound porch that she visited still in Syracuse.

Her fictional family also needed a name. May rolled off her tongue, but her own middle name, her mother’s maiden name, would not do. She tried other months. June and July sounded strange. So did August. How about April or March?

As spring became summer the March family took shape. Her Christmas story for
Merry’s Museum
suggested the opening scene in which one sister complains, “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.” Louisa changed three of the girls’ names: Nan became Meg, Lu became Jo, and May became Amy. Beth remained. They and their Marmee would manage triumphantly in a world devoted to “the gospel according to Abigail,” in the words of Madeleine Stern.
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In addition to “temperance, woman’s rights, and philanthropy,” the Marches advocate “discarding medicine and the use of brown-bread pills instead, the substitution of new milk for strong coffee, and brown bread for hot biscuits. Dress reform that loosened tight belts and suggested the loose attire called freedom suits was championed, along with the three great remedies of sun, air, and water.”

The book’s heroine and Louisa’s best-known alter ego is Marmee’s tomboyish second daughter, Jo. A moody and imaginative young woman, Jo is a creative intellectual, a combination previously unknown in female characters in American literature.
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Jo manages her emotions by writing, as Louisa and Abigail did. She achieves a public voice by selling stories to magazines. Throughout the novel Jo voices dreams that Louisa and her mother shared: “I’d have a stable full of Arabian steeds, rooms piled with books, and I’d write out of a magic inkstand, so that my works should be as famous as Laurie’s music. I want to do something splendid before I go into my castle—something heroic, or wonderful—that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead. I don’t know what, but I’m on the watch for it, and mean to astonish you all, some day. I think I shall write books, and get rich and famous.”

The Reverend Mr. March is, as might be expected, largely absent from the book, appearing briefly at the end.
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The only significant male
character is Laurie, the rich, charming, motherless boy next door who, according to Louisa, was inspired in part by several younger male friends.
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The quintet of Laurie and the March sisters evokes not only the May family of Abigail’s childhood but also the five children at Fruitlands. There are hints of Colonel Joseph May in Laurie’s imperious grandfather and in Mr. March, who has lost all his property before the novel starts. The sisters’ judgmental Aunt March may be a partial portrait of Aunt Q.
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The story was “drawn from life,” Louisa said later, “for I find it impossible to invent anything half so true or touching as the simple facts with which every day life supplies me.”

During the nine weeks she spent composing the 402-page manuscript, Louisa felt “very tired.” Her head was always “full of pain from overwork,” and her heart was “heavy about Marmee, who is growing feeble.” Abigail at sixty-seven was weakened by heart disease. No longer able to work outside the home, Abigail was severely restricted even within. As her world narrowed, her hopes focused even more on Louisa. When she felt well, she doted on her daughter, sewing caps to keep her warm and bringing her tea. When Abigail was unwell “she sits at rest in her sunny room,” Louisa observed, “[which] is better than any amount of fame to me.”

Louisa delivered the manuscript of
Little Women
to Niles on July 15. She admitted that it “reads better than I expected.” In June Niles had found a partial manuscript “dull,” and so had Louisa. Now, after showing the book to his appreciative young niece, Niles said, “[I have] read the whole of it & I am sure it will ‘hit,’ which means I think it will sell well.”

A few weeks later, at his office on Washington Street in Boston, the publisher and Louisa discussed the terms of their contract. Niles offered her a choice: an advance of $1,000 and no royalties; or a smaller advance of $300 and royalties on each copy sold. She asked his advice. Years later she credited the “honest publisher” for suggesting she take royalties, which “made her fortune, and the ‘dull book’ was the first golden egg of the ugly duckling.”
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Niles made another clever suggestion. At the end of the book she could hint of a sequel. Louisa appended to the manuscript, “Whether [the curtain] ever rises again, depends upon the reception given to the first act of the domestic drama called ‘LITTLE WOMEN.’ ”

It was soon clear that
Little Women
would have a sequel. Two weeks after its publication in October 1868, the first printing of two thousand books had sold out. Realizing its commercial appeal, Louisa immediately began Part Two. “I can do a chapter a day,” she vowed on November 1. “A little success is so inspiring that I now find my ‘Marches’ sober, nice people, and as I can launch into the future, my fancy has more play.”

Success did not allay her loneliness. “I never seem to have many presents, as some do, though I give a good many,” she lamented that month on her thirty-sixth birthday. “That is best perhaps, and makes a gift very precious when it does come.”
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Loneliness was a consequence of paddling your own canoe, she was aware. Marmee had been lonely, too, and perhaps that was worse, to be married and lonely. “I feel as if the decline had begun for her,” Louisa wrote of her mother on the day Abigail turned sixty-eight, “and each year will add to the change which is going on, as time alters the energetic, enthusiastic home-mother into a gentle, feeble old woman, to be cherished and helped tenderly down the long hill she has climbed so bravely with her many burdens.”
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Bronson headed west again that fall, and Louisa had a “cold, hard, dirty time” helping her mother close Orchard House for the winter. Louisa was “so glad to be off out of C[oncord] that I worked like a beaver, and turned the key on Apple Slump with joy.”
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She moved her mother to Anna and John’s home in Maplewood, part of Malden, north of Boston, to spend the winter with them and their sons.

The working artists Louisa and May settled into an elegant “sky-parlor” on the top floor of the new Bellevue Hotel on Beacon Street in Boston, near their late great-uncle John Hancock’s house. They had “a queer time whisking up and down in the elevator, eating in a marble café, and sleeping in a sofa bed, that we might be genteel.” Louisa still felt poorly. “I was very tired with my hard summer, with no rest.” But she still had work to do.

Innumerable readers sent her letters begging that the March girls marry, so she began Part Two with Meg’s wedding to the teacher John Brooke. Louisa resisted her audience’s drive toward marriage, “as if that was the only aim and end of a woman’s life!” she told her mother. “I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone!” Still, she satisfied her audience: by the end of Part Two all three surviving March sisters are happily married with children.
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“I haven’t given up the hope that I may write a
good book yet,” Jo March Bhaer says, “but I can wait, and I’m sure it will be all the better for such experiences as” marriage and motherhood. Like her creator, Jo must choose between marriage and a literary career. In the world of
Little Women
, a woman cannot have both. Jo’s mother reminds her, “Hope and keep happy,” and Jo thanks her for “the patient sowing and reaping you have done.” Marmee’s seemingly satisfied reply is “O my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this!” It is possible that for Louisa these words conveyed some irony.
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