Marmee & Louisa (40 page)

In many ways,
Little Women
accepts the very gender roles that Louisa’s mother had spent her life resisting. Jo and her husband start a school that admits only boys. The twins born to Jo’s sister Meg and her husband could not be more stereotyped: “Daisy [the girl] demanded a ‘needler,’ and actually made a bag with four stitches in it; she likewise set up housekeeping in the sideboard, and managed a microscopic cooking-stove . . . while Demi [the boy] learned his letters with his grandfather. . . .
¹⁰⁹⁷
The boy early developed a mechanical genius. . . . Of course, Demi tyranized over Daisy, and gallantly defended her from every other aggressor; while Daisy made a galley-slave of herself. . . .” Only the word
slave
gives Louisa away.

In early January 1869, having sent off Part Two to Niles, she and May “left our lofty room at Bellevue and went to Chauncey Street,” also downtown.
¹⁰⁹⁸
“May & I are having a jolly winter boarding in Boston, she teaching drawing & studying . . . I writing, editing and poking about in my usual style,” she told a friend. “My dream is beginning to come true, and if my head holds out I’ll do all I once hoped to do.”
¹⁰⁹⁹

Louisa’s head did not hold out. By March she felt poorly again. Her joints hurt. She had pain in her head and her belly. Unable to sleep, she displayed “that drawn tired look,” May observed. Abigail urged Louisa to come home. Bronson, just back from the West, “wanted his library” at Orchard House, and Abigail “was restless at Nan’s.” So Louisa gave up her rooms in April to join her parents in Concord, which seemed “cold & dull.” Still not feeling well enough to write, she “took care of Marmee and tried to rest” as she awaited the publication of
Little Women
, Part Two.

On an impromptu visit to her publisher, she found trucks, packing crates, and clerks swarming outside his building. Inside she found
Thomas Niles “curved like a capital G over his desk.”
¹¹⁰⁰
Unnoticed, she stood quietly before him, thinking to herself, “Like the Duke of Marlborough, he is riding the whirlwind; something tremendous is evidently going on.”

Seeing her there, he seemed to leap across the desk. “My dear Miss Alcott! You got my letter? No? No matter! Nothing to parallel it has occurred in my experience! All else put aside, street blocked . . .
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
backed off the stage! . . . the triumph of the century!” The hubbub, it turned out, was for her book: three thousand copies of Part Two were already sold, days before its publication. “One leaves [
Little Women
] with the sincere wish that there were to be a third and a fourth part,” a reviewer wrote in the
National Anti-Slavery Standard
.
¹¹⁰¹
“Indeed he wishes he need never part company, with these earnest, delightful people.” There “under the roof of a single New England home,” another reviewer wrote, “could be discovered all the homes of America.”
¹¹⁰²

Niles pulled out his checkbook and asked Louisa what sum she desired. He anticipated selling twenty thousand copies by Christmas.
¹¹⁰³
Any amount, he said with a smile.
¹¹⁰⁴
That evening at home Louisa recounted her day to her mother, who was paring apples for a pie, and her sister May, on the piano stool. “Hard times for the Alcotts are over forever,” she said.
¹¹⁰⁵
“I feel as if I could die in peace.” Louisa paid all the debts, gave Samuel E. Sewall $1,200 to invest for her, and made sure Marmee had every comfort.

Her work seemed to be done. After “toiling so many years along the up-hill road, always a hard one to women writers, it is peculiarly grateful to me to find the way growing easier at last; with pleasant little surprises blossoming on either side, and the rough places made smooth,” she wrote to Niles.
¹¹⁰⁶
Louisa’s success vindicated her mother’s hopes. Decades earlier Abigail had seen that her daughter was fond of writing and encouraged the habit. Her Lu had a nature too noble to curb, Abigail had said. There would soon be forty thousand copies of
Little Women
in print, more than any book by any male author of the day. For the first time ever, Odell Shepard wrote, the Alcotts enjoyed “comfort and . . . freedom from economic stress.”
¹¹⁰⁸
Indeed they were rich.

As fiercely as Louisa had fought for success, though, she disliked fame. The pressure of an audience clamoring for more books for girls
forced her to leave her true love, her sensational stories.
¹¹⁰⁷
In this way, according to Judith Fetterley, “the success of
Little Women
limited Louisa’s artistic possibilities.”
¹¹⁰⁹
Moreover, Louisa disliked celebrity. “People begin to come and stare at the Alcotts,” she complained to Anna of the fans besieging her house. “Reporters haunt the place to look at the authoress, who dodges into the woods” to avoid them. “Success has its dark side,” she realized, “& popularity is not half as delightful as it seems.
¹¹¹⁰
Living in a lantern is very trying, to feel oneself suddenly dragged from obscurity to a pedestal, made public property.” That summer she was determined to escape. She spent July in the village of Rivière-du-Loup on the Saint Lawrence River, more than a hundred miles north of Quebec City.
¹¹¹¹
This was the summer home of her second cousins the Frothinghams, of Maine and now Quebec, with whom her mother and uncle remained close. Frothinghams, like Mays, begat radical Unitarian divines. Louisa’s slightly older “Cousin Fred,” the abolitionist minister Frederick Frothingham, was a nephew of the ill-fated Samuel May Frothingham to whom Abigail had been engaged.
¹¹¹²
Louisa and her sister May relaxed on Mount Desert Island in Maine during August. Niles reprinted
Hospital Sketches
and brought out
Fireside Stories
, a collection of Louisa’s stories for adults, another best-seller.

Bronson was elated. His
Tablets
, published by Roberts the same month as
Little Women
, had sold well enough for a second printing and received respectful reviews.
¹¹¹³
As for Louisa, critics across America now “place her in the first rank of writers of fiction,” he said in September 1869.
¹¹¹⁴
“It is an honor not anticipated, for a daughter of mine to have won so wide a celebrity, and a greater honor that she takes these so modestly, unwilling to believe there is not something unreal in it all. The public is not mistaken . . . and if she regains health and strength she will yet justify all her fame. I, indeed, have great reason to rejoice in my children, finding in them so many of their mother’s excellencies, and have especially to thank the Friend of families and Giver of good wives that I was led to her acquaintance and fellowship when life and a future opened before me.”

Even as he acknowledged his daughter’s fame and his wife’s “excellencies,” Bronson still maintained a somewhat traditional view of women’s role in society. “If women will only use their own tools simply and skillfully they may carry the world,” he wrote a month later.
¹¹¹⁵
“I don’t
like to see them taking to our [men’s] ways as if all power lay in these. The platform and pulpit are efficient organs, but parlor and pen are still more, and graceful for women. An enthusiastic, intelligent, and earnest woman’s eloquence in the parlor is irresistible. Let the women cultivate conversation and their day is sure to come.” He had been bolder in
Tablets
, advocating that women “possess equal privileges with men.”
¹¹¹⁶

In late October Louisa and her sisters closed Orchard House once again and moved their parents back to Anna and John’s pleasant home in Maplewood. Louisa and May again took rooms, this time at 69 Pinckney Street in Boston, a few doors from the Louisburg Square home of their cousin, Elizabeth Willis Wells, who in the 1820s had been one of Abigail’s orphaned charges. Louisa began writing
An Old-Fashioned Girl
, which, like
Little Women
, drew from May family history and began as a story for
Merry’s Museum
.
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Its heroine, the humble Polly Milton, visits her wealthy cousins the Shaws, a noble Revolutionary War family, in Boston. The Shaws’ teenage daughter rejects a suitor whom she does not love, as Abigail had done. Like the Mays, the Shaws lose their fortune, which frees the father from materialism.

Louisa, unlike Mr. Shaw, did seek greater profit. She asked Niles to raise her royalty percentage for the next book to 10 percent, three points higher than for
Little Women
.
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He refused. Around this time she made a strategic decision based on the market to stop writing thrillers and feminist tales and to produce more books for youth. Indeed, according to Sarah Elbert, Louisa “sought to distance herself from” her thrillers and feminist fiction so as to maintain her image as a children’s author—a decision that doubtless undermined her posthumous reputation as a literary figure.
¹¹¹⁹
The truth was, though, as Abigail observed a few years later, “The world craves entertainment, fun.”
¹¹²⁰

During the winter after the publication of Part Two of
Little Women
, Bronson spent five months touring fifteen cities across the United States. “Introduced as the father of Little Women,” he wrote to his family, “[I] am riding in the Chariot of Glory wherever I go.
¹¹²¹
 . . . I have a pretty dramatic story to tell of [Louisa’s] childhood and youth, gaining in interest as she comes up into womanhood and literary note.” According to Frederick Dahlstrand, Bronson’s audiences swelled because “lots of people were curious to hear about Louisa.”
¹¹²²
Everywhere “promoted to the high places of honors on ‘Jo’s account,’” Bronson began singing the
praises of poverty.
¹¹²³
“I can hardly conceive of anything more conducive to my spiritual advantage than the experience of those years at Fruitlands and return to Concord,” he wrote in his journal during the tour. “I think I may say that my defeats have proved victories.”

As the most popular author in America, Louisa now had the means to escape her family.
¹¹²⁴
She could afford to go anywhere and do just about anything. She dreamed of visiting Italy, which she had missed on her tour of Europe. She hoped to join her uncle Samuel Joseph on a trip to the South, a half century after his youthful voyage with his sister and her namesake, Louisa May. Niece and uncle planned to visit his friend Harrison Reed, Florida’s new Republican governor, in Tallahassee that winter. The previous summer Samuel Joseph had presided at the governor’s marriage to Chloe Merrick, an abolitionist and teacher from Syracuse.

But Louisa was “far from well,” and traveled no farther than Boston that winter.
¹¹²⁵
She lost her voice and suffered from joint pain, headaches, boils, gastrointestinal pain, sore hands and legs, and swollen feet. A doctor cauterized her windpipe to restore her voice. She had consulted numerous medical experts over the years, and tried many treatments, including baths, massage, herbal remedies, homeopathy, iodine of potash, magnetic therapy, the mind cure of Christian Science, opium, and morphine.
¹¹²⁶
Her mysterious ailment, which twenty-first-century doctors conjecture was an autoimmune disorder, came and went and sometimes made her feel as old as her mother. Just as Louisa rushed home to nurse Abigail through every “sick-turn,” Abigail nurtured and coddled her. Like an elderly couple, mother and daughter cared for each other as both experienced physical decline.

It had always been this way. In girlhood Louisa stood by Marmee when she abandoned Fruitlands. As a young woman she worked as domestic and teacher because her mother needed her help to survive. Now Louisa took pride in being her mother’s best provider and helping her father realize his long-held dream of a public career. Like Edith Adelon in
The Inheritance
, Louisa would not break free from her family. She would continue as head of the household. Now and then, to be alone and work, she would rent rooms in Boston. She would have to find solace in writing, which allowed her mind if not her body to roam.

A $2,500 royalty check, the largest sum she had ever received, made Louisa’s Christmas “unusually merry.”
¹¹²⁷
The previous day, Abigail noted,
“S[amuel] J[oseph] and Louisa passed the day and night with us” in Concord. “Anna,” who was visiting with her boys, was “full of hospitality, and ‘kindness.’ Uncle parted saying, ‘Dear creature—lovely family—Goodbye darling.’”

Her heart full of pride in Louisa, Abigail continued, “The following notice appears in the Transcript of the 29th Dec. 1869: ‘Her connexion with this firm of ‘Roberts Brothers’ has been most appreciable and profitable. Her book ‘Little Women’ has reached the 36 thousandth edition—a remarkable success for a book of so little pretension, and so free from sensational plot.’”

A few months later, a friend invited May on a European tour. Alice Bartlett, the only surviving member of a prominent Boston family, twenty-five years old and fluent in French and Italian, offered to pay for May’s hotels, meals, and travel. May asked if Louisa could accompany them. Abigail’s health was stable and she was happy to live with Anna and John while May and Louisa were abroad.
¹¹²⁸
So Louisa consented to join May and Alice as “duenna,” an older chaperone, “hoping to get better.”
¹¹²⁹

She determined to make the voyage but feared the opportunity came too late. “I’ve lost the power of enjoying as I used to,” she explained to Anna. “I get tired . . . very soon, and want to rest and be still. I feel so old and stupid and wimbly.
¹¹³⁰
 . . . [I] only remember the weary years, the work, the waiting and disappointment” and feeling as if “the hounds were after me.”