Louisa May Alcott: An Introduction
JAMIE Welcome to Let Genius Burn, a podcast series about the life and legacy of Louisa May Alcott. I’m Jamie Burgess and I’m Jill Fuller—and we’re your hosts and the creators of this podcast. Let Genius Burn is an eight-part mini-series, and each episode will dive into a different aspect of Louisa May Alcott’s identity. In today’s intro episode, you’ll get to meet us, your hosts, but first, we’ll be covering a brief biography of Louisa May Alcott to introduce you to Louisa and her world.
JAMIE In the short story Behind a Mask, the young governess Jean Muir is hired by a rich family for her appealing looks and winning personality. Finally alone in her room, Jean kneels in front of the trunk that carries her only worldly possessions. She mixes a cordial and takes a long draught from her flask. Slowly, she removes her hair, then her makeup, then her dress, then her teeth. What’s left of her is a haggard woman in the place of the young, pretty thing she had been moments before. Finally, she half-uncovers her breast to expose the scar of a newly healed wound. Then, she creeps off to bed, worn out by mental weariness and the exhaustion of wearing a costume and playing a part every day of her life.
These macabre, gothic details could be from a story by Charlotte Brontë, but in fact, Behind A Mask was written and published by Louisa May Alcott. For many years, Louisa May Alcott wrote thrillers under a pseudonym as a way to earn money to support her family. Though she was best known for Little Women and the other books known as her “juvenile novels,” Louisa May Alcott’s lesser-known works explore themes such as suicide, poverty, deception, and dark magic. These themes were as much a part of Louisa’s psyche as any of the children’s books she wrote—in fact, as we are going to see in the next eight episodes of Let Genius Burn, they are present in the many facets of Louisa’s character.
Little Women was an instant best-seller, and in the past one hundred and fifty-three years since its debut, Louisa May Alcott has been remembered as a writer of children’s stories, the “children’s friend.” If we look deeper—behind the mask, if you will—we see that her life was not the tidy, moral story of her best-known book. Louisa May Alcott was a complex, ambitious woman who struggled to raise her family out of poverty; through writing, she found escape, solace, and, ultimately, hard-won financial freedom.
JILL Louisa May Alcott was born in 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania to parents Bronson Alcott and Abigail May Alcott. Her father Bronson was a Connecticut-born educator who was attempting to start his own school, and her mother Abigail was from a prominent Boston family that shared lineage with the Quincys and Hancocks. Abigail was also an ardent feminist and excellent writer. Louisa was their second daughter.
Bronson Alcott had lofty ideas about education and how to raise and teach a child. In Louisa’s earliest childhood, she was subjected to Bronson’s experiments in child psychology, and he took copious notes on what he saw as her dark nature. She was a willful and difficult child, headstrong like her mother, qualities that Bronson sometimes feared in his young daughter as he speculated about the woman she would become.
Bronson himself was a mild-mannered philosopher. His schools were unusual for the 19th century: he advocated for children to have their own desks, to sit in a circle so they could share ideas. He had a library available to his class and set up sculptures and art to show the children. He gave recess time, and most egregious to his nineteenth century contemporaries, he believed that all children deserved equal access to education: male or female, white or black.
Louisa’s education and upbringing had a strong influence on her principles and beliefs. By 1840, the Alcott family included four daughters: Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth and May. The family was subject to Bronson Alcott’s many whims and intellectual interests, including a nine-month stint in a utopian community called Fruitlands, which nearly ended in the starvation and freezing of the whole family. Bronson, who was himself a Transcendentalist philosopher, took the family to Concord, Massachusetts among other prominent authors and scholars, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Peabody, and Margaret Fuller.
This was Louisa May Alcott’s childhood: visiting Emerson’s library and borrowing his books, reading Shakespeare and imitating his plays with her sisters. She loved nature and loved to run, believing she had been a deer or a horse in another life. She loved her sisters and especially her dear mother, Abigail, who was the center of her world. Abigail validated Louisa’s many moods and applauded her trials in being good. Though Bronson’s many attempts to earn money failed, the family stayed afloat on the kindness and good graces of their many friends.
JAMIE For about ten years during Louisa’s late teens and early twenties, the sisters all went out to work to earn money for the family. Their debts piled up, and Louisa couldn’t imagine a way they would manage. Abigail, Louisa’s mother, worked as a missionary to the poor in Boston, which was an early type of social work, continuing to instill her values of altruism and equality in her daughters. Louisa herself kept teaching and sewing, though she truly wanted to write. Her attempts at writing and publishing came in fits and starts. She published a book of fairy stories, then some suspense stories in popular magazines under different names. But she’d been told that she couldn’t write, and she should stick to her teaching.
In 1857, the Alcotts at last returned to Concord, Massachusetts and found some sense of stability, though they lost their dear Elizabeth that year. In 1858, they moved into the Orchard House, the brown house on Lexington Road that is today known as the home of Little Women. They lived in this house through the Civil War, when Louisa lamented being born a woman, because she longed to go and fight. Instead, she found a place as a nurse in December 1862, just after her 30th birthday. At the new year in 1863, Louisa celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation in Washington, DC, as abolition was one of the causes closest to her heart. Shortly after, she contracted typhoid pneumonia from the unsanitary hospital conditions, and for several weeks, she was close to death.
When Louisa’s fever and delirium wore off, she woke to find that she was back in Concord with her family, her long, shiny, dark hair cut short. She was a different woman after that experience, no longer youthful and full of energy as she had once been. She had been treated with a medicine called calomel, which is made of mercury, and the effects of the medication followed her throughout her life, plaguing her with joint aches, headaches, and fatigue.
Ever concerned with earning money, Louisa May Alcott spun her experiences in the Civil War into gold, when she wrote and published her most successful work to date: Hospital Sketches. The stories of nurse Tribulation Periwinkle charmed audiences and earned Louisa new publishing accolades. A few years later, in 1868, a publisher approached Louisa and asked her to write a book for girls. Louisa reflected on her childhood. She had never known many girls or liked any but her sisters, she said. But she was ready to give anything a try, to earn a little more money she could use to care for her mother and sisters.
The book for girls became Little Women, and it was so popular that it took the Alcotts out of their financial troubles and into comfortable wealth. In the years that followed, Louisa was able to provide for her parents and sisters as never before. She eventually bought a house for her oldest sister, Anna, who had two sons. She took her youngest sister, May, on a grand tour of Europe, through France and Italy, so May could study art. Louisa never married, but stayed with her parents, caring for them as they aged. Abigail died in 1877. May followed in 1879, a difficult blow for Louisa, though she felt some consolation when May’s daughter came to live with her for the next several years. Bronson Alcott died at 88 years old in 1888, just two days before Louisa herself. She died on March 6, 1888 at age 55.
JILL Like many women in history, Louisa May Alcott has been reduced to a byline or misremembered entirely, known only for Little Women. But Louisa May Alcott was more than a character and more than a book. Like all of us, she- to quote her contemporary Walt Whitman- “contained multitudes.” She was witty and shocking, complex and complicated, with a personality and beliefs that were ahead of her time. She circulated with some of the great American minds of the 19th century. She lived through momentous historical events, some of which deeply influenced and changed her completely. She was surprisingly modern in her thoughts on women’s rights, social justice, and marriage. From Louisa, we see what it means to live by principle as well as passion, how to face disappointment, how to persevere and keep putting pen to paper. In her life’s story, we see a woman struggling to balance a family and a career, a writer coming to terms with the public side of success, a woman who burned for opportunities she could never have.
In the next eight episodes, we will dive deeper into Louisa’s biography, bringing her out from under the shadow of Little Women. In each episode, we will highlight a different facet of Louisa’s life and experiences, from her relationships with her family and the social justice causes she championed, to her process as a writer, her experiences with fame, and how she redefined womanhood for herself. Rather than telling her story in a chronological timeline, we’ve chosen to examine her life and identity as if each part of her story is a puzzle piece. Louisa as a daughter. As a sister. As a writer. As a woman. Each piece fitting together to create a whole, a portrait of a woman many know of, but may not really know at all. Behind the shiny veneer created over the years by the legacy of Little Women lives the book’s creator, a woman with a far grittier and more complex story- one of perseverance in the face of trauma and destitution, of self-confidence in making her own way, and of making difficult choices between the freedom to create art and a responsibility to her family- all modern issues that resonate with us today. As you listen, we hope you find something in Louisa’s story that resonates with you and inspires you to dig further, not only into Louisa’s history, but into the stories of other women who exist only in the footnotes of the past.
