‘Alcott’: a lively portrait of the woman behind ‘Little Women’

By MEGHAN BARR

Associated Press

“Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women” by Harriet Reisen (Henry Holt and Co., 384 pp., $26)

In her new biography of the fiercely independent author of “Little Women,” screenwriter Harriet Reisen draws a lively, engrossing portrait of Louisa May Alcott’s life that will appeal to the legions of women who grew up worshipping the book.

Reisen takes us through Alcott’s life from birth to death, which makes for some unwieldy storytelling in the early chapters as we follow the Alcott family through decades of shiftless wandering across the East coast. And with writing that is at times overly dramatic, we trod through territory that’s been chronicled before: the poverty, the desperation, the alienation from genteel 19th-century society.

“Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women” does not quite do justice to the complicated relationship between Louisa and her father, Bronson Alcott, whose Transcendalist philosophizing and refusal to maintain steady employment often made the family destitute.

John Matteson’s masterful, Pulitzer Prize-winning “Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father,” remains unequaled in that respect.

As Reisen recounts, Alcott’s childhood sufferings drove her to relentlessly pursue a writing career that finally won her the financial stability that her father was never able to provide.

She would later become the family breadwinner, a role that kept her from ever feeling truly free.

The book works best when Reisen allows Alcott to speak through her wonderfully witty and clear-eyed letters. They offer a glimpse of the kind of unsentimental prose that Alcott, who made her fortune in children’s literature, often said she longed to write in an “adult novel” but died before she had the chance.

Watching a sunrise over the sea, she described “mist wreaths furling off, and a pale pink sky above us.” The city of Baltimore, seen through her eyes, was “a big, dirty, shippy, shiftless sort of place.”

The story is least absorbing when Reisen interjects her own musings about the Alcotts. Writing about Bronson, for example, she implies that he had homosexual relationships but glosses over the subject.

Later, Reisen hints that Louisa May Alcott’s frail sister Lizzie, who inspired Beth in “Little Women,” suffered from serious “catatonic” mental illness. She also speculates that Alcott herself was manic-depressive — but never fully explores the possibility.

But “Little Women” fanatics will find much to love in Alcott’s story, which is far more compelling and gritty than any she dreamed up in her lifetime. Her spirit shines through in Reisen’s retelling of her six-week stint as a war nurse, the death of her sister Lizzie and, most achingly, the long, hard literary road that eventually led to “Little Women.”

ALCOTT BIO

Born: Nov. 29, 1832 in Germantown, Pa. (now part of Philadelphia), the second daughter of transcendentalist/educator Amos Bronson and Abigail May Alcott. The family moved back and forth between Boston and Concord, Mass., finally setting in Concord at Orchard House.

Siblings: Sisters, Anna Alcott Pratt (1831), Elizabeth Sewall Alcott (1835) and Abigail May Alcott Nieriker (1840).

Published: More than 30 books and story collections, including:

“Flower Fables,” her first book, written when she was 22, for the daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“Hospital Sketches,” a collection of stories based on the letters she had written home when she was a nurse posted in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War.

“Little Women,” her most famous work. Written when she was 35 at the request of her publisher Thomas Niles, who asked that she write “a book for girls.” Written at Orchard House from May to July 1868, the book is based on the four Alcott sisters coming of age during the Civil War in New England.

Died: March 6, 1888, in Boston .She is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.

Sources: www.louisamayalcott.org; www.online-literature.com