Eden's Outcasts

The Pulitzer Prize for Biography went this year to Eden's Outcasts, John Matteson's dual biography of Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women, and her father, Bronson, who was a teacher, philosopher, and friend to the New England literary set. I have never read Little Women (I once went to a theatrical production of one of her stories, The Night Governess, and during the post-play discussion an expert on Alcott asked who had read Little Women--the hands that were raised were almost exclusively female) but her life is interesting, particularly as it relates to the transcendentalism movement.

Bronson was, to put it kindly, eccentric. For most of his life he tried to put his views on education to work by teaching and founding various schools, but they inevitably failed. For a time he co-founded a Utopian community that had strict rules about the non-use of animal products, even to the point of not using wool (cotton was out as well, due to the slave labor involved in picking it). He and his wife and four daughters lived in poverty much of the time, as he wasn't much of a farmer and refused to work in the accepted construct of the times. He was, though, a good friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and well known to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who viewed him suspiciously.

Louisa grew up in a fecund literary environment. She once, as a young girl, went to Emerson and asked for reading recommendations, and he showed her his volumes of Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe. She got her start writing potboilers for the magazines of the day, but it wasn't until a publisher pestered her to write a book for young girls did she achieve literary immortality. Almost against her will, she penned the story of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March. At first her publisher found it dull, until he showed it to his niece, who enjoyed it thoroughly.

Little Women was a publishing phenomenon, and at the same time Bronson finally achieved national renown with publication of educational tomes he had written much earlier, as well as touring the country having public conversations on philosophy and religion. In one of those eerie twists of fate, Louisa, who never married, died a mere forty hours after her father did (she contracted typhus while working as a nurse during the Civil War, and a cure of mercury slowly poisoned her to death over the last twenty-five years of her life). She and her parents and sisters are buried in a section of Sleepy Hollow cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, that I have had a chance to visit. It's quite a thing to stand in one spot and be a mere few paces from their graves, as well as Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne.

Matteson has written a sterling biography. Drawing on well-kept journals by the principles, he creates the family's world expertly, and pinpoints the relationship between father and daughter quite well. Louisa was always seeking her father's approval, and when she finally earned it almost meant more to her than riches and fame. Riches, not quite, because as a girl she had known poverty. Fame, on the other hand, she didn't want. Matteson tells some amusing stories about how Louisa spurned the attention of many of her fans. I liked this one the best: "At one public appearance, an energetic matron worked her arm like a pump handle and exclaimed, 'If you ever come to Oshkosh, your feet will not be allowed to touch the ground: you will be borne in the arms of the people.' Louisa vowed never to visit Oshkosh."

Matteson also does a fine job of putting things in perspective, as he does here: "Now, more than a century later, Little Women remain available everywhere; Tablets (Bronson Alcott's book), by contrast, is out of print and long forgotten. To those with access to the latter volume, however, it is a rare treat to read the two works side by side, as two complementary glimpses into the past, and into the heart of the Alcott family."

Finally, I enjoy reading a good biography because if the author is successful, especially in dealing with a deceased person, you are able to live with that person for a short time, from birth to death, and at the end there is a certain emotional response. I admit getting a little misty-eyed reading this passage: "Something deeper can be learned from looking at the children who never stop coming to Bronson's and Louisa's house. They are eager, hushed and wide-eyed. They come to see something they cannot describe but must certainly feel, something that comes neither precisely from the Marches nor the Alcotts, but is perhaps an idea of how life and families ought to be."