Authors: Eve LaPlante
In June, having completed
Little Men
, witnessed the unfolding of the Franco-Prussian War and a Tiber River flood, and enjoyed a few weeks in England, Louisa prepared to sail home.
1150
Her mother, she had learned from Anna, had been “ailing & despondent all winter,” in need of her Louie.
1151
On the theory that May “must be free and happy to cultivate her talent,” Louisa encouraged her younger sister to stay for another year of studying and teaching art in London and Paris.
1152
So Louisa returned to America alone. As her ship entered Boston Harbor, she could see her father awaiting her on the dock. He escorted her to Concord, where she found her mother “feeble and much aged by this year of trouble.”
1153
Louisa gave Abigail a wine-colored wool shawl she had bought in Europe and vowed to herself, “I shall never go far away from her again.”
Anna painted a verbal portrait of her sister that day, in a letter to an old friend. Louisa’s “success has not spoiled her one bit.
1154
She is the same old jolly generous simple Louie of your time, honest, outspoken and quick, but the same warm heart, & straightforward goodness that made her so loveable as a girl. The only change is the inevitable one which age & sickness always bring & a certain elegance & stately grace which we never thought to see in our topsy turvy boyish Louie. . . . She has acquired an ease and polish which makes her (in my partial eyes) a most beautiful woman.” Anna felt tremendous relief to have Louisa home.
With John gone, Anna and Louisa would soon fall back into the supportive relationship they had enjoyed as girls and young women. Their bond was not unlike that between Abigail and her sisters and sister-in-law decades before.
Only a day after Louisa’s return from Europe, the Alcotts received news that Samuel Joseph, age seventy-three, was “very sick at Syracuse.”
1155
His daughter Charlotte was with him when he died, on July 1, 1871, leaving his sister the sole surviving May. The Alcotts learned of his death on the fourth. They were deeply saddened but Abigail could not tolerate a long train trip, Anna had her boys, and Louisa could not abandon Marmee, so only Bronson headed to Syracuse that afternoon. Abigail was unusually silent, Louisa observed, pressed “all the more into the embraces of her household, by this event.”
1156
Alone with her journal, Louisa mourned “Dear uncle S. J. May . . . Our best friend for years.”
1157
On July 6, his “church could not contain the throngs who sought to attend the funeral exercises,” a newspaper reported.
1158
Twenty Orthodox Protestant ministers, a Jewish rabbi, a Catholic priest, “an Indian chief and many colored people” filled the Church of the Messiah. Gerrit Smith called Samuel Joseph “the most Christ-like man I ever knew.” Lydia Maria Child observed that he viewed women “not as charming creatures to be idolized for their personal attractions, or as helpless things to be condescended to on account of their weakness; but simply as living souls, into whom God had breathed the breath of spiritual life.”
1159
William Lloyd Garrison, in poor health himself, paid tribute to the “Happy Warrior” who had been his closest friend.
1160
More than a century later, the scholar Catherine Rivard observed that “Samuel J. May had the unshakeable principles of Bronson Alcott without his crippling impracticality.
1161
He had Emerson’s kindly temperament, without Emerson’s distaste for humor. (Sam could be downright jolly.) He could stand up for an unpopular point of view without the noisy cage-rattling and often offensive tone of Garrison. Like Thoreau he was not afraid to take risks and appear different, but unlike Thoreau he was eminently likeable. Without any arrogance he could appeal to the gentle righteousness of people even while asking them to tear down injustice with firm purpose. In short, he had the best traits of the best of them.” In 1897 Susan B. Anthony said, “Women suffragists to-day venerate Samuel J.
1162
May’s
memory . . . [because he] took us by the hand and lifted us up,” referring to herself and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. “It was he who helped the women to grow into a knowledge of how to be and how to do.”
Not long after his brother-in-law Samuel Joseph’s funeral, Bronson had a memorable dream. In the dream he was walking and talking with the late Dr. Channing, to whom Samuel Joseph had introduced him in 1827. Channing was indicating to Bronson that Abigail was approaching them “bearing a pail of water in each hand, tugging them up the lane, leaving me to wonder where I was and why I was permitting her to do what belonged to me.”
1163
The dream suggests that Bronson felt he had not carried his share of the family’s load, unduly burdening his wife.
Louisa, settled back in Concord with her mother, sister, and nephews, could not avoid the effects of her celebrity, which she had largely been spared in Europe. With more than 150,000 copies of her books of juvenile fiction in print, she was besieged by “strangers swarming round” Orchard House, Anna observed. In response, Louisa “panted for my garden hose and a good chance to blaz[e] away at ’em.
1164
Isn’t it dreadful? . . . O dear, what a bother fame is. . . . I hope the ‘Jo Worshippers’ were not regaled with my [private] papers. Has the old box [of papers] ever been nailed up? I squirm to think of my very old scribbles being trotted out.” From Europe she had warned Niles, “Don’t give my address to any one. I don’t want the young ladies’ notes. They can send them to Concord and I shall get them next year.”
She disliked adulation. “I can’t entertain a dozen [fans] a day, and write the tales they demand also,” she complained. “Reporters sit on the wall and take notes; artists sketch me as I pick pears in the garden; and strange women interview Johnny as he plays in the orchard.”
1165
She had always felt “porcupiny,” long before
Little Women
. In 1865 she described herself privately as “busy writing, keeping house & sewing . . . & strangers begin to come demanding to see the authoress who does not like it.
1166
. . . Admire the books but let the woman alone if you please, dear public.” To her amazed father she seemed “almost indifferent to her fame.”
1167
Louisa’s reticence impressed Lydia Maria Child. On a visit with the Alcotts, Child admired Louisa’s “straightforward and sincere” manner and “hatred of lionizing” and “conventional fetters.”
1168
Child never liked Bronson but privately envied Abigail for having “such gifted daughters to lean upon, after all the toil and struggles of her self-sacrificing life.”
1169
In contrast to his daughter, Bronson courted publicity, and in modern parlance he soon became her unofficial publicist. His yearly trip west became a sort of book tour. He spent four or five months in six or seven states delivering conversations on “Concord and Her Authors,” foremost among them Louisa.
1170
In her late thirties, Louisa had now accomplished the task she set herself at seventeen, “to make the family independent if I could.” However, even though she often felt “frail,” she could not rest.
1171
“As I still live, there is more for me to do.” During the next fifteen years she rewrote
Work
for publication in 1873 (dedicated “to my mother, whose life has been a long labor of love”), revised and published a melodramatic novel called
A Modern Mephistopheles
(1877), published three short-story collections (
Aunt Jo’s Scrap Bag, Proverb Stories
, and
Spinning Wheel Stories
), and composed five more novels for girls and boys—
Eight Cousins
(1875),
Rose in Bloom
(1876),
Under the Lilacs
(1878),
Jack and Jill
(1880), and
Jo’s Boys
(1886). She also revised
Moods
for republication in 1882. While in her earlier version the heroine commits suicide at the end, in the revision Sylvia—like Louisa—lives on to develop a chronic illness and devote herself to the care of an aging parent. “At eighteen,” Louisa explained, “death seemed [to me] the only solution for Sylvia’s perplexities; but thirty years later, having learned the possibility of finding happiness after disappointment, and making love and duty go hand in hand, my heroine meets a wiser if less romantic fate than in the former edition.”
1172
On May’s return from Europe in November 1871, Abigail rejoiced, “Thank God for these special mercies—My girls ALL home” under one roof. Orchard House would finally be warm in winter. Louisa was about to have a coal-burning, central furnace installed. “No more rheumatic fevers and colds,” she vowed. “Mother is to be cosy if money can do it.
1173
She seems to be [cosy] now, and my long-cherished dream has come true, for she sits in a pleasant room, with no work, no care, no poverty . . . Thank the Lord! I like to stop and remember my mercies. Working and waiting for them makes them very welcome.”
For years Bronson had pressed Louisa to write a book about his childhood and family life, as she had so often done for Abigail. To encourage this project, he gave her his letters and journals and shared “quaint” recollections.
1174
In 1872, to provide her “a picture for a background to her new story,” he took her to see his boyhood home in Connecticut, where she
had never been before and to which she never went again.
1175
She disliked it, remarking, “[I] Don’t wonder the boy longed to climb those hills, and see what lay beyond.”
1176
She told him she would try to write his book, which she would call
An Old-Fashioned Boy
or
The Cost of an Idea
, on one condition: “Pa, if you talk about Jo in public,” she warned him, “I won’t write ‘The Cost of an Idea.’ Say I forbid it, and don’t cluck like an old hen over your ugly duckling.” That year she showed him an account she had written of Fruitlands. “It surprises one by the boldness and truthfulness of the strokes,” he felt.
1177
While she never completed
The Cost of an Idea
, she did publish her Fruitlands account several years later, under the title
Transcendental Wild Oats
.
Feeling somewhat better in the autumn of her fortieth birthday, Louisa moved to Boston to write.
1178
Bronson went west for the winter, while May, Anna, and the boys stayed in Concord with Abigail.
1179
“Another year is closing upon my life,” Abigail wrote in her journal at the end of December.
1180
“The New Year finds us as a family somewhat separated. Mr. Alcott at the west. Louisa’s in Boston. But having Anna and her children with us, makes us feel with May for our housekeeper, on the whole comfortable and happy; circumstances all easy and competent to the wants or even luxuries of life.” Warmed by the furnace from Louisa in addition to the fireplace, Abigail mused on her character. “I fear little, [and] I hope much, for malice finds no place as an element in the composition of my character. I am impulsive but not
vindictive
. I love long, love much and hope to be forgiven.” On the other hand, “My education was defective. My married life has been filled with trials. I was not prepared for it, and hardships I resisted rather than accepted or mitigated. I writhed under the injustice of society—and mourned my incompetency to
live above it
.” Looking to the future, she continued, “If Louisa’s health and capabilities for writing do not get exhausted, she has a fortune before her in her own gift. May has talent and industry to supply all her rational needs. Anna and her boys have got a good start in the world. Everything seems tending to independence.”
May, who tended to even more independence, decided in the spring to return to England, to paint and draw. Louisa’s goodbye gift to her May that spring was a thousand dollars. By late April, with her younger sister gone, Louisa felt obliged to go home to help Anna care for their parents. “Under Louisa’s supervision our housekeeping for the last fortnight has
sped quietly and tidily,” Bronson wrote to Ellen Chandler in the summer of 1873.
1181
“And it is gratifying to find that she has lost nothing of her practical cunning while engaged in writing stories for the millions.”
1182
It was not long before Louisa hired a temporary housekeeper so she could revise her unpublished novel
Work
, which sold twenty thousand copies when it came out later that year.
1183
That summer Abigail became seriously ill, her mind clouded and her body weak. Fearing her mother was near death, Louisa spent weeks at her bedside.
1184
Some “dropsy of the brain [was] destroying her reason,” Anna told a friend.
1185
“For several weeks she did not know us, or seem like mother. From this she at last recovered . . . [but] we feel that she will not be with us many years longer. Louisa, good soul, is devoted to her, and lives to provide, and lavish upon her every comfort & luxury. She pours out her money like water, and scarcely leaves her night or day . . . I sometimes fear [Louisa] will wear herself out. . . . She seems aged body & soul for a woman of 40 years.” Although Abigail improved in August, Bronson was “not sure that Louisa can safely leave her mother even for a day.”
1186
Watching over her mother, as Abigail had watched over her, Louisa often sensed that she and Marmee were on parallel paths.
1187
Nevertheless, the world demanded Louisa’s presence. Suffragists begged her to appear at their conventions. Not long after Abigail’s recovery, her brother’s old ally Lucy Stone, editor of the suffrage periodical
Woman’s Journal
(“the only paper I take,” Louisa said), wrote to solicit Louisa’s support.
1188
After reading Stone’s letter aloud to Abigail, Louisa asked her, “What shall I say to Mrs. Stone?”