Jeannine Atkins

Last night I went to the Odyssey Bookshop http://www.odysseybks.com/ to hear Harriet Reisen talk about her new biography for adults: Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women. Like many of us, Harriet Reisen’s passion began as a girl reading her way through Louisa’s novels, and grew during the past twenty years of writing this biography and co-producing a film biography which will be aired Dec. 28 as part of American Masters on PBS. She talked about conversations with costume designers about making the linen outfits the family wore on the utopian farm, Fruitlands. There were visitors, many of whom wrote journals, but while Henry David Thoreau, for example, might lavish pages on a tree, there’s no written description of the tunics and bloomers. The costumers did their best with this period when the Louisa was ten and her family avoided cotton, because it was based on slave labor, and wool, since it relied upon unconsenting sheep, and leather: though practical Mrs. Alcott surely insisted on shoes once the weather got cold. As authors we can do our best with words, but costumers and illustrators have to get more specific. Here’s what illustrator Jean-Paul Tibbles did with the cover of my book (Putnam 2001).



Like Harriet Reisen, the topic of the Alcotts is one I could go on and on about. I liked that the quote from the diary Louisa wrote when she was ten – how she and her older sister Anna were called to a meeting to see if the family should stay together -- which inspired my novel also kind of broke her heart. I loved hearing a few research stories: the unanswered phone calls, the plodding, the serendipity of a letter that fell out from a volume at a used book store with a phone number at the end. Harriet Reisen read two excerpts, and it’s clear she worked hard not only to elegantly and truthfully show Louisa, but put her vividly into the context of her time and place. Harriet Reisen loves a material world both for its clues and color. And she shows Louisa as a runner. Often twenty miles a day.

She cited authors who have been influenced by Louisa Alcott including Simone de Beauvoir, Cynthia Ozick, and J.K. Rowling. I might add more than half the the writers I know. I look forward to reading the biography and seeing the television documentary, with a script that is all quotes, many from Louisa’s diaries and letters, with some commentary by scholars.

“So I plod away although I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it.”
-- from Louisa May Alcott’s journal when writing Little Women, an almost immediate bestseller which has never gone out of print.


by Emilie Heidel

A teacher is a kind of a cheerleader, and when I give writing assignments, I hope my students feel there’s more ahead of them than plodding. So imagine my thrill when one emailed me while working on the assignment of writing and/or drawing a map of events in Little Women to ask if she and another could combine their plot points into one big poster. Another proposed working with two others to make a board game. Is there anything better than teaching Little Women at a woman’s college? I don’t think so.

Then I went to the classroom, which smelled of fresh chocolate. A group had baked chocolate chip cookies. One student showed me the book her mom had sent. Inside the front cover of Little Women were the names of her grandmother, her mom, and herself, all signed when they were thirteen. I noticed the “i” in her middle name was dotted with a heart.

It was fun to discuss a book that many were rereading. There was a lot of energy around Jo’s male identity: her remarks re hating being a girl, preferring guy’s clothing, cutting off her hair to raise money. One quoted Alcott’s father saying, as she left to become a nurse during the Civil War, as saying, “I’m sending my only son.” Some concluded Jo is gay or trans. We do bring up historical context. Women’s clothing of the time was truly constraining: we see Amy catching her breath as she walks with tight corsets under her clothes, and Meg buys 25 years of silk for a gown. That’s a lot of cloth to be carrying around. LMA was for dress reform and women's suffrage, among many other causes in days of many restrictions. We can look at her life and history, but still every reader gets to bring who she is now to a book, and hopefully that enlarges the reading for us all. And hopefully the book-banners, who seem to see crossing gender lines as a key reason for taking books off shelves, won’t add Little Women to the list.


Arielle and Najwah's poster


I was thrilled with what I took home in my oversized bag. Andrew considers the four sisters of Little Women as inspiration for the girls of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, so he “embroidered” a nineteenth century gown, instead of jeans, with mottos appropriate to the March sisters, with many “translated” to the IM language a middle school reader might use.



Other gems include Althea, Hillary, and Jack’s board game which starts at the March House, but with possible stops at a semi-frozen river, the seaside, and France, before you might win the good life – partly by picking The Lawrence Boy card (Laurie saves the day!). You get to go ahead 2 spaces with a Christmas letter from Father, or by trading in a small bottle of perfume for a larger, nicer gift for Marmee (Amy), or by having twins (Meg). They give Jo 2 steps for publishing a book and 10 for selling her hair so Marmee can visit Father: clearly these are more generous people than me! You have to step back for being caught with pickled limes (Amy), deciding to wear small shoes because they’re pretty or failing to make good jelly and being a spendthrift (Meg). Burning manuscripts, falling through the ice, making excuses not to help Beth, or contracting scarlet fever all set you back.




Julia Fuller-Kling also used watercolors and fabric to embellish her fairy tale paper, and these match her warm demeanor.




I liked how Lauren Ray included themes underlying the actions.




Krystal Tusaneza, an economics major, told me how happy she was to spend an evening drawing. And I like the way she suggests the four sisters unite as one woman.

As students recently came into class, one spoke of a contingent of Little Women fans who think Jo should have skated away after Amy fell through the ice of a frozen river. And then Jo could have married Laurie. “Anyway, Laurie turned into a drunk and died young, so it worked out, “ she said.

Okay, I know Amy burned Jo’s manuscript. Which may be as bad as falling into very cold water. But I don’t know, I never really embraced the whole Laurie-Jo thing, and I kind of liked Mr. Bhaer, even though I know Louisa May Alcott, annoyed that her editor insisted that Jo needed to be married off, didn’t go out of her way to make him especially fetching.

I’ve written about May, Louisa’s real sister, who was the inspiration for Amy (note the twisted around letters) and admire the woman. She longed to be an artist in a period when that was even harder than becoming a woman writer. She left Concord, Massachusetts to spend years in Paris, France. Like Amy, she loved to flirt, but she didn’t marry until she was in her late thirties, knowing that marriage and children would likely be the end to a career in art.

I say Yay to the fictional Jo for getting over that burnt manuscript (and yay for the copiers and back-ups of our day) and hauling her little sister out of the Concord River. Other votes?