Review: Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography

Susan Cheever gives us a deeper look into one of our favorite authors

By Amanda Stovall
Published: November 2nd, 2010 | 12:00am

Louisa May Alcott the woman is often lauded as the voice of quintessential children’s literature alongside E.B. White and Laura Ingalls Wilder. But Alcott the writer is sidelined by this very praise with very little recognition for her other publications, which are typically only found tucked into the reading syllabuses of feminist American literature courses. Suan Cheever’s new autobiography of Alcott aims to shatter the warm and fuzzy mold of the Little Women author who has been so tightly plastered into since the book's publication in the 1800s.

Starting with her childhood, the book focuses heavily on Alcott’s relationship with her family, predominately her father, Bronson Alcott, with whom the rambunctious Louisa was consistently in trouble. She was even sent away at times so that she wouldn't disturb her parents and sisters. Bronson himself is an important, albeit minor, figure in American transcendentalism, and the book outlines his connections to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, each acting as teachers in Louisa’s younger years and later as models for characters in Little Women.

Cheever delights in pointing out on multiple occasions that the severity of Bronson's hand in his daughter’s upbringing has been eternally punished in the father’s noticeable absence from the entirety of Little Women, a book built around the familiar people and places in Louisa’s life. Cheever also offers up, throughout the course of the book, that her father's absence from Alcott’s most successful work is also a sloughing off of the need to seek his approval and live in his shadow, two factors that dominated Louisa’s upbringing.

Louisa May Alcott continually brings into question the factors that shapes the coming-of-age of all women: “... (girls) are mercilessly pressured by the world around them, the impossible models provided by society, their parents’ expectations, and the landslide of feelings and opinions released by their emerging, delicious, and unconscious sexuality. Under this onslaught of expectation, many young girls are pushed away from their original childhood selves and become silent hybrids, creatures molded so much by their environment that it is hard to recognize who they really are.”

Cheever depicts in Louisa a girl who struggled through tremendous poverty, illness, and misogyny to stake her claim in the male-dominated world of intellectual literature, even being told “stick to your teaching” by a potential publisher. Cheever writes, “There is often a lot of anger in great writing,” and lets us know that there was plenty for Louisa to have been angry about: “No one likes to be outside, the one left behind to tell the story, but a writer must learn to live out there in the cold, warmed only by her ability to write.” While Louisa literally spent many New England winters freezing for her dreams (and her father’s dreams) of writing, it was Louisa’s role as family caretaker—watching her sisters get married and have children while she herself refused marriage proposals and wrote “blood and thunder” stories she was ashamed to give her name to but sold for nice profits—that seemed to leave her “outside” and able to tell her stories.

Cheever successfully creates an autobiography that is missing all of those “blood and thunder” elements that traditionally drive a life story to interest readers—romance, scandal, and sex (Did Alcott ever even have sex? Who knows), but will still manage to captivate anyone who has struggled to achieve a goal they’ve been told is impossible or beyond their reach. What starts as a book about Louisa May Alcott, becomes a book about the power of finding your own, unfettered voice, and raising it above the roar of lions that surround us.

—

About the book

Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography

By: Susan Cheever

Simon & Schuster November 2, 2010

320 pages