Little Women at 150

LITTLE WOMEN AT 150

Children’s Literature Association Series

University Press of Mississippi | Jackson

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the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University,

Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University,

Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University,

University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shealy, Daniel, editor.

Title: Little Women at 150 / edited by Daniel Shealy.

Other titles: Children’s Literature Association series.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2022. | Series: Children’s Literature Association series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021048486 (print) | LCCN 2021048487 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496837981 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496837998 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781496838018 (epub) | ISBN 9781496838001 (epub) | ISBN 9781496838032 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496838025 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Alcott, Louisa May, 1832–1888. Little women. | Alcott, Louisa May, 1832–1888—History and criticism. | Children’s

literature—19th century—History and criticism.

Classification: LCC PS1018 .L58 2022 (print) | LCC PS1018 (ebook) | DDC 813/.4—dc23/eng/20211209

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048486

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048487

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

FOR JOEL MYERSON

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

DANIEL SHEALY

Class, Charity, and Coming of Age in Little Women

JOHN MATTESON

Louisa May Alcott’s Emersonian Use of The Pilgrim’s Progress: Little Women as Palimpsest

ROBERTA SEELINGER TRITES

Faithfulness Itself: The Imperative for Hannah Mullet in Little Women

SANDRA HARBERT PETRULIONIS

Mobilizing the Little Women: Images of Transport and the Domestic

BEVERLY LYON CLARK

This Was Something Altogether New: On Jo March’s Adulthood and Little Women’s Final Chapters

ANNE K. PHILLIPS

Marriage in the Nineteenth Century: The Influence of Margaret Fuller’s The Great Lawsuit on Little Women

CHRISTINE DOYLE

Louisa May Alcott, Ethel Turner, and Some Little Women Down Under

JOEL MYERSON

Louisa May Alcott, Major Author: Little Women and Beyond

GREGORY EISELEIN

About the Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Research for Little Women at 150 was supported in part by funds from the Foundation of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and from the State of North Carolina. I would like to acknowledge the support of the Department of English and Nancy A. Gutierrez, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UNC-Charlotte.

I am also grateful to Katie Keene at the University Press of Mississippi for the opportunity to publish this book. Mary Heath, editorial associate at the press, provided help in the early stages, always answering numerous queries promptly and cheerfully. Valerie Jones, the book’s project editor, offered generous support in seeing the book through the press. Kelly Burch’s exemplary copyediting helped improve the volume.

Thanks also goes to my children, Luke and Hannah. Their love makes all the work worthwhile.

A special thanks goes to Andrea Eugster for her encouragement all along the way. From the time our paths crossed at Orchard House in Concord, her support has been inspirational and transformative.

As this book was in press, sad news arrived that Beverly Lyon Clark had passed away suddenly on March 18, 2021. A professor of English at Wheaton College for forty-four years, Bev was a wonderful teacher, a brilliant scholar, and a generous friend. Her scholarship in children’s literature, and Louisa May Alcott in particular, will endure and continue to aid and inspire new generations of students, literary critics, and scholars for years to come. Sadly, on November 19, 2021, Joel Myerson also died suddenly. Joel was a Carolina Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, at the University of South Carolina, where he began his academic career in 1971. He edited or authored over sixty books and was an esteemed scholar of nineteenth-century American literature, publishing works on Emerson, Whitman, Fuller, Dickinson, and Hawthorne. Together, Joel and I, often with Madeleine B. Stern, edited five books on Louisa May Alcott. Joel was such a large presence in my own life—a teacher, a mentor, but most of all, a good friend. I was delighted when both Bev and Joel agreed to contribute to Little Women at 150, as I knew their work would only strengthen the book as a whole. Amy March, in Little Women, declares, I want to be great, or nothing. Beverly Lyon Clark and Joel Myerson were great.

LITTLE WOMEN AT 150

INTRODUCTION

DANIEL SHEALY

In 1922, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian, reminiscing about Louisa May Alcott, his friend and neighbor in Concord, Massachusetts, writes that "a few months ago I saw a moving picture based upon [Little Women]; the picture was not so good as the book, but it drew big audiences all over the country, and paid more money to the producers, no doubt, than Louisa herself ever made out of the book" (190). The film was most likely the now-lost silent version released by Paramount-Artcraft in January 1919, starring Dorothy Bernard as Jo March. Produced by William A. Brady, who had also produced the popular 1912 Broadway play of the novel, this adaptation of Little Women was even filmed partially in Concord. The image of Julian Hawthorne, who once claimed to be the inspiration for the character of Laurie, watching the escapades of the March sisters in a darkened theater is somewhat haunting. The time warp that the black-and-white celluloid images brought to the mind of Hawthorne, then in his midseventies, comes across clearly in his recollection. This early twentieth-century episode not only shows how the 1868–69 novel was becoming part of the culture of modern times in the United States but also demonstrates how time was quickly passing. Soon the people who grew up with Louisa May Alcott and her sisters in Concord, like Julian, would be gone. Hawthorne ends his brief account of the film by observing how Alcott’s Little Women endures: There is a popularity of more than fifty years, a Victorian success lasting over to our revolutionary and sophisticated twentieth century, and still vigorous and unafraid. A book written just after our Civil War, and keeping sweet and good all through the World War, and likely to survive the next cataclysm, whatever that might be. Nothing short of genius could achieve such a result (190). Now, 150 years after its initial publication, Little Women still survives and still looms large on the US literary landscape and in the American conscious. Ironically, Louisa May Alcott’s greatest success came from a novel that she never seemed to consider her best literary work.

In Jo’s Boys (1886), the final volume in the March family trilogy, Alcott writes of her main character’s unexpected literary success:

A book for girls being wanted by a certain publisher, [Jo] hastily scribbled a little story describing a few scenes and adventures in the lives of herself and sisters … and with very slight hopes of success sent it out to seek its fortune.… The hastily written story, sent away with no thought beyond the few dollars it might bring, sailed with a fair wind and a wise pilot at the helm straight into public favor, and came home heavily laden with an unexpected cargo of gold and glory. (46)

She goes on to note: A more astonished woman probably never existed than Josephine Bhaer when her little ship came into port with flags flying, cannon that had been silent before now booming gayly, and, better than all, many kind faces rejoicing with her, many friendly hands grasping hers with cordial congratulations (46). Readers, of course, recognize that Jo’s literary success was really Alcott’s own experience with the publication of Little Women.

In October 1868, the month of the book’s publication, Alcott thanked Mary E. Channing Higginson, wife of the abolitionist, soldier, and author Thomas Wentworth Higginson, for taking the time to congratulate her: I am glad my ‘Little Women’ please you, for the book was very hastily written to order, & I had many doubts about the success of my first attempt at a girl’s book.… Your husband gave me the praise which I value most highly when he said the little story was ‘good, & American’ (Selected Letters 118). However, her reference to Little Women as the little story in her reply to Mrs. Higginson indicates that she did not consider it great literature—a feeling one might understand given the literary environment she grew up with in Concord and Boston. But her father, Bronson Alcott, the transcendentalist poet and philosopher, reflected on Higginson’s letter in his journal—and on his daughter’s reaction: This is high praise, and should encourage her to estimate, as I fear she has not properly, her superior gifts as a writer (Journals of BA 391). Two years later, while holding Conversations in Ohio, he wrote home to Louisa, informing her "of the enthusiasm with which her [Little Women] is here received … all of which she will be slow to accept, cannot even comprehend (404). But, as Bronson suggests, it appears Alcott never fully grasped the significance of her accomplishment since eleven months before her death, in April 1887, she told a newspaper reporter that she yet hope[d] to write a few of the novels which have been simmering in my brain while necessity & unexpected success have confined me to juvenile literature" (Selected Letters 307–8). Not only did she seem to view juvenile fiction as inferior, but she also initially resisted writing the novel that continues to endure after 150 years since its initial publication.

When Thomas Niles, the editor at Roberts Brothers Publishers of Boston, approached Louisa May Alcott in September 1867 and asked her to write a girls book, Alcott promised to try it (Journals 158). However, she put off her attempt for months while she composed other fiction and corrected proofs for Morning-Glories, and Other Stories, a collection of twelve fantasy tales. In addition to Morning-Glories, she wrote blood-and-thunder thrillers for Frank Leslie—$50 and $100 for all I will send him—and penned two stories each month for The Youth’s Companion (162). At the same time, she was under contract to Horace B. Fuller to edit the children’s periodical Merry’s Museum, a position she assumed in October of 1867 for $500 a year. Her girls book was put on the back burner. As 1868 began, Alcott noted in her journal that she had earned $1,000 from her writing the previous year, and as her first hyacinth bloomed that January, she felt it was a good omen for her impoverished family: Perhaps we are to win after all, and conquer poverty, neglect, pain, and debt, and march on with flags flying into the new world with the new year (162). Five months later, in May 1868, her father spoke to Thomas Niles on Louisa’s behalf about a fairy book (165). After all, fairy tales and fantasy stories were easy for the thirty-five-year-old author to write. Her first book, Flower Fables (1854) had been a small collection of peaceful, nature fantasy tales, and after the minor success of Hospital Sketches in 1863, she had followed that book with The Rose Family, a short work similar to Flower Fables. In addition, she had just published her new collection of fantasy tales, Morning-Glories, for Fuller. With all of her other literary commitments, fairy tales, Alcott must have thought, would take less time to compose. Plus, it was a genre she felt comfortable writing. However, she confessed to her journal, Niles told Bronson that he "wants a girls’ story (165). Her emphasis clearly denotes her disappointment or reluctance. Conferring with her mother and sisters, Anna and May, Alcott decided to explore her own family’s experiences as a source for her novel: So I plod away, though 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 (166). In later years, Alcott would reread this journal entry and find amusement in this lack of confidence. Good joke" she would insert (166). In a little over two months, during the late spring and early summer of 1868, she completed her book for girls at the small half-moon desk Bronson Alcott had built in her upstairs bedroom at Orchard House—all the while still writing for The Youth’s Companion and Merry’s Museum. However, Frank Leslie, she noted, clamors for more [thrillers], but must wait (166).

When Alcott read page proofs in late August, she felt that Little Women reads better than I expected. Not a bit sensational, but simple and true, for we really lived most of it, and if it succeeds that will be the reason of it (Journals 166). Roberts Brothers offered her $1,000 for the copyright, a typical gesture in nineteenth-century publishing. They would pay her a sizable fee—the same amount of money she had earned the previous year by writing twenty-five stories and Morning-Glories—and they would assume the financial risk. Who knew if such a girls’ book would sell? However, at the same time Roberts Brothers made their offer, they advised me to keep the copyright—something she had not done with her previous four books. Three years before her death in 1888, Alcott inserted the following comment in her journal: An honest publisher and a lucky author, for the copyright made her fortune, and the ‘dull book’ was the first golden egg of the ugly duckling (166). Little Women, or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy was published in October 1868, and before the month’s end the first printing sold out. November saw 1,000 more copies purchased, and 4,500 copies were in print by the end of the year (169n18).

Reviews also were, for the most part, positive. Pleasant notices and letters arrive, and much interest in my little women, who seem to find friends by their truth to life, as I hoped, noted Alcott (Journals 167). The Boston Daily Evening Transcript wrote, The book is fresh, sparkling, natural, and full of soul. In characterization it displays uncommon excellence, as compared with ordinary books for girls (Clark, Contemporary Reviews 61). Little Women is a girls’ book of quite another sort, declared the Springfield Daily Republican, explaining that the March sisters are not children but … are girls with the instincts of womanhood strong and active, but without the simplicity of childhood. Calling these household adventures … wonderfully varied and rich, the reviewer noted that children may not like them, but they will attract the girl and boy who have an inkling of the world beyond the children’s horizon (63).

With positive reviews and steady sales, Thomas Niles eagerly asked for a sequel. Alcott, buoyed by the acclaim of both readers and critics for her first volume, admitted in her journal that a little success is so inspiring that I now find my ‘Marches’ sober, nice people, and as I can launch into the future, my fancy has more play. The one thing she vowed, however, would be the very thing that would disappoint many readers: "I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please any one" (Journals 167). Alcott worked furiously on the book, almost meeting her goal of writing a chapter a day. On New Year’s Day, she sent Roberts Brothers the completed novel with hopes that it will do as well as the first, which is selling finely, and receives good notices (171).

Little Women, part 2 appeared in April 1869 and was even more of a success than the first part. Reviews were again extremely positive. Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher, sister-in-law of Harriet Beecher Stowe, declared in The Mother at Home and Household Magazine that it is amusing to see with how much spirit this simple little book is discussed by elderly people who generally look upon young folks’ story-books as foolish things. She went on to note that we have known one grave lady take Jo’s refusal of Laurie more to heart than that young gentleman, for he got over it, and our young friend has not yet ceased grumbling (Clark, Contemporary Reviews 77). The Eclectic Magazine noted that the sequel is the very best of books to reach the hearts of the young of any age from six to sixty, though its merits will be most appreciated by those who have reached the contemplative period of life (76). Initial sales of part 2 surpassed those of the first book. By August, Roberts Brothers had printed 11,000 copies of the novel. Frank Preston Stearns, a friend of the Alcott family, recalled in his 1895 memoir Sketches from Concord and Appledore: First the young people read it; then their fathers and mothers; and then the grandparents read it. Grave merchants and lawyers meeting on their way down town in the morning said to each other, ‘Have you read Little Women’; and laughed as they said it. The clerks in my office read it, so also did the civil engineer, and the boy in the elevator. It was the rage in ’69 (85). The sales of both parts of Little Women were so successful that Roberts Brothers sent Alcott a check for $2,500 on Christmas Day 1869—her royalty for only six months. The hyacinth that had bloomed on New Year’s Day in 1868 proved to be a good omen indeed, as Alcott and her family would never again worry about poverty or debt. Little Women would make Louisa May Alcott wealthy—and famous. By April 1869, the best-selling author confessed: "People begin to come and stare at the Alcotts. Reporters haunt the place to look at the authoress, who dodges into the woods à la Hawthorne" (Journals 171). The curiosity of the Jo worshipers, as Alcott often called them, would continue for the remainder of her life, as the little story of the March sisters would make her one of the most well-known and most successful authors of the last half of the nineteenth century.

As the golden age of children’s literature dawned in the United States, Little Women, a work that many scholars view as one of the first realistic novels for young people, soon became a classic. Over the next century and a half, the novel grew into a cherished book for girls and boys alike. Readers as diverse as Carson McCullers, Gloria Steinem, Theodore Roosevelt, Patti Smith, and J. K. Rowling have declared it a favorite. When Little, Brown, who purchased Roberts Brothers in 1898, decided to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Little Women in 1909 with a new edition of the work, the New York Times Book Review wrote: As a rule the classics of youth scarcely live beyond the immediate generation that welcomed their birth. It is a unique distinction of ‘Little Women,’ however, that it has never grown old, never appeared antiquated to the youngsters of today, who are rather prone, as a rule, to demand somewhat different literary fare from that which satisfied their elders (22). From the initial publication of the novel in 1868 until Alcott’s death in early 1888, Roberts Brothers printed approximately 200,000 copies of Little Women (Myerson and Shealy 69–71). Never out of print, Alcott’s classic tale of four New England sisters growing up during and after the Civil War has been published in more than thirty countries around the world. Currently, Amazon.com lists numerous separate editions of Little Women, from inexpensive abridged copies for young readers to profusely illustrated deluxe editions. While sales of the book worldwide over the last 150 years cannot be accurately established, one safely can estimate that the number is in the millions.

For many readers, the book’s main character—the determined, tomboyish, headstrong Jo March—became a character with whom they formed a personal connection, one that would inspire them to pursue their own dreams. J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series (who goes by Jo), once noted the effect that reading Little Women as a child had on her: My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer (BR8). She found herself in Jo March—as did almost countless thousands of readers around the world.

The afterlife of Little Women, however, turned Alcott’s girls’ book into something larger as its story became a part of the culture of the United States and new generations discovered their own version of the March sisters. In 1912, Little Women debuted on the Great White Way as a successful Broadway play. Each performance began with the novel’s now-famous opening line: Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents. Versions of this play would be performed around the country for years to come. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy also found themselves as part of high culture when the first musical adaptation, Little Women, an Operetta in Three Acts, appeared in 1940. Almost sixty years later, a new opera, composed by Mark Adamo, opened to positive reviews in 1998. More contemporary audiences met the March sisters on Broadway in 2005’s Little Women: The Musical. Its advertisements proclaimed: Six generations have read this story. This one will sing it.

Film, of all the adaptations of Little Women, brought the story of the March sisters to even larger numbers of people. Beginning with two silent productions in 1917 and 1919, the celluloid versions of Alcott’s classic opened the doors to the March family home, exposing their lives to more viewers than the readers of the novel. After viewing one of the earliest films of Little Women, Julian Hawthorne, in 1922, noted, These audiences, which laughed and were tearful by turns, were composed mainly of persons who either in their childhood or in maturity had read the book; and of the residue who had not read it, few, I imagine failed to get it out of the local lending library immediately afterward (190). Even in the early years of the motion picture industry Hawthorne is correct in pointing out that many film viewers would come to the movie because they had enjoyed the novel and, like he, they could compare the two. He is also right that the film itself would send more people in search of the novel, thus ensuring a spike in the book’s sales.

Films have given Alcott’s Little Women more of an audience than book sales would ever achieve. Katharine Hepburn’s portrayal of Jo in George Cukor’s 1933 RKO production made the actress a star and the film itself a classic. In 1949, the novel saw its first film adaptation in Technicolor, assuring it a place in television reruns for the last half of the twentieth century. June Allyson played Jo, with costars Janet Leigh, Margaret O’Brien, and Elizabeth Taylor as her sisters. By the end of the century, a new generation of filmgoers in 1994 experienced the queer plays and experiences that Alcott felt so unsure about just three years after the Civil War. Gillian Armstrong, the first female to direct Little Women, once again turned the novel into a successful production, one that earned Winona Ryder an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for her performance as Jo March. In spring 2018, Little Women once again came to the small screen over Mother’s Day weekend with a multipart television miniseries for PBS’s Masterpiece. One hundred years after the first American film version, Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of the novel, starring Meryl Streep and Emma Watson, appeared nationwide on Christmas Day 2019, to great popular and critical acclaim. The new film, which was nominated for Best Picture, would also bring Oscar nominations for Best Actress to Saoirse Ronan, who played Jo, and Best Supporting Actress to Florence Pugh for her portrayal of Amy.

With movie tie-ins and other spinoffs and merchandise, Little Women still remains popular in the national consciousness. Even the US Postal Service honored Little Women (1993), giving it its own stamp. In 2005, Geraldine Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel March, a fictional account of Mr. March’s wartime experiences. Most recently, in 2018, PBS’s The Great American Read placed Little Women at number eight in its list of one hundred favorite books that Americans still enjoy reading. And each year, since Orchard House opened as a museum in 1912, thousands of admirers from all around the world (the novel is especially beloved in Japan) make a pilgrimage to Alcott’s modest family home in Concord, Massachusetts. When Alcott was born in November 1832, Bronson Alcott wrote his father-in-law, Col. Joseph May, that he hoped his new daughter would eventually deserve a place in the estimation of society (Letters of ABA 20). With the publication of Little Women, Alcott certainly achieved that recognition—and more.

One hundred years after Alcott’s birth, in November 1932, the first scholarship on her work appeared. An entire issue of the Elementary English Review, a periodical aimed at elementary school teachers, devoted its pages to the author of Little Women (Alberghene and Clark xxi). However, treatment of Alcott as a serious writer of fiction still was largely ignored by literary scholars in the twentieth century until the 1940s, when more articles slowly began to appear in academic journals. Largely spearheaded by the scholarship of Madeleine B. Stern, this mainly biographical and historical focus gradually began to turn the tide against a view of Louisa May as the children’s friend, a title bestowed upon her by Alcott’s first biographer, Ednah Dow Cheney. Nevertheless, most of the academy still saw the writer merely as an author of children’s literature—a field not worthy of serious scholarship.

However, the emergence of feminism in the 1960s led to a new exploration of women’s fiction, which began to bring more interest in Alcott. With the 1975 publication of Stern’s first collection of Alcott’s sensational stories, Behind a Mask, scholars began to see a rich, unexplored area of the author’s canon, and it helped spark a new interest in her work. By the 1990s, PhD dissertations and critical articles in scholarly literary journals appeared more frequently, especially with the growth of children’s literature as a serious academic pursuit. Over the past fifty years, the majority of literary criticism on Little Women has had a decidedly feminist perspective, as evidenced by the publication in 1999 of Little Women and the Feminist Imagination,