Alcott Louisa May - American Bloomsbury : Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau : their lives, their loves, their work

This book follows the lives of five principal characters and dozens of their friends and family members over a period of about twenty-five years from 1840 to 1868. A few final scenes take place in the 1870s and 1880s.

I have tried to find a structure that follows the story chronologically and which also gives each character a chance to experience almost every event in the narrative. The result is a series of overlapping scenes in which some incidents are repeated, sometimes more than once. An important turning point will be seen through Hawthornes eyes and then through Emersons or Louisa May Alcotts before it is finally completely described. Each section of two to three chapters focuses on one character, and each character is at the center of the narrative four times during the book.

By this method I have tried to honor the characters, their lives, and their intimate connections with each other.

In January 2000, my agent was asked to find a writer for an introduction to a new edition of Little Women; by chance I happened to call her about something else a few minutes later. She asked if I would like to do it. Sure, I said. I thought of Little Women as one of those books I had read a long time ago that was excellent back then. It was a book that elicited a sigh of recognition from me when it came up in conversation, but which I actually did not remember very clearly. I had seen the movie. I knew very little about Louisa May Alcott, although I had faded memories of a dreary, obligatory childhood visit to the Alcott House in Concord, Massachusetts.

The book amazed me. Far from being the string of bromides I dimly recalled, it was an elegantly written family story of great poignance and skill. Alcotts voice reached out through the century and a half since she had written, creating suspense even when I knew what was going to happen, drawing characters that seemed to come alive on the page, writing scenes of a texture and sensual detail that made them seem more real than the room where I read. Her prose style, clear and slightly, gently ironic, captivated me. I began to read about her, racing through Martha Saxtons and Madeleine Sterns biographies. The woman was even more interesting than her writing.

I was delighted to discover that Laurie, the boy next door in Little Women, was probably based on Henry David Thoreau, on whom Louisa had a crush, or was it Ralph Waldo Emerson, who actually lived next door to the Alcotts? The March girls beloved absent father was Bronson Alcott, one of the founders of alternative education. The book I had vaguely loved as a girl reading about girls was actually a rich portrait of American writers at a specific moment in history.

Soon, I was immersed in reading about the group of men and women who came to be called Transcendentalists, discovering more and more coincidences of greatness being the result of proximity to greatness. I remembered F. O. Matthiessens bold statement that all of American literature had been written between 1850 and 1855. What I hadnt realized is that most of it was written in the same cluster of three houses.

I wrote my introduction to Little Women and kept on writing.

The crossroads where the swampy meadows below the Cambridge Turnpike rise steeply to the orchards on the other side of the Lexington Road looks like any New England corner; shaded by maples, it is bordered by lush grass in the summer and piles of plowed snow in the winter. On the high side, two clapboard houses sit near the road. Across from them, a white house with a columned entrance is surrounded by lawns. Its the kind of house an ordinary merchant might have owned in the nineteenth century, but this intersection is an extraordinary place.

At various times, these three houses were home to Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller. Their neighbors were Henry James and his father, Emily Dickinson and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Horace Mann. Their friends were Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Henry Ward Beecher, and Edgar Allan Poe. From their collaborations with each other and the Concord landscape came almost every nineteenth-century American masterpiece Walden, The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick, and Little Women, to name a fewas well as the ideas about men and women, nature, education, marriage, and writing that shape our world today.

We may think of them as static daguerreotypes, but in fact these men and women fell desperately in and out of love with each other, tormented each other in a series of passionate romantic triangles, edited each others work, talked about ideas all night, and walked arm in arm under Concords great elms. They picked apples together in the autumn, struggled with horses and carts through the spring mud, and swam in the Concord River in the summer. They mourned together when the Emersons lost their nine-year-old son, and rejoiced together when Anna Alcott married John Pratt.

They campaigned together for temperance and for abolition, subjects that were explored in lectures they gave at the local Lyceum, named after Aristotles school outside of Athens, just one of the ways in which they expressed their admiration for Ancient Greece. They championed Greek Revival architecture, they studied and read Greek, and they adorned their living rooms and studies with busts of Plato and Socrates.