The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott (34 page)

I am indebted to the people who taught me about writing and reading like a writer: Hugh Spagnuolo, Fritz Swanson, Laurence Goldstein, Theresa Tinkle, and especially Tish O’Dowd. Any missteps in this book occur in spite of their efforts.

I am blessed with two loving and committed parents, Steve and Mary O’Connor, and my brother, Matt, a man of few words but a very big heart; thanks to all three of them for a lifetime of support. Thanks also to Bob Sr., Ann, Andy, and Megan McNees, my new family, for their enthusiasm. Gratitude to my first reader and dear friend Lori Nelson Spielman; to Erin Richnow Brown, for invaluable suggestions and encouragement; to John Lederman, for listening; and to Jennifer Brehl, for her support. Many thanks to Mary Bisbee-Beek, my friend who knows everybody; to Kate Emerson, for her photographic skills; and to Geoffrey Gagnon, for being in New York seven years ago and wanting to talk about writing. It’s no exaggeration to say that this book simply would not exist were it not for my wise and true friend Kelly Harms Wimmer, my deep thanks to her. And finally, out of the tree of life I picked me a plum in my husband, Bob, who has offered continuous support: thank you for taking me to Ontario, where I had nothing to do, for happily eating lima beans, and for never doubting this would happen.

 

 

 

Like many American readers, I have always loved
Little Women
. But I never knew much about its author until I stumbled on Martha Saxton’s
Louisa May Alcott: A Modern Biography
one day while poking around in the library. I checked it out, and for some reason as I was reading I felt compelled to mark the sections I loved with sticky notes. I just didn’t want to forget any of the details. When I finished, the book looked like it was sprouting leaves—there were sticky notes on almost every page.

I read it again. I kept renewing the book until the library wouldn’t let me renew it anymore. After that I went into the library through the back door so no one would corner me and try to get the book back. Finally one day my husband rolled his eyes and said, “Why don’t you just
buy
it?”

So I did buy it, along with all the other biographies of Louisa I could find. And right away I noticed something strange: Each biography portrayed her differently. One painted her as a pioneering feminist; another described a reluctant spinster; yet another imagined her as little more than an extension of her father and his philosophical work. After spending so much time reading about her, I felt I had to know—who was the real Louisa?

All the biographers had drawn their details from the same primary sources—Louisa’s letters and journals, among other things. So I decided to read them myself, and they simply took me over. My husband and I had recently relocated from Providence, Rhode Island, to the somewhat out-of-the-way town of Waterloo, Ontario, for his work. Leaving my job as a teacher in Rhode Island and trying to figure out what to do with myself in our new home left me feeling unsettled. I toyed with the idea of making an honest effort to write a novel, something I had wanted to do for as long as I could remember. But I was afraid. What if I wasn’t any good? What if I had nothing to say? As I read Louisa’s descriptions of her own anxieties about the writing process, I felt a faint twinge of hope. I knew I had to try to write, and I knew I wanted to write about her.

The final piece of the puzzle fell into place when I happened upon an excerpt from a memoir by Julian Hawthorne, the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Julian had been a neighbor to the Alcotts and a childhood friend of Louisa’s youngest sister, May, the inspiration for
Little Women
’s Amy. Writing about Louisa, he said, “Did she ever have a love affair? We never knew. Yet how could a nature so imaginative, romantic and passionate escape it?”

And I thought,
That’s it
. Biographers note that Louisa had a habit of burning letters, though it’s impossible to know how many were destroyed and what they contained. Louisa herself acknowledged a childhood infatuation with Ralph Waldo Emerson that drove her to write him adoring letters, which she never sent and which she later burned. Louisa was famous in her own lifetime, and she was careful to edit the journals and papers that biographers would use to tell the story of her life after she died.

Knowing this, I didn’t have to stretch too much to imagine that perhaps Louisa
did
have a love affair but erased all traces of it. Yet when would it have happened? I remembered that the biographies mentioned that the Alcotts summered in Walpole, New Hampshire, in 1855. Only a few solid facts are known about that summer—her father Bronson kept a garden, the sisters put on a few plays with local actors, and in the fall, Louisa went off to Boston to write and Anna went to Syracuse to work in an asylum. The lack of historical information made it the perfect setting for the story: a lost summer in Louisa’s life.

Next I went in search of as many details as I could cull from books on nineteenth-century New England dress, cooking, housekeeping, leisure, transportation, politics, and literature. I continuously reread Louisa’s letters and journals as I worked because I wanted the Louisa in my story to sound as much like the real Louisa as possible. I made a list of all the books she loved—Dickens was her favorite writer; she deeply admired
Jane Eyre
—and I pored over them looking for clues about what might have been on her mind. I tried to pull together the anecdotes that best showcased who she was. The picnic by the river, candlemaking with Anna, Bronson’s insisting that his daughters read their journals aloud, J. T. Fields telling Louisa she should stick with teaching because she’d never make it as a writer—all of those things really happened in various forms. And as many readers will know, Ralph Waldo Emerson really did play a significant role in the Alcotts’ lives as a source of friendship and financial support.

Despite its being rooted in fact, however, this story is without a doubt an invention, and I have taken plenty of liberties. In the interest of moving the narrative forward, I gathered episodes from Louisa’s experiences living on her own in Boston from late 1855 through 1856 and beyond, and condensed them into a shorter period of time. Nicholas and Nora Sutton, Margaret Lewis, their families, the other young people in town, and, of course, Joseph Singer are entirely fictional characters, though that does not make them any less real to me.

Last summer, I traveled to Walpole for the first time. Until then I had been working from an old map of the town and some snapshots of Washington Square. It was wonderful and strange to walk through the town that seemed so vibrant in my imagination. I pictured the characters walking to the river, rehearsing the play in the attic of a downtown inn, and shopping for fabric in the dry goods store. I felt closer to them than ever.

I was thrilled to realize that
Leaves of Grass
was published that same summer. Emerson read it immediately and probably talked about it with Bronson. Discovering the historical coincidence of Louisa’s lost summer and Whitman’s great work felt like a very good omen. Nothing in American literature could bind two restless hearts in love like that volume of poetry. This seemed to bring the story together, and at that point I committed to following it where it might lead.

Most of the few images of Louisa that survive show her when she was older, after the success of
Little Women
had catapulted her to almost instant fame. In them she appears tired and much older than she actually was. Her doctors, and, by extension, generations of Alcott scholars, believed she had been poisoned by the mercury-based calomel given to her as a treatment for typhoid. A biography published in 2009 cites the work of two doctors who attempted to settle remaining questions about Louisa’s diagnosis. Their investigation of her symptoms led them to posit that Louisa had developed the autoimmune disease lupus—a fascinating idea that, alas, cannot be proved. Whatever the cause of her suffering, in her later years she was in constant pain, and this is evident in the images that appear in all her biographies—one of the few things they have in common.

But there is one picture of her as a young woman in her early twenties. She isn’t smiling—most people didn’t smile in pictures then because they were self-conscious about the poor condition of their teeth—yet the intensity of her gaze hints at how much life resided behind those eyes. This Louisa is young, vibrant, and full of anticipation for the joys and sorrows that lie ahead. I kept the picture on my desktop as I worked, and sometimes it seemed she was nudging me, bit by bit, toward the story she wanted me to tell.

For more details about Louisa’s life and writing, visit
www.kellyoconnormcnees.com
.

 

 

 

I am indebted to several sources for information on Louisa May Alcott’s life and work, as well as the details of life in Walpole, New Hampshire, in 1855: Madeleine B. Stern’s
Louisa May Alcott
, Martha Saxton’s
Louisa May Alcott: A Modern Biography
, John Matteson’s
Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father
, Susan Cheever’s
American Bloomsbury
, William Anderson and David Wade’s
The World of Louisa May Alcott
, Ednah Dow Cheney’s
Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals
, Harriet Reisen’s
Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind
Little Women, George Aldrich’s
Walpole As It Was and As It Is
, J. C. Furnas’s
Fanny Kemble: Leading Lady of the Nineteenth Century Stage
, Jane Nylander’s
Our Own Snug Fireside
, and John Culhane’s
The American Circus: An Illustrated History
. Any factual errors or anachronisms in this story emerged from my own flawed vision and do not reflect the painstaking work of these writers.

Little Women
has never been out of print since its publication in 1868, but the Louisa I have come to know—complex, ambitious, political, and, of course, a brilliant storyteller—shows herself more fully in the many other stories and novels she wrote before and after her famous novel. Those mentioned in this book include “The King of Clubs and the Queen of Hearts,” “Mrs. Podgers’ Teapot,” and “Love and Loyalty,” all collected in
Hospital Sketches and Camp Fireside Stories
;
Work: A Story of Experience
;
A Modern Mephistopheles and A Whisper in the Dark
; “Morning-Glories,” from
Morning-Glories and Other Stories
;
Little Men
; “Transcendental Wild Oats: A Chapter of an Unwritten Romance”;
Under the Lilacs
;
Moods
;
An Old-Fashioned Girl
; and
Jack and Jill
. Countless others exist, many of which were published under a pseudonym because they were deemed too sensational to be linked to Miss Alcott. Two must-reads that most certainly were
not
written for “little women” are
A Long Fatal Love Chase
, which remained unpublished until 1995, and
Behind a Mask, or A Woman’s Power
, originally written under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. I hope readers will find as much delight in their pages as I have.

 

 

 

Kelly O’Connor McNees is a former editorial assistant and English teacher. Born and raised in Michigan, she has lived in New York, Rhode Island, and Ontario, and now resides with her husband in Chicago.
The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott
is her first novel. For more information, please visit
www.kellyoconnormcnees.com
.