Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father

Summary (from the publisher): Louisa May Alcott is known universally. Yet during Louisa's youth, the famous Alcott was her father, Bronson, an eminent teacher and a friend of Emerson and Thoreau. He desired perfection, for the world and from his family. Louisa challenged him with her mercurial moods and yearnings for money and fame. The other prize she deeply coveted her father's understanding seemed hardest to win. This story of Bronson and Louisa's tense yet loving relationship adds dimensions to Louisa's life, her work, and the relationships of fathers and daughters.

 

Review: Bronson Alcott was born in 1799 as the oldest son of a Connecticut farmer. Heavily influenced by his readings and early experiences teaching, he became interested in how to shape the characters of his pupils. Good friends with Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, he came to represent one of the philosophers of Concord, Massachusetts. He disdained corporal punishment, followed a strict vegetarian diet, and believed that he needed only to appeal to the character of his charges to encourage good behavior. His second daughter, Louisa, born in 1832, challenged many of his convictions. "Highly energetic, resistant to discipline, she had an innate turbulence that her father had tried without success to tame. She was, in Bronson's view, a creature of 'impatience, querulousness, forwardness'" (10). Yet this daughter, of the four born to him, would be the one to carry on his legacy and the one who is principally responsible for keeping Bronson's memory alive today.

 

Despite his seemingly good intentions, Bronson proved a rather dismal failure at providing for his family and accomplishing his philosophical goals. He started multiple schools that were eventually shut down. Most infamous was the Temple School, which was eventually disbanded because Bronson refused to dismiss a black student from the school. Despite this bold move that meant professional suicide, as well as later serving as a stop on the Underground Railroad, Bronson also privately asserted that male African Americans should be sterilized in masse. In short, he was a bundle of contradictions.

 

Perhaps most shocking for me was learning of Bronson's behavior after encouraging his family to experiment with commune living. During the course of the experiment, Bronson became increasingly convinced of the worthiness of the Shaker's way of life with genders and families living separated and believed that he would never achieve his philosophical goals if he remained with his family. Despite the fact that his wife was a slave to manual labor to keep the family fed and clothed, Bronson very nearly left the family at this juncture. Still, he considered himself a "Shaker in principle" and announced that he "had long since been divorced from his wife by the high court of his work and that she was no longer anything to him" (165). In other words, it seems that Bronson's ego often obscured his ability to do right by his wife and children. However, it also seems that Bronson likely suffered from mental health issues that made his capacity for regular employment difficult to impossible at times. Louisa seems to have inherited this penchant, and nearly committed suicide in at least one point in her life.

 

Yet despite Bronson's failings, we likely have them to thank for his daughter's literary works. Bronson's wife and daughters all worked to help support the family. Louisa, in addition to jobs teaching and sewing, pursued her writing in hopes of becoming published and earning money. Yet it was not until she wrote the first of three volumes of Little Women that she became an over night sensation and was able to pay her family's debts and keep her family comfortable. A highly autobiographical novel, it varies in small significant ways. For instance, it was not her father but Louisa who served during the Civil War; Louisa spent six weeks as a nurse before becoming dangerously ill and being sent home near death. Additionally, she never married as her counterpart Jo does in the novel. And in real life, her youngest sister May (Amy in the novel), married late in life only to die after giving birth to a daughter who Louisa raised until her death.

 

Louisa never fully recovered from the mercury treatment she was given when she fell ill during the Civil War. Debilitating pain combined with a punishing writing schedule in attempts to support her family caused her to grow frail and ill in her fifties. Ironically, Louisa, who shared a birthday with her father, was to die just days after him. Just days before her father's death, on her last visit to see him, Bronson took his daughter's hand and said "I am going up. Come with me." (423). Loyal to the last, Louisa did just that.

 

Although I am sometimes skeptical of dual biographies, this biography that covers the life of Bronson Alcott and his famous daughter Louisa May worked so well together. This is in part because Bronson and Louisa were father and daughter, partly because both were writers, partly because Louisa was heavily influenced by her father's beliefs, and also partly due to the fact that Louisa never married and all her years were closely tied to her parents and sisters. In addition to tying the two lives together extremely well, the author does a superb job of analyzing Louisa's writing and providing literary commentary on the merits of her works and the reflection of them on her life. I knew little about the author before reading this book and felt like this biography gave me a comprehensive understanding of Louisa and her family.

 

Stars: 4