February 2021 Book: Marmee & Louisa

 

Abigail May Alcott is at the heart of Eve LaPlante’s “Marmee & Louisa,” a dual biography that attempts to save Louisa’s mother from invisibility, the “lot of most women of the past,” or so LaPlante claims. Her letters and journals scissored away by her husband and daughter, who wanted to avert gossip about her difficult marriage, Abigail Alcott is of course the complex core of Louisa’s novel “Little Women.” LaPlante (who is a descendant of Abigail’s brother) has mined what’s left of Abigail’s prose to insist that “Marmee,” as her daughters called her, was a fine writer, an indefatigable reformer, a devoted teacher — and, above all, Louisa’s literary lodestar.

The daughter of a prominent Boston family, Abigail May was heir to a certain privilege. Even if, as a woman, she could not attend Harvard, she studied privately, learning Latin, French, chemistry, botany and moral philosophy. Determined to put her education to use by teaching, she met and fell in love with Amos Bronson Alcott, a self-taught peddler turned progressive educator, in 1827, when she was 26. After the penniless Alcott refused to hire her as his deputy, she proposed marriage instead. Little did she know she’d be his aggrieved assistant for the rest of her life. “I do love this good woman,” her self-involved husband confided to his journal, “because she loves me.”

NYT Book Review, Dec. 2012

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