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