Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Louisa May Alcott

Two Short Stories by Louisa May Alcott

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I’ve been reading stories and novels by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) to understand what the popular culture of the 1860s,1870s, and 1880s was like. I could call it research for my historical work-in-progress, and it is that, but it’s also become something more.

Alcott first gained literary notice during the Civil War. In 1863, she published Hospital Sketches, a collection of stories about a volunteer’s experiences in a Washington, D.C., convalescent hospital for wounded Union soldiers. As serious as the subject was, Alcott also treated it with sympathetic humor, and she did it the right way by making herself the object of the jokes and comical situations. 

She continued to write and publish short stories (the family needed her income). And then, in 1868 and 1869, came the two-part publication of Little Women, and international fame for Miss Alcott. (I’ve told the story here of how I came to read Little Women, not exactly voluntarily.) When she did a European tour in 1870, she was surprised to discover that she was famous in England as she was in America. Little Women was a sensation.

It’s also set during the Civil War, and the wounding of the March patriarch in battle becomes one of the significant scenes of the novel. Several of her short stories also referred to the war, set either during or shortly afterward.

A Country Christmas is one of those stories. A young woman visiting relatives gets the idea to invite two city friends to spend “a real country Christmas” with them. It’s not exactly a “city mouse and country mouse” story, but the two rather blasé city friends experience the values of family, community, hard work, and true friendship. It’s a charming story, definitely of its period, and it shows the author using a light touch to extol country values.

Kate’s Choice was published sometime later and most likely after Alcott’s European tour. A teenaged English heiress is sent to America after the deaths of her parents. Her mother had been the only daughter among several brothers in a farm family. All of the children had done well financially, but their lives had taken them away from their mother. 

According to the terms of her father’s trust, Kate is to visit each of her uncles’ families and decide which one to live with. All of them are interested in the girl – she’s charming, pretty, and extremely wealthy. But it’s only when she visits her grandmother that she makes her choice, and the lives of everyone in the family will change. It’s a sweet story and again very much of its time. 

What do these stories tell you about Alcott? She was a woman and author of her time, but she was also something more. Her female characters are strong ones; no damsels in distress are found here. Her stories are straightforward accounts and (fortunately) lack the element of “breathless prose.” G.K. Chesterton would say that she anticipated the School of Realism by about 30 years. 

Alcott also knew her audience – girls and young women. She tapped into an awareness that was growing that would eventually lead to women’s suffrage and equal rights. Her stories may be about well-to-do and middle-class girls at home, but her heroines are independent, with dreams and aspirations of their own. Likely much like Alcott herself.

Related:

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott.

Photograph: Louisa May Alcott about 1870.

“Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott

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I was in 9th grade, at the time part of the middle school where I grew up. Our English teacher assigned our all-boy class two papers about authors – one English and one American. We were required to read one work by each author for our papers. She had a list of 35 English writers and 35 Americans, one for each person in our class. Our choices, however, were determined alphabetically, which meant whoever was last would get the two no one else wanted. Which meant me.

No one wanted to read a play by William Shakespeare, which meant he would be my English author. And the last American author on the list (remember this was an all-boys class) was Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888).

When my name was called, general laughter erupted. The teacher, with her soft Alabama accent in a roomful of New Orleans boys, was irate. She loved Alcott, she said, and she loved Little Women. And if any of us ever wanted to understand girls, we should read the Alcott novel. I knew what I had better read for my report.

Louisa May Alcott originally published Little Women as two books, Part 1 in 1868 and Part 2 in 1869. The story is based on the lives of Alcott’s sisters, family, and friends. A first read of Part 1 by her publisher found it boring, until he had his two daughters read it. Then he had more girls in the target audience read it. The 2,000-copy first edition sold out almost immediately.

The book has been as popular in Britain as it has in the United States, even though the setting is Civil War Massachusetts (Part 1) and Massachusetts and Europe for Part 2. G.K. Chesterton, when he read it, said it had anticipated the Realism School in literature by about 30 years.

To read it today, you also realize how it anticipated the television mini-series. It’s episodic chapters are almost ideally suited for the small screen (see the 2017 mini-series version developed by Heidi Thomas, she of Call the Midwife). The well-loved work has been adapted countless times for stage, movies, and television. It’s even been adapted as a musical and for anime.

And Little Women is well-loved with good reason. It captures of the lives of the four March sisters living between childhood and adulthood (thus the title, “little women”). The family is living through the Civil War period, with their father serving as a chaplain with the Union army. Each chapter centers on a particular sister – Meg the wise one, Jo the headstrong one with a burning passion to write, Amy the pretty and artistic one, and Beth, the youngest, most frail, and kindest of the girls. In their father’s absence, their mother Marmee presides over the family. 

For all four girls, and the next-door neighbor Theodore (“Laurie”), the story is something of a coming-of-age novel. While the story is set during the Civil War, the war itself rarely intrudes, until in Part 1 Mr. March is taken ill with pneumonia and Mrs. March travels to Washington, D.C. to care for him. Part 2 occurs after the war is over.

Louisa May Alcott

It’s a well-written, engaging story. As you read, you come to like these sisters, and you keep reading o find out what will happen to them and their mother. I have to admit, having seen the 1994 movie version, I can only identify Susan Sarandon as Mrs. March, although Emily Watson did a fine job in the 2017 BBC television series. Those two adaptations stick very closely to the original novels. 

I read the work thinking there would be more about the Civil War than I had remembered from my first reading back in high school. There’s not. The war is a distant and unrelated event in the story. Even Mrs. March rushing to her husband’s bedside is never detailed. 

But it’s still a good story. Alcott wrote well, with passion and with humor. Some of the predicaments that Jo and Amy in particular get into are close to hilarious.

For my ninth-grade papers, I read Julius Caesar and Little Women. My lack of choice ended up standing me in good stead with the teacher, who gave the class a Southern evil eye, daring anyone to laugh, when I read my paper (as we were required to do). I saw a few grins, which quickly disappeared when she turned her attention upon the miscreant. No one laughed.

Top illustration: A drawing of the March house. 

Related:

Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott. 

“Hospital Sketches” by Louisa May Alcott

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In 1862, Louisa May Alcott decided she would do her duty for the Union effort on the Civil War and volunteered to become a nurse. She eventually found herself at an army hospital in Georgetown, part of Washington, D.C. She wrote letters to her family in Massachusetts, describing her experiences. And eventually, the letters became the basis for Hospital Sketches, published in 1863.

You would expect an account of Civil War hospital experiences to be extremely serious. And for the most part, Hospital Sketches is. But it is also laugh-out-loud funny, especially in the early chapters.

Alcott turned her experiences into a fictional account. While Massachusetts is the same starting place and Washington, D.C. the destination, the account of traveling from one to the other is close to hysterical. But nothing will dampen the enthusiasm of our intrepid heroine, Nurse Tribulation Periwinkle (Alcott might have been reading too much Charles Dickens to come up with a name like that). Known affectionately to her family as Trib, she will conquer railroads, shipping lines, army bureaucracy, and hospital assignment changes as calmly as the most dedicated Stoic. Well, sort of.

An example is the sailing part of the journey. It is a brand-new ship. Nurse Periwinkle, having two close drowning calls as a child, is convinced that the ship will inevitably pick her journey as the occasion to sink. Sharing a large sleeping room with several other women, and realizing there are no life preservers, she determines that one of the ladies has the best chance for floating on the open sea, and her plan is to latch on to her when the boat sinks. The poor woman doesn’t understand why Nurse Periwinkle becomes so attached to her. 

The account of the journey to Washington is filled with anecdotes like that. Once our heroine arrives, however, she will do her duty for her country. It takes her a while to get used to the sights and smells of a Civil War hospital, not to mention the needed washing of the patients. But here the story takes a serious turn, because Nurse Periwinkle will face men dismembered, disfigured, and dying. 

Louisa May Alcott

Alcott (1832-1888) is best known for her novels and short stories. Little Women, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys are American classics. She grew up associating with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was a well-known adherent of Transcendentalism. She was an abolitionist and a feminist. She also wrote numerous gothic thrillers under a pen name. 

Hospital Sketches is funny, sad, and poignant. Alcott had more latitude in adapting her letters into a fictional account rather than a non-fiction memoir, but the work still provides insights into the hospital experiences of doctors, nurses, and patients in the Civil War years.

Top photograph: A Civil War nurse, about 1864.