During the course of her short life (she died at 39), she was a teacher, governess, and author. She was a not-so-patient daughter, a discontented lover, and a rebellious sister. Though surrounded by Gothic myths and legends since the publication of Jane Eyre, she was surprisingly fun-loving, wry, and witty.

A moment of silence for Charlotte, who has saved, changed, challenged so many of our lives. This year, for the first time, her date of death will serve as Hyperemesis Gravidarum Awareness Day.

“November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year,” said Margaret, standing at the window one dull afternoon, looking out at the frostbitten garden.

“That’s the reason I was born in it,” observed Jo pensively, quite unconscious of the blot on her nose.

Now that November is coming to an end, it’s time to celebrate the birthday of Louisa May Alcott, who was born on this day in 1832.  And so, you’re in for a treat…Kelly O’Connor McNees, author of The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott , is here to give her thoughts on the very human LMA.  Welcome, Kelly!

I have always loved Little Women, of course, but Little Women is not really what made me want to write a novel about Louisa May Alcott. If I had never read any other novels or stories written by Louisa, nor any of the books written about her, I probably would have gone on happily rereading Little Women each year around Christmastime and not thinking very much about the woman who created it.

But one day in the library I picked up a copy of Martha Saxton’s biography of Louisa May Alcott. It stirred something in me and suddenly I wanted to read everything in the Alcott solar system but Little Women. This includes dozens and dozens of stories, a few novels, and one piece of thinly disguised journalism about her experience as a nurse during the Civil War. Next, I turned to Louisa’s collected letters and journals and the biographies by Madeline Stern and John Matteson.

The narrative voice of Little Women is polished and reserved, a spinster aunt telling a group of children a cozy story in which she has no personal stake. But the voice and content of Louisa’s other work, not to mention her letters and journals, is immediate and vibrant. This writing and the biographies reveal her to have been a person of intense and changing states of mind, one who was, in turns, passionate, depressed, prickly, angry, manic, lonely, and full of good humor. In other words, Louisa May Alcott was a real person. And realizing that is what made me want to write a novel about her.

I could list the facts that usually scandalize and/or surprise fans of gentle-mannered Little Women, and there are plenty—Louisa wrote sensational tales under a pen name and was very much motivated by money; she wrote about love gone violently awry, stalkers, and illegitimate children, as well as the experience of opium, to which she became addicted after years of chronic pain—but a mere list, without the context that life, day in and out, provides, seems to me a boring exercise.

I was and am interested in the choices Louisa made each day in her attempt to cultivate a certain kind of life that was rare indeed for a woman in her time: A life of independence and fulfilling work. We know, looking back, that she was destined to become one of the most famous women in human history, but until, at age 35, she wrote the book that became a bestseller, she did not know what the future held. And, yet, she rose each day and wrote until her hand cramped, determined to persevere to publication—not to be lauded, but so that she could provide for her family. Where does that drive come from? What hopes and wounds resided in the heart of this real woman? That’s the question I wrote The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott to answer.

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.

First up, Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell, born on this day in 1900.  Here are some fun facts about the fearless Peggy:

~ Like me, Peggy was a Smithie who didn’t graduate from the illustrious women’s college.  She attended for roughly a year and lived in Chapin House, but dropped out after her mother’s death.

~ Peggy had mother issues, exacerbated by the fact that her dying mother left a hell of a deathbed letter for her to peruse.  This set the standard of her behavior almost impossibly high…a standard she was quick to break.

~ Kicked out of the Junior League.  Find out why in the pages of my book

~ Woman reporter.  Peggy held her own in a career as an investigative journalist at a time when women simply did not do so.

~ Publishing juggernaut.  For all that Peggy dissembled and pretended her “little book” was just a “little” contribution to American letters, it actually revolutionized and revitalized Depression-era publishing.  Gone With the Wind found readers across all walks of life, and its road to movie adaptation was nothing short of a phenomenon.

~ Philanthropist.  I learned from the Margaret Mitchell House’s website that during World War II, Peggy managed to raise $65 million for a replacement to the sunken U.S.S. Atlanta…in sixty days.

There’s a wonderful body of work about MM out there, but I must admit to being tickled pink about Ellen F. Brown‘s upcoming Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller’s Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood.

Happy birthday to the irascible and charming Peggy!

Introduction
Self: Lizzy Bennet, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Faith: Janie Crawford, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Happiness: Anne Shirley, Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Dignity: Celie, The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Family Ties: Francie Nolan, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Indulgence: Claudine, The Claudine Novels by Colette
Fight: Scarlett O’Hara, Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Compassion: Scout Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Simplicity: Laura Ingalls, The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder
Steadfastness: Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Ambition: Jo March, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Magic: Mary Lenox, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Epilogue & Acknowledgments

One of the most painful parts of writing this book was realizing who I couldn’t include…The Betsy-Tacy books of Maud Hart Lovelace, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Anne Frank, and about 2353252525235 others.  But what a list!

Which chapter are you most excited about?  Which heroines do you wish I’d been able to cover?

This was Charlotte Brontë, and she’s been on my mind recently for many reasons.

To me, reading is as immersive and essential as breathing, and there are some authors who are more than my favorite writers…they feel like my intimate friends.  Charlotte Brontë is one of those women, and she’s the subject of my first Heroine Mini-Series featuring three pivotal moments in her life.

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That shuffling scamp! Charlotte read the letter swiftly, taking in the news once, twice, until she could scarcely see for anger.  He had done it again.  Thomas Newby, the man who had published Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, was spreading a vicious rumor, this time in the United States.  Seeking to expand his fortune and capitalize off of the controversy surrounding Charlotte’s incendiary Jane Eyre, he had led the American publishing house Harpers to believe that the pen names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell all belonged to one person and that Jane Eyre, the American rights to which they had just bought, was in fact the work of one author instead of three.

That shuffling scamp! The Brontë sisters had never been ones to make public spectacles of themselves, but after the months of terrible reviews and public scrutiny, this was the last straw.  Charlotte and her sister Anne tromped four miles across unforgiving moorland, enduring a thunderstorm before falling into a carriage that carried them to London.  Barely rested and painfully aware of their countrified appearance in the midst of a bustling city, they sought out the offices of Smith, Elder.  Charlotte herself had carried on a years-long correspondence with her publisher, George Smith…under the pseudonym of Currer Bell.  And now his name, the name of the man who had fought for her book and brought it into the world, was being smeared an ocean away.

That shuffling scamp! Charlotte insisted, gently at first, more passionately when denied, that she must see Mr. Smith at once.  And there he was, “young, tall, gentlemanly,” stepping forward courteous and confused at the sight of these two thin, timid-looking women.  Charlotte thrust a letter into his hand, one he had addressed with his own hand to “Currer Bell, Esq.”  He started, sputtering.

“Where did you get this?”

“At the post office.  It was addressed to me.”  She let the words sink in before she continued.  “We have both come that you might have ocular proof that there are at least two of us.”

To be continued…

]]> http://theheroinesbookshelf.com/2010/03/03/charlotte-bronte-in-london-heroine-mini-series-part-1/feed/ 0 http://theheroinesbookshelf.com/2010/02/17/guys-of-the-heroines/ http://theheroinesbookshelf.com/2010/02/17/guys-of-the-heroines/#comments Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:57:45 +0000 Erin Blakemore http://theheroinesbookshelf.com/?p=93 At the beginning of this whole entire process, I faced a nervewracking choice:  I wanted to write about great heroines of literature.  But did I want to limit my perspective to just female authors? In the end, I decided yes and focused on heroine/author pairs whose qualities complimented or offset ]]> At the beginning of this whole entire process, I faced a nervewracking choice:  I wanted to write about great heroines of literature.  But did I want to limit my perspective to just female authors?

In the end, I decided yes and focused on heroine/author pairs whose qualities complimented or offset one another.  But with the same stroke, I cut out a whole set of incredible heroines written by men.  In apology, and in tribute, here are some of my faves:

• Mary Mackenzie – The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd:  This book was given to me by a friend who apparently knew my tastes inside and out.  Mary is a proper English girl who travels to China to fulfill an engagement to a man she barely knows.  Her slow liberation from a corseted existence and her torrid affair with a mysterious Japanese nobleman makes for gut-wrenching, page-turning reading.  Better yet, this book is epistolary (and pulls it off!) and deals with a facet of imperialism I had never thought of before.
• Lucy Honeychurch – A Room With a View by E.M. Forster:  Oh, A Room With a View.  I have watched your Merchant Ivory loveliness a million times, but I never really appreciated you before reading the book upon which you were based.  Lucy is annoying, flawed, and hopelessly muddled, and her story is easily one of my favorites ever.
• Matilda Wormwood – Matilda by Roald Dahl:  A reader, an adventurer, and a brave little soul, Matilda stands at the center of a book that completely galvanized eight-year-old me.  Her antics may be unrealistic, but her pluck and spunk aren’t.
• Anna Karenina – Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy:  You know those characters you love to hate?  This was a book I loved to hate…it just didn’t resonate with me the first time around.  But I gave it a second chance (somehow), and discovered a petty, selfish, insecure, nuanced, and miserable character in the lovely, corrupt Anna.  If you were forced to read this book in high school or college, consider giving it a second chance (I recommend the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation).

This is a woefully incomplete list, but it’s good to remember that women aren’t the only people who can write incredible heroines.  So…who’s on your list of favorite guy-authored heroines?

Why embrace the serious sides of my literary heroines when many of them left such happy, pert, intelligent women as their legacy?  (Anne of Green Gables or Lizzie Bennet, anyone?)  Why not just focus on the picture they wanted to present to the world…the picture of the productive, happy writer who left her dirty laundry between two covers and moved on with life?

I was reminded of this question when reading this article about Louisa May Alcott and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dirty little opium secrets (or not-so-secrets, as the case may be).  For me, the answer is all about context.  When we look at the real lives of these writers, their accomplishments in the face of great trials and hardships are even more impressive.  Louisa May Alcott wrote her books in a state of constant, crushing financial worry…and if she hadn’t known what it was like to be poor, she could never have given us the image of four sisters sewing their way through dire straits and attempting to burden the load they must shoulder.  Could Charlotte Brontë have made Jane Eyre‘s Lowood School so terrifying if she herself had not survived a similar experience?

Now that I know the backstory behind my favorite books, I feel even more grateful that these women took time out of their lives to give something to us, people they never met or even imagined.  Not that I subscribe to the thought that writers must be tortured (that’s probably material for a whole ‘nother post), but I think they’re at least allowed to be human.  When we deny a Jane Austen or a Frances Hodgson Burnett her humanity, we miss out on the rest of the story.