Posts Tagged ‘louisa may alcott’

One of the questions I get asked most often is “I’m a fan of [insert author here].  What books and resources should I read to find out more?”

When I wrote The Heroine’s Bookshelf, I very deliberately decided to make the book as accessible as possible…which meant excluding a bibliography or academic footnotes.  However, the history major in me demanded a very rigorous research process, and I consulted multiple books and primary sources for each chapter.

Rather than bore you with my long, snarled list of primary sources and books, I’d like to recommend some great further reading to serve as an entree into the lives of my literary heroines.  Please bear in mind that I could have written an entire book on the research materials alone, so this represents a very truncated list!

Jane Austen: If you’re looking for a comprehensive guide to all things Jane, by all means start at The Republic of Pemberley’s most impressive Selective Jane Austen Bibliography.  Great starting places include Jane’s Fame:  How Jane Austen Conquered the World by Claire Harman and A Memoir of Jane Austen: And Other Family Recollections, by James Edward Austen-Leigh, a great period document that informs Jane bios to this day.

Zora Neale Hurston: Nobody wrote about Zora’s life quite as well as Zora herself, notably in Dust Tracks on a Road, but I particularly enjoyed Valerie Boyd’s Wrapped In Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston and Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit by Deborah G. Plant.

Lucy Maud Montgomery: Maud scholarship is making huge strides, thanks in part to the L.M. Montgomery Institute and the Lucy Maud Montgomery Literary Society.  I found true inspiration and great information in Irene Gammel’s Looking for Anne of Green Gables, Mary Henley Rubio’s Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, and the lovely Annotated Anne of Green Gables edited by Wendy Elizabeth Barry, Margaret Anne Doody, and Mary Doody Jones and published in a gorgeous edition by the Oxford University Press.

Alice Walker: Alice Walker is still living out her own biography.  I enjoyed Alice Walker: A Life by Evelyn C. White and Alice Walker: Critical perspectives past and present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah.

Betty Smith: I was disappointed at the dearth of biography on this amazing figure of literature, and hope that more authors take up the call to document Betty’s life in greater detail.  That said, I devoured Valerie Raleigh Yow’s Betty Smith: Life of the Author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and found Carol Siri Johnson’s online dissertation on Betty Smith to be quite helpful.

Colette: Though she was a formidable, fascinating figure indeed, Americans don’t tend to pay too much attention to Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, and many of her biographies are out of print.  I enjoyed Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman and found interesting information in Michele Sarde’s Colette and Colette: A Life by Herbert R. Lottman.  If anything, any book on Colette is worth peeking into for ravishing photos of the famously beautiful Colette!

Margaret Mitchell: Peggy Mitchell was notoriously…unreliable when it came to relating her own biography.  That said, Ellen Firsching Brown and John Wiley have done a stunning job with their recently-released Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller’s Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood. Darden Asbury Pyron’s Southern Daughter is an entertaining starting point for more biography on Peg as opposed to the book for which she is famous.

Harper Lee: Nelle was the only other living author featured in my book, and she is notoriously private about her life to the chagrin of her fans and the detriment of her biographers.  That said, it is hard to find a biography as lovingly researched and thorough as Charles J. Sheilds’s Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee.

Laura Ingalls Wilder: Laura’s another writer who is currently undergoing a scholarship renaissance, helped along by the amazing folks at Beyond Little House and Laurati who are doing interesting work nationwide and even worldwide.  I was particularly entranced by Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life by Pamela Smith Hill, which is hands-down my favorite Laura biography.  Other great bios include John E. Miller’s Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, Anita Clair Fellman’s Little House, Long Shadow, and the ever-controversial The Ghost In the Little House by William Holtz, which chronicles the life and work of Rose Wilder Lane.  As far as Laura expertise, you can’t be savvier or more well-informed than the legendary William Anderson, who has made a place for himself as THE Laura expert of the ages.  Click here for a bibliography of his books and pamphlets on Laura.

Charlotte Brontë: Charlotte’s one of those women who has had books written on the books about her…there’s that much incredible information about the Brontë family.  I personally love Elizabeth Gaskell’s warm, chatty memoir about her friend, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, though it’s been criticized for its insistence that Charlotte was proper rather than passionate.   In case you care to read a biography on Charlotte not written in the nineteenth century, you can’t go wrong with Rebecca Fraser’s The Brontës or Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life.

Louisa May Alcott: On last count, I personally own over 10 books about Louy.  My favorites include the very innocent, anachronistic yet informative Invincible Louisa by Cornelia Meigs and John Matteson’s unforgettable, Pulitzer-prize-winning double biography of Louisa and her father, Bronson…Eden’s Outcasts gets special mention as one of the only biographies that has both made me cry and that I have dreamt about.  Highly recommended.  That said, 2010 was a banner year for Alcott scholarship, producing both Harriet Reisen’s Louisa May Alcott:  The Woman Behind Little Women and Susan Cheever’s Louisa May Alcott:  A Personal Biography.

Frances Hodgson Burnett: “Fluffy” Burnett was another woman I found it hard to research, since she has been shunted off to the kidlit category by many dismissive biographers.  Her lovely autobiography, The One I Knew Best of All, is barely worth mentioning for its obvious unreliability.  That said, we must content ourselves with Anne Thwaite’s dual Frances bios and Gretchen Gerzina’s Frances Hodgson Burnett, and with Gerzina’s perceptive biographical notes in the W.W. Norton Annotated Secret Garden.

“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.

Welcome to October, a month of writing, of working, of striving, and of celebrating.  I’m not sure how it’s possible, but The Heroine’s Bookshelf comes out in 19 days!  In the meantime, I find that a heroine is well-suited by October:

• ramblings
• conversations with dear friends
• rifling through the kitchen to find where the tea is
• thinking hard about best cardigan to value ratio
• shirking raking duty whenever possible!

How about you?  What’s on a heroine’s docket this October?

Jo was very busy in the garret, for the October days began to grow chilly, and the afternoons were short. For two or three hours the sun lay warmly in the high window, showing Jo seated on the old sofa, writing busily, with her papers spread out upon a trunk before her, while Scrabble, the pet rat, promenaded the beams overhead, accompanied by his oldest son, a fine young fellow, who was evidently very proud of his whiskers.

Quite absorbed in her work, Jo scribbled away till the last page was filled, when she signed her name with a flourish and threw down her pen, exclaiming…
“There, I’ve done my best! If this won’t suit I shall have to wait till I can do better.”
- Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

Missed the tour?  Never fear!  Click here for a podcast, map, and handouts for the tour and recreate the experience alone or with an intrepid friend!

We finally have details on what might be the most anticipated event of my mini book tour…The Heroine’s Bookshelf Heroines of Literature Walking Tour in Greenwich Village, NYC on the evening of Tuesday, October 26!

The tour will be co-hosted and curated by Erin Blakemore, author of The Heroine’s Bookshelf, and Glamour columnist/NYU adjunct journalism professor Jessica Siegel.

The Schedule:

Tuesday, October 26^th

6:15 p.m. – Meet at bookbook bookstore, 266 Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10014; (212) 807-8655

6:30 p.m. sharp – we will leave on the walking tour

7:30 p.m. – Book Launch party and book signing event at bookbook

R.S.V.P. to Heather Drucker, HarperCollins Publicity at heather.drucker@harpercollins.com or 212-207-7468

On the docket are an exploration of the homesites and haunts of some of literature’s greatest heroines, culminating in a launch party and book signing at an independent book store.  Prepare to see.

. . . . .The street where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women . . . .

. . . . .The place where Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter Rose Wilder Lane lived in bohemian splendor as a “bachelor girl”. . . .

. . . . .The home of Edith Wharton where she lived with her mother at age 20 .….

. . . . . From Wharton’s House of Mirth – the former Benedick men’s residence where Lawrence Selden, Lily Bart’s friend and confidant, lived – the house is still there! . . . .

. . . . .The former home of Alice Walker and husband Mel Leventhal . . . .

. . . . .Edna St. Vincent Millay’s house (the smallest house in NYC!), and the many places that she lent her “heroism”: The Cherry Lane Theater, the Provincetown Playhouse, old Chumley’s location ….

. . . . .Willa Cather’s famous haunts .  . . .

And, much, much more!

This event is free and fun.  All you need to do to attend is to R.S.V.P. to Heather Drucker, HarperCollins Publicity at heather.drucker@harpercollins.com or 212-207-7468. I can’t wait to walk and learn with you!

It’s a singularly exciting, overwhelming, and trying time these days.  I find myself on quite the rollercoaster of ups and downs in terms of my day job, my writing, my relationships, and my own self-image.

Maybe it’s some kind of lunar phase or solar phenomenon (since everyone I know seems to be in upheaval), maybe it’s my age or something in the water.  I’m certainly at sea, and it turns out that all I really know for sure is what I have known how to do since the beginning…read myself into comfort and some semblance of sanity.

These days that usually looks like a book by or about Louisa May Alcott, irascible and overworked, overwrought and feisty and cranky as can be.  You wouldn’t know it to read Eight Cousins or Rose in Bloom, which are replete with moral lessons even when they show life’s trials (which usually involve things like struggling to be as good as you should be, or contracting a fever which is healed by a cousin’s devoted care).  But I recently had reason to turn back to Little Women…well, more truthfully, I took advantage of my participation in GalleyCat’s World’s Longest Literary Remix Contest (results coming soon!) to revisit it.  And when I took a close look at Chapter 1, I was startled by the sheer restless, anxious energy that spews forth from the book’s first beloved pages.

Just look at the verbs and descriptions:  over the course of a few passages, Jo

• grumbles
• lies on the rug
• states her work makes her “ready to fly out the window or cry”
• laughs
• stretches
• puts her hands in her pockets and whistles
• pulls off her hairnet and shakes down her hair
• warms Marmee’s slippers
• chokes on her tea and drops her bread, butter side down, on the carpet…
• and sings with her sisters.

Could there be a better portrait of the restless energy of a 15-year-old girl too big for her body and outgrowing everything about her life?  Could there be anything more appealing to a modern girl (or struggling, tired, manic, stressed-out woman)?  The beauty, of course, is that some of that anxious spirit comes from Louisa herself.  And just one chapter in, I’m plunged back into one of my primary reasons for persevering:  my admiration of an unconventional “little woman” and of her creator, who had this to say about strife:

I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning to sail my ship.