Review: - Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen

I know this is my blog and I shouldn't feel like I have to apologise if I've not managed to post anything for a couple of weeks, but I do and so here I am, apologising yet again. In the past two blog-free weeks I've read quite a lot, but just been generally too exhausted to function outside of work. Today is my first free day off in aaaaaages, and I just finished The Woman Behind Little Women - the first book I've read for my Year of Reading Louisa May Alcott.

Here's a quick synopsis of the biography from Goodreads:

A vivid, energetic account of the life of Louisa May Alcott, whose work has delighted millions of readers
Louisa May Alcott portrays a writer as worthy of interest in her own right as her most famous character, Jo March, and addresses all aspects of Alcott’s life: the effect of her father’s self-indulgent utopian schemes; her family’s chronic economic difficulties and frequent uprootings; her experience as a nurse in the Civil War; the loss of her health and frequent recourse to opiates in search of relief from migraines, insomnia, and symptomatic pain. Stories and details culled from Alcott’s journals; her equally rich letters to family, friends, publishers, and admiring readers; and the correspondence, journals, and recollections of her family, friends, and famous contemporaries provide the basis for this lively account of the author’s classic rags-to-riches tale.
Alcott would become the equivalent of a multimillionaire in her lifetime based on the astounding sales of her books, leaving contemporaries like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James in the dust. This biography explores Alcott’s life in the context of her works, all of which are to some extent autobiographical. A fresh, modern take on this remarkable and prolific writer, who secretly authored pulp fiction, harbored radical abolitionist views, and completed heroic service as a Civil War nurse, Louisa May Alcott is in the end also the story of how the all-time beloved American classic Little Women came to be. This revelatory portrait will present the popular author as she was and as she has never been seen before.

When my mum first read Little Women to us I remember telling her that I wanted to be Jo, and I remember her telling me that Louisa Alcott was the basis for the character of Jo, but I didn't realise quite how much that was true. As I was reading this book so many scenes and event in the lives of the Alcotts were just straight out of Little Women or one of its' sequels. The lives of the four March sisters are the idealised versions of Louisa's own life. The reality of Louisa's childhood was in reality often a lot closer to the experience of the Hummels, the German family the Marches feed and take care of in Little Women. Louisa's father, Bronson Alcott was one of the major founders of the Transcendentalist movement and originally a teacher along the kind of lines of Mr Bhaer, however his ideas about equal education, even allowing a black girl into his classroom alongside his white pupiles, were way ahead of their time and led to failure after failure and to the Alcott family fleeing their debts and moving time after time. Throughout her life, Louisa's father was much more of a man of ideas than of action. Early on he befriended such greats as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both of whom provided Louisa with inspiration for numerous characters. Although Louisa has made a better version of her father in Mr March, his ideas of childraising are still clear throughout the books. Plumfeild is based on Fruitlands, meant to be a kind of transcendentalist commune but eventually a great failure and some of the hardest years of the Alcotts lives.

I was also happy to see the chapter where Beth dies in Good Wives described as "among the most affecting scenes in all fiction" (p272), as people always have to repress a snigger when I tell them that that scene is pretty much the only one in a book that is guaranteed to make me cry every single time. The character of Beth is an immortalisation of Louisa's sister Elizabeth (Lizzie), who also died young, although not as young as Beth March. The last time I read Jo's Boys I found a note I'd never read before about how the real life version of Amy had died prior to the book being written, which is why she doesn't feature so much in the last volume. Basically, the Little Women books are Louisa's life with the bad bits taken out. 

There were a lot of things I already vaguely knew in Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, but to have the detail behind them made a huge difference. For example, the entire early part of Louisa Alcott's writing career was spent in her writing thrillers and the 'blood and thunder' tales that Jo March eventually becomes so ashamed of in Good Wives. I also solved my issues with the episode of Friends where they go on and on about how Beth dies in Little Women when I was always convinced she dies in Good Wives. Apparently that's a geographical thing, as in the States the two volumes are published as one, under the title Little Women, whereas in the UK they are more often published in the original two volumes under two seperate titles. This is good as it means I can finally forgive Friends and move on with my life... 

I'm glad that I read this before diving into any of Alcott's major works, as I now feel that I have a solid grounding of knowledge going in. It's also the kind of book I'm going to be pushing into the hands of everybody I know who has even a vague enjoyment of Little Women, and yes, I've come away from it with quite a reading list, not only of particular Alcott titles I want to read (particularly Transcendentalist Wild Oats, Louisa's account of the Fruitlands episode), but also a renewed desire to read Thoreau's Walden, which I picked up a gorgeous copy of in a charity shop back in January. This was always a book I was going to want to read, and I'm glad that it was so well written, well presented and engaging. Yay for Louisa Alcott, breadwinner of her family, crusader for justice, and creator of the Marches! :-)

Review: - Saplings by Noel Streatfeild

Saplings was the last Noel Streatfeild novel I had on my shelves that I had never read before, and having finished it I wish that I'd been able to stray from re-reading more and delve deeper into her adult novels. Being brought up on her children's novels (Ballet Shoes and the rest..) I thought I knew what to expect from her, but Saplings proved me wrong. Yes, it was still told with a similar voice to favourites such as Apple Bough and White Boots; it still had that childish innocence and simplicity in the way that the story was told, but the subject matter, to put it plainly, shocked me. Anywhere but in a Streatfeild novel I would have barely blinked at the regular references to sex, the evidence of the psychological trauma created by death, and the dealings with alcoholism, depression, and attempted suicide, but in Streatfeild, it rocked my safe little world.

I came across the beautiful Persephone edition of the book while rumaging in one of the most awesome second hand bookshops ever, and then it sat on the shelf for ages, and only the impending end of the year finally coerced me into reading it, but I'm so glad that I did. I love it when an author (especially one as well - known and loved as Streatfeild) completely contradicts everything I expect of her, while still letting me know that this is still a Streatfeild book that I'm reading. Saplings is a book about the Second World War, but not at all in the same way that When the Siren Wailed was. The latter was a very simplistic childish account of wartime experiences, told through the eyes of the children only, whereas the former is this and much more - told through a variety of narrators, including the four Wiltshire children, both of their parents, their governess and various Aunts and Uncles, it builds up a hugely diverse, varied and intense account of the experiences of one family through one of the greatest struggles possible for an English familiy to live through in recent history.

Saplings starts off on a beach, with the children, Laurel, Tony, Kim and Tuesday, enthralled by the fact that their parents Lena and Alex have arrived to spend the rest of the holidays with them. The opening scene is an incredibly Streatfeild-esque one - the children are pretty much all showing off for 'Dad', who is the hero of the story, and are planning on swimming out to their raft - a difficult feat for Kim, the showoff of the family, who has never done so before. From this innocuous beginning, the story rapidly intensifies, shocking me by the combination of the words 'passion' and 'naked' in the same sentence by page sixteen! The parts of the story told from the point of view of Lena, the children's mother, are integral to the build up of events - Alex and Lena's relationship is an incredibly intense one, and Lena is not particularly fulfilled by motherhood. Alex is what she lives for, and her love of him is very focused and consuming. You could say that it's her feelings for him which dictate the course of the entire novel.

The major reason that I found the novel so engrossing was the fact that it strayed from the usual happy ever after ending. Although the way the story ends is far from hopeless, it comes very abruptly, and there doesn't seem to much cohesion. Whereas usually the happiness of children is paramount in Noel Streatfeild's novels, this is never the case in Saplings. About a third of the way through the novel and incredibly sad and traumatic event occurs, which I don't want to mention because I'd really love you all to read the book, and after that the children's feelings are only considered from the point of view of the multitudes of relatives who feel they know 'what's best' for them. It was incredibly sad. It was also very sad to read children growing up without the healthy, wholesome, loving environments which are what I loved about Streatfeild's books as a child, and for that reason I'm glad that I waited to be twenty four before reading this novel. I know it sounds a bit pathetic of me to say, but part of me feels like I've had an idol smashed by the experience of reading Saplings. Because I am the age I am, I can enjoy it and realise that the experience I've had with this book eventually makes her a stronger writer for me, and one that I can continue to get to know and love from an adult point of view, rather than always reading her work with an eye for nostalgia. If I'd read it when I was younger, I'm not sure that would have been the case.

The blurb for this book talks about Noel Streatfeild's ability to see the world from a child's perspective, and says that what makes the book special is the way that she uses that skill to explore very adult problems, and this is definintely the case. The novel is basically a coming of age of all of the Wiltshire children to some degree, but mainly of Laurel, and her becoming a woman is marked by the many awful situations she experiences.

Not a happy book, but a very honest one, and a portrayal of the awful rammifications of the Second World War, even for those not directly involved in it, that you don't see often. I highly recommend this book. It gave me a totally new experience with an author I expected nothing new from, and that's an achievement.

A Year of Reading... Louisa May Alcott

(image source)

Some of you who read my blog may know about my Year of Reading Noel Streatfeild. Earlier this year I discovered that Streatfeild, one of my favourite childhood authors, had actually written a lot more books than I was aware of, which led to 2011 being the year in which I tried to read as many of her books as I possibly could, made problematic by being on a book buying ban for the first three months of the year. However, I think I’ve done pretty well, and I’ve had a great time doing it. My reading of Streatfeild has led to some more interesting discoveries about some other favourite authors (J.M Barrie, L.M Montgomery, and Louisa May Alcott among them) who were much more prolific than I’d previously thought.

I have an enduring love for Little Women and its’ sequels. It is the first book I remember reading by myself, for fun, outside of school, and to this day the books remain very close to my heart. As with Streatfeild, I was unaware of exactly how much Louisa Alcott had written, and I’m quite excited to discover some of her adult fiction. I’ve found an awesome website which has pretty much all of her novels, plays and short stories in full online. However, I’m going to be trying not to read too many of them like this, as I know from previous experience that online reading and I don’t really get along. I’m a diehard fan of ‘the book’ and I always will be. Also, my eyes dislike looking at screens for too long! I may, however, read the short stories online, and other things in desperation, and to facilitate the successful continuation of my 2012 book buying ban.

Little Women is pretty much my all – time favourite book, and as the March girls are based on Louisa Alcott and her three sisters, I’m also going to add biographies and non – fiction to the list of books. I’d like to finish the year knowing a lot more about the woman who wrote the book that has had undeniably the biggest impact on my life so far.

Weirdly, it’s very difficult to get a complete list of Alcott’s works. The most comprehensive list I’ve found (and also the place where they are online) is here and it’s this that I’ll be working from I think. Honestly, I didn’t do brilliantly with reviewing the Streatfeild books I read this year, so my resolution is to do better this year. I’m excited!