Louisa as Sister

Once upon a time, four sisters became immortal. When they were young, the four girls were still flesh and blood, ordinary girls who built towers out of their father’s books and put on plays in the barn for their neighbors and went hungry too many nights. One day, when they were all grown up, the second sister took out her magic pen and began to write down the stories of their adventures: the simple yet profound drama of growing up into women and forging their own paths. Like a spell, she transformed her sisters with paper and ink into characters who would live forever: from Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth, and May into Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. This is the story of the sisterhood behind Little Women. This is Louisa as Sister.

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Transcript

Louisa As Sister

JAMIE Welcome to Let Genius Burn, a podcast series about the life and legacy of Louisa May Alcott. I’m Jamie Burgess and I’m Jill Fuller. In today’s episode, we’re meeting the extraordinary sisters who inspired Louisa’s most famous novel, Little Women.

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JILL Once upon a time, four sisters became immortal. When they were young, the four girls were still flesh and blood, ordinary girls who built towers out of their father’s books and put on plays in the barn for their neighbors and went hungry too many nights. One day, when they were all grown up, the second sister took out her magic pen and began to write down the stories of their adventures- the simple yet profound drama of growing up into women and forging their own paths. Like a spell, she transformed her sisters with paper and ink into characters who would live forever: from Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth, and May into Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. 

In 1867, Thomas Niles, who worked for the Roberts Brothers publishing firm, approached Louisa to write a girls’ book. She put it off for 8 months. When she finally started it in May 1868, she expressed her reluctance in her journal: “Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters…” So it was to her sisters- and her memories- that she turned for content. In doing so, she changed the landscape of literature for young women. While the book was supposed to be a girls’ book, Louisa deliberately chose to give her characters the title of “women.” Most coming-of-age literature for young women at the time, according to scholar Anne Boyd Rioux in her book Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, was “More about ‘growing down’ than growing up,” with the heroine “learning to conform to feminine norms rather than discovering herself as an individual.”  Little Women was revolutionary in its insistence that women were unique individuals, and that they deserved a voice and a story. In addition, in focusing on the relationships of sisters and mothers, Rioux writes, “Alcott’s fiction wrote around and essentially supplanted…patriarchal authority as it was manifested in churches, schools, and the home.” The decision on Louisa May Alcott’s part to break away from the mold and create something realistic for young female readers was a daring one. Yet it worked. What made Little Women extraordinary for its time, and what has contributed to its enduring popularity, is how real it felt. The book, one critic wrote, was “fresh, sparkling, natural, and full of soul.” When it was first published, everyone read it: girls, yes, but also boys and grown adults. All fell under the spell of the March sisters, those four vivacious women blazing their own way to womanhood.

“‘Jo,’ ‘Beth,’ and ‘Amy’ are all drawn from life, and are entirely truthful pictures of the three dear sisters who played and worked, loved and sorrowed together so many years ago,” wrote Anna Alcott Pratt in a letter to fans of the book. Anna herself, the oldest of the four, was Meg, pleasant and kind, genteel and social. She was also a talented actress, who met her husband John through their theater troupe. Next came Louisa herself, the topsy-turvey one, the writer, the one who climbed trees. The Jo trying oh-so-desperately to overcome her quick temper and moodiness and shed her faults like too-small clothes. Elizabeth, the third sister, was born two years after Louisa. Called Beth, Lizzie, or Betty, she was shy and quiet, with a love of music, just like the character who bears her name. In the neighborhood plays, as in life, she took a role backstage or in the audience, preferring to watch her sisters play their parts. The final sister was named Abigail May, but when she was older, she insisted on going by her middle name. The baby and the pet of the family, May had also been born after much of the family’s early financial struggles, so she did not carry the same difficult memories her older sisters did. Artistic, beautiful, and ambitious, May was, arguably, the only sister who rivaled Louisa’s creative drive/ambition achieved everything she set out to do. Her life veers the most from the character we know as Amy March.

Through reading Little Women, we tend to think of the sisters as a whole group of four, but in fact, their individual relationships with Louisa were as unique as their personalities and talents. These bonds not only influenced Louisa’s greatest novel, but they were also the foundation of her identity.

JAMIE Louisa May Alcott, whose name has become synonymous with sisterhood through the writing of Little Women, never knew life without a sister, and the first, and last, was Anna.

Anna was the only member of the Alcott family whose life encompassed Louisa’s own, who was there with her from start to finish, as she grew from a bratty, willful child into the famous authoress. The girls were both born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, while their father was teaching there. He was near the start of his career, and he approached parenthood with alarming attention, bordering on obsession. When Anna was born, he watched her with intent and recorded her every move. He made faces at her and studied her reactions. He believed that children were inherently good, and through optimal education methods—that is to say, his own—he could raise a perfect child.

And then came Louisa, who challenged each of his methods and all his beliefs about inherent goodness. The girls were born twenty months apart, and at first, they seemed to bring out the worst in each other. Anna hit her sister and told her father Louisa should be punished. Louisa learned to intimidate and antagonize her older sister. The two girls represented, to their father at least, the opposite ends of the spectrum of temperament, with Anna’s gentle, loving perfection on one side, and Louisa’s brash and moody personality on the other.

As their childhoods progressed and the Alcotts faced hardship and poverty, Louisa and Anna formed an inseparable bond. Both girls grew up with the same sense of self-reliance, intent on making life easier for the family and for each other.

During their year at the experimental utopian community Fruitlands, Anna and Louisa relied on each other for company, games, and stories. They began to make up plays together, and Anna had the most acting talent of all the sisters. While the family lived at Hillside, Louisa and Anna orchestrated a set of five plays that made their parents proud. They continued to pursue this mutual interest while living in Walpole, New Hampshire with their cousins.

From their early teenage years, Louisa and Anna had no choice but to go out to work, and they commiserated together over the labor in their letters. Anna worked as a governess and a teacher. Her acting went on hold while the family struggled financially. Anna didn’t like being separated from the family, as she went to live with her cousins and even as far away as Syracuse, New York. Though Louisa felt responsible to provide financially for her parents and emotionally for her younger sisters, Anna alone didn’t need Louisa’s care. Louisa wrote to her as an equal, where Anna was someone who could help her accomplish the task of caring for the family. With Anna, Louisa was less alone in her burdens.

In 1857, the Alcotts moved back to Concord after nearly ten years in Boston, and Anna Alcott returned to acting in a play called the Loan of a Lover. Neighbor and friend Edward Emerson said that “The Loan of a Lover [was] a charming little play but known to lead to serious results,” as the two actors who played the lovers often, in fact, fell in love.

This was the case with Anna and a local man named John Pratt, who played her love interest. Their on-stage love led to real life romance.

Meanwhile, Lizzie Alcott passed away after her long illness on March 14, 1858. A month later, Anna announced her engagement to John Pratt, giving the Alcotts something hopeful to look forward to: a wedding.

Anna’s wedding is, as Meg’s wedding in Little Women, a defining moment in the lives of the Alcotts, and it is an event that Alcott scholars have often used to investigate family dynamics and to speak about Anna’s character. It’s true that Anna’s wedding does seem indicative, in many ways, of Anna’s personality. It was a simple wedding, where the invitations were sent out in the morning, delivered by Louisa and their younger sister May to the neighbors. Anna wore a pretty silk dress in light gray. The sisters picked lily of the valley around the house for the wedding flowers. It was a humble ceremony that focused on the couple’s devotion to each other, where John Pratt said, “No ceremony could make us more married than we already are.”

The wedding does speak to the Alcott’s values of family and humility. They were not ostentatious—they couldn’t afford to be—but more than that, Anna didn’t have Louisa’s burning ambitions. The poverty and difficulty of the Alcott’s lives thus far had led Anna and Louisa to two different conclusions: Louisa wanted greatness, Anna wanted a quiet life.

The sisters also differed on their attitudes toward marriage. Anna saw the possibility for reprieve from her work as a teacher and governess, while Louisa saw imprisonment. Anna also expressed a desire for a family of her own, while Louisa saw her nuclear family—Bronson, Abigail, Anna, Lizzie, and May—as the center of her life. In fact, the only reason she might consider having a wedding was because family friend Ralph Waldo Emerson kissed Anna to congratulate her, and Louisa said that receiving a kiss from Emerson might make a wedding worthwhile.

Through these difficult years, Louisa had nursed her sister Lizzie through sickness and continued to write and work to provide for the family, hoping against all odds that she could give young May her heart’s desires. With Anna’s marriage, Anna proved again to Louisa that she didn’t need Louisa to take care of her. In Little Women, Meg’s wedding is a great emotional blow to Jo, and there is evidence that it was so for Louisa, who felt she was losing all her sisters at once. But there must have been some relief there, as well, for Louisa, whose life was spent in service to others. Anna remained the sister who could quietly support Louisa, as Louisa supported everyone else.

Anna seemed happy in her life with her husband and sons. She was not discontented the way she had been when she was working, and she settled into her life as a mother. Her husband died suddenly in 1871, and Louisa’s tribute to him in a letter to Anna showed that she had warmed to him as the brother she never had, and believed he was an excellent father, husband, and brother.

In the following years, Louisa and Anna had renewed closeness of their early sisterly bond. With the death of their beloved Marmee in 1877 and May in 1879, the sisters shared the responsibilities of caring for May’s daughter. Anna answered letters to Louisa’s fans and signed them as “Meg,” charming her readers in a way Louisa refused to do. Louisa could still be the obstinate sister, and Anna her kindly foil. Anna could pick up when Louisa was too weak, or sick, or crotchety to do it herself.

After May’s death, Lousia wrote in her journal, ““I see now why I lived, to care for May’s child and not leave Anna all alone.” Louisa never knew life without Anna, and even as she became more ill toward the end of her life, it was life with Anna that kept her alive. And it was Anna, the only living sister, who kept vigil at Louisa’s bedside as she took her last breaths, just hours after the death of their father. Anna recounted Louisa’s final hours in a letter to their longtime family friend, Alf Whitman: “It seemed as if with [Bronson’s] departure, her last earthly care left her, and she felt free to follow.” And Louisa did follow, as we know, shortly afterwards. To Alf, she said, “To you who knew our love for each other I need not speak of this sorrow.”

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JILL Beth dies.

Even if you’ve never read Little Women, you probably know this one pivotal fact in the plot. It’s in every adaptation on the stage and screen because it is central to Jo’s development as a person and a writer. Because it is so devastating and so relatable. But ultimately Beth the character dies because Lizzie the person died, when she was 22 and her not-yet-famous older sister was 25. Lizzie. Elizabeth. The only sister whose name is exactly the same in Louisa’s novel as in real life.

I want to tell you something about Lizzie and Louisa’s sisterhood that doesn’t center on Lizzie’s death, because her death seems to be the only thing that defines her, despite her 22 years of life. But there isn’t much for me to tell. When she was alive, Lizzie hardly appeared in any of Louisa’s personal writings, except in the background, playing in the woods or sending her homemade gingerbread to her writer sister in Boston. A few of Lizzie’s writings remain, namely some letters and a diary she kept when she was 10 years old. Though not a brilliant writer, Lizzie’s accounts provide a picture of what the Alcott girls’ childhood in Concord looked like- a childhood her older sister later turned into fiction. Though Louisa isn’t mentioned often in Lizzie’s journal, we do see glimpses of the two girls together: in these pages, Louisa and Lizzie work in the garden, pick flowers on the hillside, and wash their feet in the stream. It’s not much to go on, but it’s something. Of the four sisters, Lizzie was the most like her father Bronson in temperament and therefore the most unlike Louisa. Bronson called her his “Little Tranquility,” noting “her quiet-loving disposition and serene thought, her happy gentleness and deep contentment.” In most of the glimpses we get of Lizzie from the memories of others, she is more ethereal than real, a spirit rather than a person with her own agency. Friends and family remembered her as “innocent,” “pure,” “a little conscience,” “saintly.” “She was always more passive than active, more appreciative of the achievements of the others than creative herself,” one childhood friend said. Though Lizzie has gone down in history as timid, unambitious, and submissive, her mother Abigail saw a spark of strength within her third daughter. In her journal, Abigail wrote that while Anna needed gentility and disliked hard labor, Louisa and Lizzie were made of stronger metal, a comment that leads me to wonder how much the two may have had in common. Strength can come in many forms, after all.

In Little Women, Beth March dies sweetly and serenely, but when Lizzie died on March 14, 1858, she did so after weeks of intense agony, begging for ether in her final days. “What she had suffered was seen in the face,” Louisa journaled, “for at twenty-three, she looked like a woman of forty…” Although the family believed Lizzie died from complications of the scarlet fever she’d protracted two years earlier, scholars have suggested other possibilities, such as rheumatic fever, tuberculosis, and even anorexia. In Louisa’s account, she and her mother were alone with Lizzie when she died; in Abigail’s recollection, Anna and May were also present. “A curious thing happened,” Louisa wrote, describing the morning of Lizzie’s death. “As Mother and I sat silently watching the shadow fall on the dear little face,” Louisa saw a light mist float up from Lizzie’s body toward the ceiling. When she looked at her mother, she saw that Abigail was also staring at the ceiling. “What did you see?” Louisa asked. Abigail described the exact same mist, which Louisa came to believe was Lizzie’s “life departing visibly.” Lizzie had always been viewed as an angelic spirit, an otherworldly presence in the Alcott family. Here was that holiness made visible for all to see.

Reflecting on the family’s fresh loss after Lizzie’s funeral, Louisa said, “So the first break comes, and I know what death means- a liberator for her, a teacher for us.” Before Lizzie died, Louisa had composed a poem called “Our Angel in the House.” In it, Louisa extols Lizzie’s patience and cheerfulness in the face of death. While beautiful and poignant, the poem focuses more on Louisa than on Lizzie, as she expresses her desire to change and grow from the experience of Lizzie’s death. In the poem, she asks Lizzie to bequeath her with her courage and selflessness; she hopes that this grief will curb her “wild nature.” Besides Lizzie’s virtuous attributes, no mention is made of Lizzie’s time on earth, no memory of their sisterhood included. Instead, Louisa’s desires to be better, to transcend her self, are on full display here. Though the “Angel” in the title presumably refers to Lizzie, one wonders if Louisa wished she could be the earthly angel, transformed into someone new, filling the hole Lizzie was leaving. With much of Louisa and Lizzie’s relationship unknown to us, the poem provides few answers about what the two truly meant to each other.

To find the clues to their relationship, we must go back into the sickroom, where Lizzie lies propped up by pillows and Louisa acts out scenes from Charles Dickens’s novels to cheer her fading sister. In Lizzie’s last months, Louisa hardly left her side. One night, a few guests, including Louisa’s friend Alf Whitman, were visiting the Alcott’s rented house on Bedford Street in Concord. Again and again, Louisa slipped away from the crowd in the parlor to climb the stairs to her sister’s room. Louisa, Alf remembered, was “always full of life and fun, making everybody feel happy and cheerful, yet at all times ready to answer a call from ‘Lizzie.’” “I lead two lives,” Louisa admitted in her journal the November before Lizzie’s death. “One seems gay with plays, the other very sad- in Betty’s room…” At night, Louisa took turns with her mother sitting up to stoke the fire, watching Lizzie stare into the flames, silent and sleepless. “Dear little saint!” Louisa wrote weeks before her sister’s death. “I shall be better all my life for these sad hours with you.”

If we were to build a portrait of Lizzie and Louisa’s relationship solely on what was written down, it would look more like a half-completed puzzle, more conjecture than fact, more fiction than history. What does remain is what Louisa wrote in Little Women after Lizzie’s death, as if that is when Lizzie truly came alive for her. But perhaps that is unfair to assume. Relationships are built of words- conversations, letters, texts- but they are also spun, like gossamer spider webs, from the most fragile yet enduring things: glances, half-smiles, eye-rolls, the squeeze of a hand. What jokes did Louisa and Lizzie share? What knowing looks did they exchange that are lost to memory? What can any of us really know about the invisible threads between two long-dead sisters? 

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JAMIE Of all her relationships with her sisters, Louisa’s relationship with May, the youngest, was perhaps the most nuanced and complex. Unlike Lizzie and Anna, May expressed an ambition that rivaled Louisa’s. She wanted to be an artist, and she started from an early age with drawing, painting, and sculpture. Her talent, skill, and determination gave Louisa both an ally and an adversary within the family. Both women were creative and talented, and they both pursued success, though through different channels and with different attitudes.

May was born Abigail May Alcott, named after her mother, and though she went by “Abbie” for the early years of her life, she later found the name “May” more fashionable. May Alcott was the only sister born in Concord, and she became known around the small town for her exceptional height—she was 5’8”—and her mischievous nature. Constantly described as charming by her neighbors and friends, May Alcott got away with more than her sisters, which Louisa sometimes resented.

May was born in 1840, and she was 3 years old when the family spent the year at the utopian community, Fruitlands. She was still a child when they moved back to Concord and lived at the house known as Hillside, where the Alcott girls had some of their happiest memories. This was the foundational part of May’s childhood, and perhaps because it was a happy time, she could keep believing, through the arduous years that followed, that life would get better again. She was sheltered from many of the Alcotts’ financial hardships because of her age, but also because her sisters wanted to shelter her.

May always had a taste for the finer things in life, and as much as Louisa teased her for her elaborate bonnets in letters to Anna and to family friend Alf Whitman, she would, in the next sentence, bemoan not having more to give. “She is so graceful and pretty and loves beauty so much, it is hard for her to be poor and wear other people’s ugly things,” Louisa wrote to Anna in 1854. 

May wrote to Louisa, “It is hard sometimes to see other people have so many nice things and I so few, but I try not to be envious, but contented with my poor clothes, and cheerful about it.” In her writing, she sounds uncannily like her character from Little Women. May did not always appreciate the comparison to Amy March, who is, in some ways, the novel’s antagonist. Amy grows up, though, to become a companion and equal to Jo—just as May and Louisa became closer as they grew older.

In 1858, the Alcotts moved back to Concord, this time to the Orchard House where they lived for 20 years. After Lizzie’s death and Anna’s marriage, Louisa and May had only each other during these years at Orchard House, and during this time , Louisa came to appreciate her sister’s good humor and affability. They had fun together playing practical jokes on their neighbor Julian Hawthorne, and they worked together to keep the household afloat. When Louisa fell ill as a nurse during the Civil War, May was there to care for her, painting on the walls of Louisa’s room to cheer her up. May’s good humor, once seen to her sisters as a kind of blind naïveté, became a valuable asset to the downtrodden family.

May grew into a striking young woman. In the preface of the book May Alcott: A Memoir, the sculptor Daniel Chester French writes of May: “Her face was not beautiful, according to classical standards, but the liveliness of expression and the intelligence and gayety that shone from it led one to overlook any want of harmony in her features… An intimate friend said of her, ‘If it were the fashion to go without clothes, May would be considered the most beautiful creature in the world.’”

When people visit Orchard House today, one thing is clear: by the end of their tour, it’s May, not Louisa, who has captured their hearts and imaginations. May’s drawings cover the walls of the house, especially in her small room, which is painted blue, May’s favorite color. May borrowed engravings and sketches from Emerson’s library, some of which were quite large, in order to copy them. Imagine May walking down the road with a framed painting or drawing under her arm in order to sketch it back home. She copied drawings out of books, and she experimented with all types of media, including wood-burning and plaster-casting.

May’s studio, a small room on the first floor of Orchard House, likewise provided an extra canvas for her, and she made “frescoes,” in the form of portraits on the walls. May’s reputation as an artist grew in Concord, and she gave lessons to many aspiring young people, including Daniel Chester French, who later sculpted the Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial.

May knew she had talent, but she didn’t have the formal education to become an artist. She had studied in Boston with William Morris Hunt, but a true artist of the 19th century needed to spend time in Europe.

After the publication of Little Women in 1868, Louisa had enough money to take her youngest sister on a grand tour of Europe. Though Louisa’s health was already frail, this was an important experience for the sisters. They were both adults now, and the pettiness of their girlhood was behind them. Louisa saw the seriousness of May’s practice, and she helped fund her younger sister’s art lessons.

While on their trip, the sisters bonded as never before. Louisa wrote home long missives that described their adventures and misadventures, while May sent sketches and wrote funny stories about the people they met in various pensions.

Still, they weren’t above a little friendly competition. May continued to practice her art and to take trips to Europe to study, and she eventually became known for her copies of artist J.M.W. Turner’s work. In 1877, when May was living in Paris, her Still Life with Bottles was accepted to the Paris Salon. It’s worth noting that 1877 was an especially difficult year to be accepted to the Salon, and American painter Mary Cassatt had two paintings rejected that year. May’s still life was hung almost “on the line,” which was a great honor. In a letter home to her family, she wrote, “Who would have imagined such good fortune and so strong proof that Lu does not monopolize the Alcott talent. Ha! Ha! Sister, this is the first feather plucked from your cap, and I shall endeavor to fill mine with so many waving in the breeze that you will be quite ready to lay down your pen and rest your laurels already won.”

Her professional life grew, but her personal life seemed stalled. Anna worried that May had too many suitors and couldn’t pick one, that she liked them all too much. In the end, she married a Swiss businessman named Ernest Nieriker, who was significantly younger. They lived together in Meudon, France, outside of Paris.

May had a daughter in 1879. She had named her little girl after Louisa, and called her Lulu for short, a fitting tribute for her sister who never married and whose only children were her books.

Unfortunately, May contracted an infection while giving birth, and she lay close to death for several weeks. The Alcotts, in Concord, waited for news, worrying more by the day. After seven weeks, her husband wired to say that May had died.

Of all the tragedies in her life, those close to Louisa said she took May’s death the hardest. Anna wrote, “I have never seen her brave heart so broken, so many hopes are shattered, and so much to which she looked forward so long has now vanished forever.” Louisa herself wrote, “I mourn and mourn by day and night for May. Of all the griefs in my life, and I have had many, this is the bitterest.”

Louisa did not know that May had already made plans for her older sister. As she lay ill, May requested that her baby be sent to America to live with her sisters.

Louisa might have envied May’s buoyancy of spirit, but she also benefited from it. Though they had a complex relationship, Louisa came to see her younger sister as an equal—both as a creative talent, and as a source of emotional support and love. Louisa demanded a lot of those she loved, and in many ways, May was the one who gave back. She had all of Louisa’s ambition, but without many of her concerns about self-worth. May pursued her career as an artist--and lived her entire life--unapologetically. Through May’s successes, Louisa felt her hard work paying off. It was a worthwhile reward for the woman who worked so tirelessly to provide for the people she loved.

JILL At the heart of Little Women is a supportive, complicated, and unique sisterhood, one that Louisa knew intimately through her own experiences and relationships with Anna, Lizzie, and May. It is no stretch to say that without Louisa, there could not have been a book, but without the Alcott sisters, there could never have been a Little Women.

Stay tuned for our conversation but first… In the spirit of the Alcott’s strong beliefs and actions for social justice, each week we are highlighting an organization we believe in and asking for your support. For this episode, we are supporting Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, the literary house museum owned and operated by the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association. Orchard House has been in operation for more than one hundred years, and it is the center for Alcott scholarship and a beloved space for education and summer camps for local children. Please consider donating today. You can find more information at the links to Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House in the show notes and on our website, www.letgeniusburn.com. Thank you!

JAMIE We’ll see you next week for Episode 3: Louisa At Work. Until then, follow us on Instagram and Facebook @letgeniusburn. Before we go, don’t forget to check out and donate to Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House this week. You can find information and links to donate in the show notes or on our website. You can also find more information about Louisa and her world at www.letgeniusburn.com.