My Girls

Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888)
From Louisa May Alcott: Work, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links
“From Alcott, a Parable for a Spirited Niece” (Dinitia Smith, The New York Times)

“Empowering American Women Artists: The Travel Writings of May Alcott Nieriker” (Julia K. Dabbs, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide)

Previous Story of the Week selections by Louisa May Alcott
• “Anna’s Whim”
• “An Hour”
• “How I Went Out to Service”

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Louisa May Alcott: Work, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Stories & Other Writings
894 pages
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Available as an e-book

Two paintings by May Alcott Nieriker (1840–1879): Still Life with Bottle, oil on canvas, was exhibited in Paris Salon of 1877 and is described in Louisa May Alcott’s “My Girls.” La Negresse, oil on canvas, was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1879.

The November 7, 1871, issue of the Lawrence [Massachusetts] Daily American included the following notice:

The boys and girls will be delighted,—we can vouch for two enthusiastic ones already,—with the announcement that Messrs. Roberts Brothers, Boston, have in press, and are to issue on the first of next month, a new volume by Miss Alcott, under the taking title of “Aunt Jo’s Scrap Book,” and containing twelve stories, the opening one being called “My Boys.” . . .

The introductory sketch in the book describes some of the “boys” Louisa May Alcott knew earlier in life—including her Polish friend Ladislas Wisniewski, who inspired the character of Laurie in Little Women. It’s hardly news to her fans that, as a teenager, Louisa preferred the companionship of boys. In her essay she admits, “I don’t mind the rough outside burr which repels most people,” and she recalls that for her childhood friends, “the moment they outgrow their babyhood their trials begin, and they are regarded as nuisances till they are twenty-one, when they are again received into favor.” Or, as the summary in The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia puts it, “The boys who figure prominently in her early childhood are depicted as sympathetic comrades in a society unsympathetic to her high spirits and lust for adventure.”

The book, Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, with the subtitle, My Boys, Etc., was a huge success, and readers (and not a few critics) begged for more. “Dear Aunt Jo!” cried a reviewer in the Providence Press, “Your scrap-bag is rich in its stores of good things. Pray do not close and put it away quite yet.” And so, over the next decade, five additional Scrap-Bag volumes appeared. Yet, if Alcott herself is to be believed, after the publication of the first volume, some readers complained: What about the girls she had known?

Thus, the fourth volume of Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, which appeared in 1878, carried the subtitle My Girls, Etc. Echoing her earlier sketch, the opening selection describes six young women in her circle of friends, those who have pursued careers instead of, or in addition to, the traditional roles of wife and mother. She doesn’t refer to any of the women by name, yet there are enough clues to identify the inspirations for two of them. The doctor called “A” has been alternately identified by scholars as one of two women (or a composite portrait of both): her close friend Laura Whiting Hosmer, a homeopathic physician in Concord, or Lucy Sewall, Alcott’s second cousin and financial advisor and a resident physician of the New England Hospital for Women and Children who became its director in 1869.

There’s no doubt, however, concerning the identity of the painter Alcott calls “B,” who is her sister May. As described in the selection, May departed for Europe, first to produce reproductions of paintings by English artist J. M. W. Turner and eventually to create original works. In 1877 she submitted an entry in the famous biennial Salon of Paris and wrote to her mother that, if her painting were accepted for display, “it will be a very great honor, and a fine feather in my cap to start a career with, for color-dealers, picture-purchasers, and all nationalities, turn to the Salon catalogue as the criterion by which to judge of an artist whose name is unknown to them.” Her painting, a still life (shown above), was selected for the exhibit, and her proud sister Louisa wrote “My Girls” a few months later.

The following year May married Swiss businessman Ernest Nieriker. “I mean to combine painting and family, and show that it is a possibility if let alone,” she insisted in one of her letters home. “In America this cannot be done, but foreign life is so simple and free. . . . I often wonder if I could step back into my old life and feel at home there, for I seem quite a different person from the woman who bade you good-bye so long ago.” A second painting, La Negresse, was accepted for the Salon in 1879 and she even published a book for would-be artists, Studying Art Abroad, and How to Do it Cheaply. Unfortunately, May Alcott Nieriker died in December of that year, only weeks after giving birth to a daughter, christened Louise Marie in honor of her aunt. The infant was sent to Boston and raised by Alcott until her death in 1889, when “Lulu” (as her Boston relatives called her) was returned to her father and spent the rest of her ninety-six years in Switzerland.

Notes: On page 851, Alcott refers to several J.M.W. Turner paintings her sister sold as reproductions. You can view the originals at the following links: Venice, seen from the Giudecca Canal, The Sun of Venice Going to Sea, The Fighting Temeraire, Admiral Van Tromp’s Barge at the Entrance of the Texel, and Datur Hora Quieti.

Pillicoddy, mentioned on page 854, is a character in the nautical comedy Poor Pillicoddy: A Farce in One Act (1843). The Infant Phenomenon (p. 855) is Ninetta Crummles, a member of the theatrical troupe in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby. Bijou Heron (page 857), was a famous child-actress who starred in the comedy The Little Treasure (1855). Topsy (p. 588) is a slave girl in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin whose famous response to the catechistical question “Who made you?”—“I spect I grow’d. Don’t think nobody never made me.”—inspired the popular figure of speech “it grow’d like Topsy,” used to suggest development without the benefit of guidance or direction.

On the last page, Alcott lists several contemporaries as models for young women: woman suffrage and temperance reformer Mary Livermore, who edited The Agitator and Woman’s Journal, for which Alcott wrote; Ednah Cheney, a writer, suffragist, abolitionist, and lecturer at Bronson Alcott’s Concord School of Philosophy, who later wrote two biographies of Alcott; Julia Ward Howe, author and activist for suffrage, prison reform, and international peace, best known for writing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”; Maria Mitchell, an astronomer and professor at Vassar College and the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and Lucy Stone, the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree, a leader of the women’s rights movement, and founding coeditor (with her husband) of the Woman’s Journal.

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Once upon a time I wrote a little account of some of the agreeable boys I had known, whereupon the damsels reproached me with partiality, and begged me to write about them. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Kate’s Choice

Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888)
From Louisa May Alcott: Work, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links
Complete list of stories from the Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag series (Susan Bailey, Louisa May Alcott Is My Passion)

“Merry Christmas”: an 1876 poem by Louisa May Alcott (Alcott Wit and Wisdom)

Previous Story of the Week selections by Louisa May Alcott
• “Anna’s Whim”
• “How I Went Out to Service”

Buy the book
Louisa May Alcott: Work, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Stories & Other Writings
894 pages
List price: $40.00
Save 35%, free shipping
Web store price: $26.00

The Christmas Party, circa 1850. Oil on canvas attributed to American painter Robert David Wilkie (1827–1903). Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

When Louisa May Alcott was twenty-three, she finished a story collection with the title “Christmas Elves.” Her father helped her prepare it for publication, and her sister May provided the illustrations. They were unable to find a publisher, however, and the book never saw the light of day. (The manuscript was presumably lost or destroyed.) This early failure certainly didn’t discourage Alcott; she continued to write holiday stories and poems throughout her career and, as readers of all ages know, her most celebrated novel opens with Jo March’s utterance, “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents.”

During the years following the publication of Little Women (1868–69), hoping to make the most of her newfound success, Alcott published six holiday books for young girls under the series title Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, for which the author adopted the guise of her most famous character. Each collection included new items and reprints of pieces published in magazines, including a number of holiday stories. The first volume, My Boys, appeared in 1872, and was followed by Shawl-Straps (which gathered travel pieces written during Alcott’s trip through Europe), Cupid and Chow-Chow, My Girls, Jimmy’s Cruise in the Pinafore, and An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving.

When the third volume, Cupid and Chow-Chow, appeared in December 1874, the notices were almost universally positive on both sides of the Atlantic. The reviewer for The Independent in London deferred to the judgment of the “only critics of whom we stand in awe—the children into whose hands the volume will fall,” yet pointedly advised “grown-up people not to remand the enjoyment of the book to children alone, but unostentatiously to read it for themselves, after the little ones have been put to bed.”

One of the stories in the third Scrap-Bag volume will be of particular interest to fans of Alcott’s novels. In many ways an unassuming, old-fashioned Christmas story, “Kate’s Choice” features a heroine whose situation might remind readers of the plight of Rose Campbell, the central character of Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom. Both characters inherit financial windfalls when they are unexpectedly orphaned at an early age and are then forced to live among their extended families. Kate, however, enjoys an unusual level of independence and chooses her own destiny. Her story serves as an intriguing contrast to Eight Cousins, which appeared three years later and in which the shy and uncertain Rose regards her various aunts and other adults as role models. Yet, like many of the characters in Alcott’s fiction, both Kate and Rose are “young women at social and emotional crossroads” who ultimately succeed on the own terms.

*   *   *

“Well, what do you think of her?”
      “I think she’s a perfect dear, and not a bit stuck up with all her money.”
      “A real little lady, and ever so pretty.” . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Anna’s Whim

Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888)
From Louisa May Alcott: Work, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links
Louisa May Alcott: “a writer who refused conventional ideas of women’s roles” (Susan Cheever, Reader’s Almanac)

The Alcotts and Orchard House (Orchard House, Concord, MA)

Previous Story of the Week selections by Louisa May Alcott
• “An Hour”
• “How I Went Out to Service”

Buy the bookLouisa May Alcott: Work, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Stories & Other Writings
894 pages
List price: $40.00
Save 35%, free shipping
Web store price: $26.00
Also available as an e-book

Detail from Drifting (1886), oil on canvas by Alfred Thompson Bricher (American painter, 1837–1908). Image courtesy of Barbara Wells Sarudy’s 19c American Women website.

During the early months of 1873 Louisa May Alcott, still overwhelmed by the extraordinary success from the publication five years earlier of Little Women, finally completed Work: A Story of Experience, a novel she had begun in 1861. The book’s publication was greeted by mostly positive reviews, with some reservations. The opinions of many readers were determined by their reactions to the book’s subject matter: “Miss Alcott has dared to touch that troublesome theme—What shall women do?—and has illumined it with the brightness of her own strong sense.” A surprising number of reviewers described the book as earnest—“It is a terribly earnest book,” wrote the columnist in The Evening Post of New York; another writer noted its “earnest tone.” A decidedly hostile critic complained about the book’s emphasis on job and career (“work is the real religion, the idea, the action of the piece, from end to end”) and protested that Work is “the story of a female who was not a woman, married to her choice who was not a man.”

Although the novel sold well at the time (the first printing alone was 20,000 copies), it went out of print early in the twentieth century and was largely forgotten until the late 1970s. In recent decades, note the authors of The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia, the book has “received positive critical attention for some of the very traits contemporary critics bemoaned,” such as its exploration of the occupational options then available to women and, perhaps above all, “a strong, independent female character who never settles into a purely domestic sphere and whose marriage is only another ‘experience,’ not the telos of her life story.”

While she was writing Work, Alcott was inundated with requests for short stories and essays. The editor of Youth’s Companion offered to purchase, sight unseen, half a dozen stories she had yet not even written, and similar offers poured from other magazines. Almost immediately upon finishing the novel, she wrote “Anna’s Whim” and sold it for the then-considerable sum of $100 to a prominent weekly New York newspaper called The Independent. Combining a love story with a battle-of-the-sexes plot, the tale revisits several of the ideas Alcott tackled in Work, and the central focus is the title character’s “whim”—Anna’s wish that men treat women the same way they treat each other.

Notes: The passing reference to a Mrs. Grundy (page 827) is to a narrowly conventional or priggish person, after a character in Thomas Morton’s 1798 play Speed the Plough. The mad gentleman and Mrs. Nickleby (p. 839) are allusions to Dickens’s Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, specifically when Nicholas’s mother rejects the advances of their neighbor and becomes convinced that he went mad because of her rejection. “Put my fortune to the touch and win or lose it all” (p. 844) is a paraphrase of two lines from the poem “My dear and only love” (1643) by James Graham, Marquess of Montrose.

*   *   *

“Now just look at that!” cried a young lady, pausing suddenly in her restless march. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

How I Went Out to Service

Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888)
From Louisa May Alcott: Work, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Stories & Other Writings

Interesting Links

“Louisa May Alcott in The Atlantic” (Sage Stossel, The Atlantic)

The Alcotts’ home at 20 Pinckney Street (Historic Buildings of Massachusetts)

Previous Story of the Week selection by Louisa May Alcott
• “An Hour”

Buy the book
Louisa May Alcott: Work, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Stories & Other Writings
894 pages
List price: $40.00
Save 35%, free shipping!
Web store price: $26.00

The Little Servant, c. 1886, oil on canvas by
John George Brown (British-American painter,
1831–1913). Image courtesy of the The Athenaeum.

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In 1851 James Richardson, a lawyer in Dedham, Massachusetts, hired eighteen-year-old Louisa May Alcott as a servant and companion for his invalid sister and elderly father. A short entry in Louisa’s journal sums up the experience: “I go to Dedham as a servant & try it for a month, but get starved & frozen & give it up.” (She actually stayed on for seven weeks.) One doesn’t have to read deeply between the lines of her later retellings, both autobiographical and fictional, to understand that the atmosphere was not only uncomfortable and grueling but also sexually threatening.

Soon after this brief employment, Alcott’s first published work appeared: a poem in Peterson’s, a popular women’s magazine. It was quickly followed by a story, “The Rival Painters,” in the Saturday Evening Gazette. During the next decade she published some twenty pieces of short fiction, as well as her first book, Flower Fables (1855), a collection of fairy tales originally written for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s daughter. Yet she was earning barely enough money to make ends meet. Still trying to break through as a writer, in 1861 Alcott began working on a novel called “Success,” but put it away after less than a month. She intended it to be autobiographical, with episodes based on her stints as a domestic servant, governess, and seamstress and on her various attempts at an acting career.

By the beginning of 1862 Alcott was staying at the home of a second cousin, Annie Adams, whose husband was the prestigious Boston publisher James T. Fields. At the urging of a friend, she opened a kindergarten, even though she loathed teaching; Fields loaned her forty dollars for materials. He had just assumed the duties of editor at the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine that he and his business partner, William Ticknor, had purchased almost three years earlier. Hoping Fields would help further her career, Alcott at some point showed him her writing, including the manuscript for “How I Went Out to Service,” a fictionalized account of her seven weeks as a house servant. He rejected the piece, telling her, “Stick to your teaching; you can’t write.” In spite of this advice, Alcott abandoned the kindergarten in May. Distraught that she still owed Fields forty dollars and stinging from his rejection of her story, she wrote in her journal, “I won’t teach; and I can write, and I’ll prove it.” Fields must have had some regard for Alcott’s writing, since he published two of her stories and a poem within the next year.

Alcott sporadically returned to the manuscript for “Service” before again abandoning it in 1865. Then, in 1868, the first part of Little Women appeared—and everything changed. Suddenly in demand, she received a request in late 1872 from the owners of The Christian Union, offering her $3,000 for a serial work of fiction. Alcott dusted off the manuscript for “Success” and quickly finished it, reworking some of the stories she had written previously (including “How I Went Out to Service”), incorporating them into the novel, and changing the title to Work. It appeared in the magazine from December 1872 through June 1873. The story Fields had rejected, “How I Went Out to Service,” was published in 1874 by The Independent, a New York–based magazine with a national circulation of 70,000. [Work is included alongside Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, and several short pieces in a new Library of America collection.]

In 1871, flush with her new wealth and fame, Alcott repaid the forty dollars she had borrowed from Fields a decade earlier. “I found writing paid so much better than teaching that I thought I’d stick to my pen,” she later claimed to have said to him. In response, Fields “laughed & owned that he made a mistake.”

Notes: On page 808, Alcott describes the trajectory of her heroine’s aspirations as plunging from the triumph of Sarah Siddons, one of the most famous English actresses of the previous century, to the misery of Betcinder, or Cinderella. A delaine is a garment made from fine combing wool, especially the wool of Merino sheep. On page 811, the comparison of the old woman to a Borgia is a reference to the notoriously power-hungry family of Renaissance Italy, particularly Lucrezia Borgia, who is remembered for alleged political and domestic intrigues.

*   *   *

When I was eighteen I wanted something to do. I had tried teaching for two years, and hated it; I had tried sewing, and could not earn my bread in that way, at the cost of health; I tried story-writing and got five dollars for stories which now bring a hundred; I had thought seriously of going upon the stage, but certain highly respectable relatives were so shocked at the mere idea that I relinquished my dramatic aspirations. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

An Hour

Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888)
From American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation

Interesting Links
Biography of William G. Allen (BlackPast.org)

How Louisa May Alcott revolutionized the “book for girls” with Little Women (Reader's Almanac)

Previously Story of the Week selections:
• “The Doll,” Charles W. Chesnutt
• “Désirée’s Baby,” Kate Chopin

Buy the book
American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation
970 pages
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Web store price: $32.00

Detail of “One hand stirred gruel for sick America, and the other hugged baby Africa,” a drawing of Civil War nurse Tribulation Periwinkle, the alter ego of Louisa May Alcott in Hospital Sketches. Reprinted from an 1880 edition of Hospital Sketches and Camp and Fireside Stories, which included “An Hour.”

In 1853 William G. Allen, a professor at New York Central College who was one-quarter black, became engaged to Mary King, a white student. While visiting friends in a nearby town, he was attacked by a mob armed “with tar, feathers, poles and an empty barrel spiked with shingle nails.” He escaped, injured but alive, and the couple hastily married and then fled to England. Professor Allen was a friend of Louisa May Alcott’s uncle, and he would send him inscribed copies of two booklets he published that described the ordeal: The American Prejudice Against Color: An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily the Nation Got into An Uproar (1853) and A Personal Narrative (1860). In late 1859 or early 1860 the twenty-seven-year-old Alcott submitted to The Atlantic Monthly “M. L.,” a tale that was almost surely inspired by Allen’s life and the first of three “abolitionist stories” she would publish during the early 1860s.

The magazine rejected the story. She wrote in her journal, “Mr. —— won’t have ‘M. L.’ as it is antislavery, and the dear South must not be offended.” (The unidentified staff member was probably the editor of The Atlantic himself, James Russell Lowell.) Three years later Alcott submitted her second antislavery story, called “My Contraband,” and the new editor, James F. Fields, accepted it (“with much approbation,” Alcott noted in her journal); the magazine published it as “The Brothers.” But when she sent in a third (and final) antislavery story to Fields’s business partner, William Davis Ticknor, for his new magazine Our Young Folks, she again met resistance. “Ticknor accepted a fairy tale I sent him but refused ‘An Hour,’ because it was about slavery I suppose.”

Both of the rejected stories—“M. L.” and “An Hour”—would ultimately find a home at The Commonwealth, a local abolitionist magazine edited by a friend. (The magazine would also publish Alcott’s first “hospital sketches,” based on her arduous duties as a Civil War nurse in Georgetown, where she contracted typhoid fever after only a month.) Yet Alcott’s supposition—that two of the three stories were rejected because of their antislavery views—was probably correct only in a general sense, especially since, during the height of the Civil War in 1863, Northern editors were hardly concerned about the attitudes of “the dear South.” Instead, what all three stories have in common is their sympathetic portrait of interracial couples. While “My Contraband” hints at a white nurse’s attraction to a former slave who works alongside her, the other two stories are not as subtle: “M. L.” describes an interracial romance in straightforward terms and “An Hour” hardly disguises the shared electric passions between the young “master” Gabriel and the defiant slave Milly. Certain elements of “An Hour”—the Gothic melodrama, the stereotypical portrayals, the sentimental homilies—might seem dated and overdone to modern readers, but the story’s themes and characters would have scandalized many nineteenth-century readers while it simultaneously solicited their sympathies.

*   *   *

The clock struck eleven.
“Look again, Gabriel; is there no light coming?”
“Not a ray, mother, and the night seems to darken every instant.”
“Surely, half an hour is time enough to reach the main land and find Dr. Firth.” . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.