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Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography
Susan Cheever
#UE4702
Hardcover, 298 pages; 2010
$26.00
Susan Cheever adds "personal" to the subtitle of her biography of Louisa May Alcott because, as a young girl, she found refuge in the pages of Little Women, Alcott's classic story of four sisters growing up in a warm, loving family in New England during the Civil War. In a sense, Alcott herself may have escaped into the home and family she created in her book, as the facts of her childhood were, sadly, dramatically different from the life lived by the March girls of Little Women. Alcott's father was difficult: an eccentric philosopher and educator who constantly pursued new venues for his theories and practices. He moved his family from one town to another, from one house to the other--more than twenty times in Alcott's childhood and youth. While the March girls of the novel lived in genteel poverty, the Alcotts were often on the verge of starvation. Clearly, Alcott rewrote her own life in her Little Women. If you still feel the effects that Little Women had on your impressionable young mind, you'll want to read Cheever's thorough and sympathetic story of its author and how she came to write such an enduring, beloved book.
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