In her new biography of the fiercely independent author of “Little Women,” screenwriter Harriet Reisen draws an engrossing portrait of Louisa May Alcott’s life that will appeal to the legions of women who grew up worshipping the book.
In “Louisa May Alcott: The Woman B
ehind Little Women” ($26) Reisen takes us through Alcott’s life from birth to death, which makes for some unwieldy storytelling in the early chapters as we follow the Alcott family through decades of shiftless wandering around the East Coast.
And with writing that is at times overly dramatic, we trod through territory that’s been chronicled before: the poverty, the desperation, the alienation from genteel 19th-century society.
“The Woman Behind Little Women” does not quite do justice to the complicated relationship between Louisa and her father, Bronson Alcott, whose Transcendalist philosophizing and refusal to maintain steady employment often made the family destitute.
John Matteson’s masterful, Pulitzer Prize-winning “Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father,” remains unequaled in that respect.
As Reisen recounts, Alcott’s childhood sufferings drove her to relentlessly pursue a writing career that finally won her the financial stability that her father was never able to provide.
She would later become the family breadwinner, a role that kept her from ever feeling truly free.
The book works best when Reisen allows Alcott to speak through her wonderfully witty and clear-eyed letters. They offer a glimpse of the kind of unsentimental prose that Alcott, who made her fortune in children’s literature, often said she longed to write in an “adult novel” but died before she had the chance.
Watching a sunrise over the sea, she described “mist wreaths furling off, and a pale pink sky above us.” The city of Baltimore, seen through her eyes, was “a big, dirty, shippy, shiftless sort of place.”
The story is least absorbing when Reisen interjects her own musings about the Alcotts. Writing about Bronson, for example, she implies that he had homosexual relationships but glosses over the subject.
Later, Reisen hints that Louisa May Allcott’s frail sister Lizzie, who inspired Beth in “Little Women,” suffered from serious “catatonic” mental illness. She also speculates that Allcott herself was manic-depressive, but never fully explores the possibility.
But “Little Women” fanatics will find much to love in Allcott’s story, which is far more compelling and gritty than any she dreamed up in her lifetime.
Her spirit shines through in Reisen’s retelling of her six-week stint as a war nurse, the death of her sister Lizzie and, most achingly, the long, hard literary road that eventually led to “Little Women.”
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