LITTLE WOMEN RE-VISITED
THE name of Louisa May Alcott is for me one of those names which operate as symbols, and flood whole tracts of almost buried and forgotten, yet still fertile, territory with power and light. Though familiar in youth with practically all of her works, I had never read anything about her life : to read about it now is comparable to reading the biography of a close parent or nurse : someone in whose character and influ- ence one's early emotional life was saturated, yet whom one had never considered as a separate individual. Often such histories, even if uneventful, result in a kind of shock, a second cutting of the cord. But whether or no the explana- tion lies in the way Miss Anthony has presented her sub- ject, the curious fact remains that all is as much as before : Louisa May Alcott is still, though significant, a little amorphous; though familiar, shadowy; and I recognise her as a portion of my family inheritance. She is duty, and creative ambition, and the higher education of women, and women's independence; she is the democratic instinct and the Puritan conscience. Above all, she is the enormous emotional strength and complexity of the family unit—a fenced-off, violent world. These things lay round me in my infancy. The photographs of Louisa and her relations look out with faces I know : with high impressive brows, long, prominent, determined jaws, lively, direct eyes from our New England family album.
Actually her life was interesting, though not dramatic. Her father was a distinguished educational reformer and the fiiend of distinguished men. She adored her family and had no close friends outside them. She nursed for a short time during the Civil War, and travelled twice in Europe. She came by her name and fortune after years of poverty and struggle. She was what is known as a born spinster, lost her heart once to a man many years her junior, shrank from, yet 'enjoyed publicity, was an abolitionist and a staunch supporter of women's suffrage. The sense of duty ruled her life and all her actions. She spent her last years in growing melancholia,
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THE BODLEY HEAD retirement and ill-health, and died in her fifties. In many ways, then, she embodied the spirit of an expanding age. Her voice was one of its typical important voices.
Miss Anthony has done her work with agreeable simplicity and straightforwardness. Her book is painstaking in the best sense. She successfully builds up the historical and social background of her subject, and Louisa is revealed to us with sympathy and detachment. The portrait somehow lacks vivid- ness, but it is affectionate and informative. There are, how- ever, occasional clumsinesses and confusions, such as the following : " As everyone has his own particular type of in- sanity, provided he ever goes insane, Louisa had hers. While she was never in any danger of actually going insane . . . . she approximated her type more nearly than the average healthy person." This seems to me a roundabout way of arriving at what was doubtless the truth : that Louisa was perfectly sane and exceptionally neurotic.
Again, of Louisa and Ladislas Wisniewski (the original Laurie) she says : " The lovers' relation between them was real while it lasted "; and thus forcibly implies the exact opposite of what she means. Also I have caught her out in one surprising blunder. It is not Miss Alcott but Miss Anthony who suffers from the lapse about. Meg Brooke's second daughter. Baby Josy is clearly referred to as cooing upstairs during her father's harrowing and prolonged funeral in Little Men. It is therefore perfectly correct for her to reappear in Yo's Boys.
What are the reasons for a popularity so colossal and so prolonged as L. M. Alcott's? The fact that she spoke for her age does not in itself account for it. One reason lies in her supreme talent for telling a story. Her instinct for the essen- tials of illusion and excitement never fails her, even in her poorest works ; always the narrative moves forward with irresistible ease and breadth. Without the intellectual and emotional depth of George Eliot or Mrs. Gaskell, she had their kind of goodness and humanity. As for the mysterious ability to make characters live, she possessed it in the same intense degree as Dickens. (Which of them, by the way, wrote this : " Once I went to heaven, and found it a twilight place, with people darting through the air in a queer way—all very busy, and dismal and ordinary "?)
It is about twenty years since I last read Little Women, but at one time it was a religious custom with me, and came round at least twice a year over a prolonged period of years. I take a copy from the bookshelf of my children (where it is some- what suppressed behind stacks of comics, and less finger- marked than Doctor Dolittle, Biggles, the works of Arthur Ransome, E. Nesbit, Beatrix Potter), and start to turn the pages. "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled 7o, lying on the rug. Immediately, as I read these first words, a strong, churning sensation occurs. The intense process of my identification with the March girls begins to be recreated for me. With mingled pleasure, astonishment and melancholy, I recall my existence as a Trinity : Jo—Beth—me. Dark, bony, overgrown, with large hands and feet, incapable of personal neatness, in romantic yet comradely relation to Laurie, determined to be a great writer, I am Jo. Seated quietly at my little piano, nursing sick babies, caressed by bearded father-figures of alarming power, age, wrath and benevolence, a ray of sunshine soon to fade away, I am Beth. I overcome all their temptations and rest morally on the laurels of all four of them.
No doubt the overdoses of piety are not for modern stomachs ; the cheery homilies oppress ; the sweetness and lovingkindhess turn sickly; but essentially it all works still, and there isn't a creak in the machinery. It is amusing, attractive, delightful, the vitality is absolutely genuine. Their faces and what they said and the dresses they wore are still as real as one's own. When Meg goes to a smart house-party, when the English boy cheats at croquet, when Amy falls through the ice, when Jo cuts off her hair, when Beth gets through the crisis of her illness—still the extraordinary effect of intimacy and drama is effortlessly achieved. Still she attacks the emotions at their centre and (just) does not hit below the belt.
If it is true, as I read recently in• a distinguished weekly, that " nothing dates like the heart," then Louisa May Alcott would be stone dead. But surely in the last analysis the exact opposite is true; and Little Women is a proof of it.
ROSAMOND LEHMANN.
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