Guardian Review
Charles Lane, an English journalist, made a mini-fortune tracking commodities and then spent it in the 1840s backing an American utopian, Bronson Alcott, in founding an ideal community that was to subsist on unleavened bread, water and fruit, mostly apples. The occasional raw vegetable, too - Alcott was so against pleasure that potatoes, necessarily cooked, had to be eaten cold lest they should be palatable. Alcott's community and its workforce were chiefly his wife and children (among them Louisa May, who took her literary revenge long after), and he and Lane wandered off at whim to proselytise for their pure, austere life, leaving the family behind, desperately harvesting the corn that stood between them and want. (It had never dawned on Alcott that an orchard is 15 years a-growing before it crops a pip.) Among those who backed Alcott while finding him risible was Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose deliciously snippy tone - "Do not gloze & prate" - Francis shares throughout this account of these proto-hippies and cultists. - Vera Rule Charles Lane, an English journalist, made a mini-fortune tracking commodities and then spent it in the 1840s backing an American utopian, Bronson Alcott, in founding an ideal community that was to subsist on unleavened bread, water and fruit, mostly apples. - Vera Rule.
New York Review of Books Review
Two books examine the lives of Louisa May Alcott and her (at times) eccentric family. MANY readers of "Little Women" have fantasized about being Jo; a few about being Meg, Beth or Amy. After reading Susan Cheever's biography of Louisa May Alcott, even fewer would want to change places with the novel's author. Like her heroine, Alcott was a bookish tomboy with three sisters, a writer who churned out pseudonymous melodramas before finding fame as a domestic novelist. Unlike Jo, Alcott never married, concluding that "liberty is a better husband than love." Where Jo romps with her own children as well as a houseful of her husband's students, Alcott declared that she "never liked girls" and stayed clear of children until adopting a niece at 48. A third difference is that "Little Women" portrays a matriarchal household made up of a mother, her daughters and their cook. Adding a servant spared her characters some of the domestic work that ate up Alcott's own time. An even greater wish-fulfillment, however, lay in subtracting the man of the house. The March girls spend much of the novel waiting for their father to return from the Civil War, but in real life Alcott was the one who left Concord, Mass., in 1861 to nurse wounded soldiers. Even after the surprise success of "Little Women," Alcott remained ambivalent about what she subtitled "a girl's book." And scholars were slow to take "Little Women" seriously. Alcott's male contemporaries (at least in America) set their novels on whaling ships and battlefields. The sickbed where Beth March spends much of the novel looked dull in comparison. Only in the 1970s did feminist critics begin to see the home itself as a battlefield: once the personal was political, the contrast between Meg's hair-curling and Jo's haircutting took on a new edge. Read together, Cheever's "Louisa May Alcott" and Richard Francis' "Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia" help explain why Alcott dreamed of a fatherless family. Bronson Alcott's biography would have made an absorbing story even if his famous daughter had never been born. This self-taught farm boy left school at 13, but became a celebrity lecturer and educational reformer and married into the New England elite. Despite (or because of) his eccentricities, he persuaded Boston's finest families to send their children to his experimental school. Like many educational theorists, Branson Alcott found his own children hard to manage. And, again like many visionaries, he also found it hard to hold down a job. As a result, the family moved 29 times in as many years. In 1843 Bronson helped found Fruitlands, a utopian community 15 miles west of Boston. Members of the commune, which numbered 13 people at its height, advocated abolitionism, environmentalism, feminism and anarchism, forswearing meat, alcohol, neckcloths, haircuts, cotton (because it was grown by slaves) and leather (because it was harvested from animals). Their rejection of one more animal product, manure, helps explain why Fruitlands failed after only eight months: this new Eden remained barren in the absence of fertilizer. In "Transcendental Wild Oats," a satiric memoir Louisa based on the diary she kept at Fruitlands, one character asks "Are there any beasts of burden on the place?" and is answered, "Only one woman!" In real life, the expulsion of the lone female convert, probably for helping herself to some fish on the sly, left Louisa's mother, Abigail, to do all the women's work and much of the men's - especially since Bronson and his sidekick, Charles Lane, made a habit of disappearing on recruiting trips at the very moment farm labor was required. Abigail's more serious complaint was that Lane threatened to break up her marriage. Some historians think Lane was in love with Abigail, others with Bronson. Whatever the case, Abigail forced her family to move before the first winter was out. Was Bronson a genius misunderstood by a mercenary world or a narcissist whose financial fecklessness drove his daughter into domestic labor and literary hack work? Reasonably enough, Cheever accepts both hypotheses. Yet in describing Louisa May Alcott as "an impoverished and abused child," she plays down the advantages derived from the family's connections. "Little Women" might never have been written if not for Louisa's father: the publisher Thomas Niles offered to take Branson's "Tablets," a collection of excerpts from his diary arranged by zodiac signs, on condition that Louisa throw in a "girl's book" to sweeten the deal. IN a post-Freudian age, when memoirs habitually chronicle unhappy childhoods, an oppressed Louisa tugs at the reader's heart. And Cheever isn't the only biographer to celebrate a heroine ahead of her time, depicting a genius we have the good taste to appreciate more fully than did her contemporaries. Yet the historical record suggests that "Little Women" exists because of 19th-century American culture, not in spite of it. Alcott was able to assert the importance of girls' private lives because Boston was in a ferment over women's rights; she was able to publish that assertion because she was born into the local literary elite. Cheever's representation of Alcott typifies the logic in which biographers credit accomplishments to the individual while blaming setbacks on the society: heads, I win; tails, you lose. Richard Francis, whose previous books have dealt with the New England Transcendentalists and Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, more fully embeds Alcott in a time and place. And his group biography reconstructs an intellectual history whose actors tended to be more prolific than articulate. ("I am what I am, and it is out of my Iamity that I am phenomenized," declared one of Bronson Alcott's admirers.) In contrast, Cheever confines history to breathless lists: "In Paris, Degas was beginning to draw ballerinas, Monet was painting landscapes and Courbet was painting a woman with a parrot. Baudelaire was writing poetry, and Émile Zola essays and novels. At home Reconstruction was proceeding full-tilt." Where Francis excavates abstract ideas, Cheever's interest lies in private relationships - specifically, in father-daughter struggles. "Home Before Dark," Cheever's biography of her own father, John Cheever, haunts her account of Alcott's life. Both books describe an upper-class mother and an intellectual father moving from house to house without ever fitting in. Both blame a father for caring more about his writing than his children. Cheever even frames her choice of subject as a rebellion against her father. Remembering a family visit to the Alcotts' house, she writes: "While the tour guide was distracted by a literary question of my father's about Ralph Waldo Emerson, I secretly stroked the little desk where 'Little Women' had been born." Later, we learn that "my father wrote a plane hijacking in a story of his" and that "my father had tuberculosis as a child." The Fruitlands commune set out to replace biological kinship with alliances among like-minded idealists. That we now think of Bronson Alcott as a father first and a writer second suggests how stubbornly the family persists. Unlike Jo March, Alcott never married, concluding that 'liberty is a better husband than love.' Leah Price is a professor of English at Harvard. Her "Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books,'' will be published next year.
Choice Review
Francis traverses the short history of a utopian community created by the Alcott family, Charles Lane, and Henry Wright in New England from June 1, 1843, until January 1844, based on letters and diaries of its members. The community aspired to live in contrast to the ever-growing industrialization of the US and subscribed strongly to the abolitionist movement and women's rights. Members ate a vegan diet and addressed their interaction with the environment before environmentalism and ecology had even been created as concepts of discourse. The group was short-lived, as its concepts of living without money and rejecting sex and education and the struggle between Alcott, his wife, and Lane over the idea of family strained their relationships to the breaking point. Francis places the group squarely within the context of American transcendentalism, but moves from his previous writings on transcendentalist utopian communities to a new appreciation of Fruitlands in its own right, worth a separate examination. He concludes that while it failed, Fruitlands preceded modern communes' concepts of happiness and community and a larger-scale identification with humanity's environmental and ecological footprint. Francis makes an interesting point and supports it. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. C. Warren Empire State College
