MARMEE & LOUISA

Eve LaPlante, a biographer and one of Alcott's direct descendants, has unearthed a trove of new letters that delve deeply into Alcott's passionate relationship with her extraordinary mother, shedding new light on Alcott's life and work.

Though her examination of recently discovered diaries, and other unpublished and unexplored letters and journals at Harvard and other archives, LaPlante soon discovered that Abigail was far ahead of her time, a woman with fierce feminist ideals who turned down a comfortable, traditional marriage within her social class for what she thought would be an equal partnership with the poverty-stricken but idealistic activist Bronson Alcott. She was proven tragically wrong, as Bronson's idealism itself made him a flighty and unreliable husband; but as her daughter Louisa grew she began to encourage Louisa's own independence, inspiring her to live out Louisa's (and Abigail's own) ideals of economic, professional, and intellectual independence. As the years went by, their relationship grew more and more paradoxical, each of them fiercely independent but tied to one another by a powerful mutual dependence.

While previous books about the Alcotts largely ignored Abigail, LaPlante’s study reveals Abigail as the parent who nurtured and fostered Louisa’s success as an entrepreneur, and the person to whom Louisa was closest in the world. Using new research in original documents, LaPlante explores how Abigail’s experiences as a daughter, wife, and mother defined Louisa’s sense of herself as a woman and as a writer of Little Women and other books. Like many women today, Abigail and Louisa struggled to balance work and love, to coordinate their public and private lives, and to enact their ideals without harming themselves or others. In addition to being a deeply felt story about two extraordinary women, Marmee & Louisa provides a crucial lynchpin in our understanding of one of the most important and beloved female writers in American history.

Eve LaPlante is a great niece and a first cousin of Abigail and Louisa May Alcott. She is the author of Seized, American Jezebel, and Salem Witch Judge, the winner of the 2008 Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction. She is also the editor of a collection of Abigail May Alcott’s newly discovered private papers, Marmee’s Memoirs: The Collected Writings of Abigail May Alcott. She lives with her family in New England.