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“A Concord Notebook: The Women of Concord— III. Louisa Alcott and Her Circle” (1906) F. B. Sanborn Well known to the scholars of the Transcendentalist circle, Sanborn became a friend and chronicler of the Alcott family, especially with his co-authorship, along with William Torrey Harris, of the two-volume A. Bronson Alcott: His Life and Philosophy (1893). A Harvard graduate, Sanborn was active on the political , philosophical, and social scene in Concord after his arrival there in the mid-1850s, where he ran a private academy from 1855 to 1863. A fervent abolitionist, Sanborn in 1857 had helped John Brown arrange meetings in Concord with Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott to build moral and financial support for his armed defense of free Kansas. After Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid in October 1859, Sanborn was suspected of being part of the “Secret Six,” which had backed Brown. Arrested in Concord, Sanborn , with the help of leading citizens such as John S. Keyes and Sen. Rockwood Hoar, was quickly released by legal maneuvering before he could be taken away. Such actions only made him more heroic in the eyes of the Alcott family. After the initial sales of Hospital Sketches in 1863, Louisa Alcott suddenly and unexpectedly found her work to be in demand, and she reported that Sanborn “says ‘any publisher this side of Baltimore would be glad to get a book’” ( Journals, 121). Although Sanborn clearly shows here in this history of famous Concord women a somewhat condescending attitude toward Louisa’s career as “a popular author,” whose early works in the Boston periodicals do not “deserve preservation,” he was one of the first to point out that while she enjoyed the opportunity to grow up as a neighbor to Emerson and Thoreau, she “still came to view the town with little satisfaction.” He also astutely captures “a certain acerbity” in Alcott, caused by “the mortifications that poverty brings to a girl of high spirits.” Pointing out the contrast between the real Louisa May Alcott and her cheerful books, he suggests that the hardships she endured as a child “sometimes dashed the enjoyment of the deserved good fortune that came to her.” [126] * The most famous of all the Concord women, in all parts of the earth, has long been Louisa Alcott, daughter of the philosopher Bronson Alcott, and commemorated by him in his volume of “Octogenarian Sonnets,” every one of which was composed after he was eighty and printed in his eighty-third year. Remembering her enthusiasm as a hospital nurse in the second year of the Civil War, and that her experiences in the army hospital in Washington, as published by me in 1863, in the Boston Commonwealth newspaper, first made her known and dear to her countrymen, he thus, in 1880, addressed to her in verse: to my daughter louisa When I remember with what buoyant heart, ’Midst war’s alarms and woes of civil strife, In youthful eagerness thou didst depart, At peril of thy safety, peace, and life, To nurse the wounded soldier, swathe the dead,— How piercêd soon by Fever’s poisoned dart, And brought unconscious home, with wildered head, Thou ever since, ’mid langour and dull pain (To conquer fortune, cherish kindred dear), Hast with grave studies vexed a sprightly brain,— In myriad households kindling love and cheer; Ne’er from thyself by Fame’s loud trump beguiled, Sounding in this and the farther hemisphere:— I press thee to my heart as Duty’s faithful child. The death of the father in March, 1888, was followed almost at once by that of the daughter; his funeral in Boston, which she was too ill to attend, had but a few days’ space between it and hers; and they were deposited in the same Concord tomb, until the tardy coming of spring would permit their burial, side by side, on the summit of the ridge where Emerson, Hawthorne, Ellery Channing, and Thoreau repose not far off. Mrs. Alcott had died in the Thoreau-Alcott house in 1877, the next year after Sophia Thoreau’s death in Bangor; and now all the members of these two friendly households have headstones in the same Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. . . . Dressed in [her] great aunt’s brocade, or the finery of her grandmother, Miss Alcott was a stately figure on the amateur stage, where I often acted in private theatricals with her and her sisters before the war. In spite of narrow F. B. Sanborn [127] [13...

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