Alcott in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her LIfe, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

“Reminiscences of Louisa M. Alcott” (1912)

“Reminiscences of Louisa M. Alcott” (1912) F. B. Sanborn Sanborn (1831–1917), who has long been seen as helping to mythologize the Transcendentalists and especially his connection with them, worked hard to keep their ideas alive for the early-twentieth-century reader. Many of his personal encounters with the New England authors and poets can be found in his two-volume autobiography, Recollections of Seventy Years (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1909). With Moncure Daniel Conway, he was co-editor of the Boston Commonwealth and also a co-editor of the Massachusetts Springfield Republican , where he often reported on the famous authors of Concord. Louisa, after reading one of his notices in the “Gossipy old Republican” telling about her personal adventures during her 1870 European grand tour, wrote her family: “I should like to knock their heads off for meddling with what dont concern them old tattle tails!” (Selected Letters, 148). Sanborn had also just published one of the first in-depth profiles of Louisa in his “The Author of Little Women,” in the 16 July 1870 Hearth and Home. Upon receiving a copy in Italy, Alcott crossed out his description of Moods (1865) as “embodying but incompletely her idea of love and marriage and failing , for that reason, perhaps, to take the position in literature which the author ’s talent justified.” Here, however, Sanborn recounts his own involvement with the family, including his first meeting with Louisa in 1852, where he was impressed by her “expressive face and earnest, almost melancholy eyes.” This first meeting, almost a decade after the debacle at Fruitlands, also captures the lack of interest by Louisa in her father’s philosophical talk, a fact biographers and critics would focus upon during the next century. In this recollection, occasioned by the success of a Little Women play in theaters around the country, Sanborn reflects upon Alcott’s own dramatic talents as a teenager and young adult, noting that she possessed the quality of an effective actress—“A serious and profound vein of feeling.” [145] * The representation of Miss Alcott’s “Little Women” as a drama, in theaters from Buffalo westward, amid applause and appreciation, is a long-deferred tribute to the dramatic element in her gifted nature. This tendency to the melodramatic, which she began to manifest as a child, and which almost placed her on the stage as an actress in the mimic scenes that had attracted her so forcibly in the plain country landscape amid which she grew up, is worth dwelling on for a moment, altho it never took effect so as to make of her a prima donna of the exalted and attractive class. For that role she was quali- fied by nature, had the circumstances been a little more propitious. The actual qualification by nature for an effective actress is varied and diverse . Beauty is an element, but a superficial one; except for light comedy, mere beauty is insufficient in an actress; tragedy, and even melodrama, demand a serious and profound vein of feeling. This Louisa Alcott, as I first saw her at her father’s Boston house in Pinckney street, in the autumn of 1852, seemed to have in her a well-endowed nature; and it was exprest in her energetic but represt manner. I made a half hour’s call while I was in Harvard College , for the purpose of being introduced to her father, Bronson Alcott, whose attached friend and final biographer I became. Mrs. Ednah Littlehale Cheney was my introducer, while she still bore her maiden name, tho affianced to Seth Cheney, the graceful artist, whom she married the next year. All thru that ceremonious call Louisa sat silent in the background of the family circle, her expressive face and earnest, almost melancholy eyes were fixt on the visitors; but slight appeal was made to her interest in the conversation, which turned on the philosophic themes that Alcott had made his own long before 1852. He had been one of the leaders in the spiritual movement that began twenty years before, about the time of Louisa’s birth—November 29, 1832—the very day of the month and year with her father, who was thirtythree years old the day this daughter was born. She saw the light in Germantown , not then a component part of Philadelphia, in a house which Mr. Reuben Haines, a wealthy friend of education, had bought for the school that Mr. Alcott had been invited...