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[Louisa May Alcott in the Early 1860s] Anne Brown Adams Anne Brown, born in 1843, was the daughter of the abolitionist John Brown and his second wife, Mary Ann Day. After the death of her father, she had enrolled , along with her sister, Sarah, in Frank Sanborn’s academy in Concord, while her mother remained on the family’s farm in North Elba, New York. Sanborn , long a supporter of John Brown, had helped the abolitionist meet people and raise money when Brown first visited Concord in 1857. In 1869, Anne married Samuel Adams, a blacksmith from Ohio, and they moved to Rohnerville, California, where Brown’s widow and several of his children had settled in the mid-1860s. Adams wrote her recollections of her Concord days late in life, but they show Louisa May as the budding writer prior to her fame. Not only does Adams report on Concord’s illustrious literati but she also writes of town events during the Civil War years. She captures Alcott in the afterglow of her first real literary success—the publication of her story “Love and Self-Love” in the March 1860 Atlantic Monthly. The editor, James Russell Lowell, had paid her fifty dollars for the tale after reading it in November 1859. Alcott confided in her journal: “Hurrah ! My story was accepted. . . . I felt much set up, and my fifty dollars will be very happy money. People seem to think it a great thing to get into the ‘Atlantic ,’ but I’ve not been pegging away all these years in vain, and may yet have books and publishers and a fortune of my own. Success has gone to my head, and I wander a little. Twenty-seven years old and very happy.” For her next entry —just a month later—she would note the hanging of John Brown in December 1859: “The execution of Saint John the Just took place on the second. A meeting at the hall, and all Concord was there” ( Journals, 95). I first met Louisa M. Alcott, at a party given for my sister and myself, by Mrs. and Miss Thoreau, mother and sister of the late Henry D. Thoreau, in the early spring of 1860. A short story of hers had just been published in the Atlantic Monthly, and people had just “found her out,” and were congratulating her. I am sorry I have forgotten the name of the story. It was a fancy sketch of “a quarrel and make up” between a young wife and her husband. [7] * She told me afterwards, that she wrote the story to amuse her sister May, during a short illness, and a cousin of theirs came there on a visit at the time, and some member of the family showed him the story. He asked her why she did not send it to the Atlantic Monthly. She replied that they would not publish any of her writings, as she had tried them several times. He took the manuscript and told her laughingly that he would bet her as much as they paid for it, against a new hat, that he could get them to publish it. A short time after she was surprised by receiving a check for the full amount. As the family were then in very straitened circumstances, it proved an agreeable surprise. This was the real beginning of her literary career. Her chief ambition was to make money to supply her mother’s wants. She used to talk to me a great deal about it. I afterwards boarded with them a while. They took a few boarders to help “make ends meet” in the household expenses, she and her mother doing all the work themselves, except the washing. They were the first persons I ever knew who advocated folding clothes and giving them “a brush and a promise ” instead of spending so much useless time at the ironing board. I used to think that if Mr. Alcott’s philosophy had made him wear a few less clean shirts, that his wife might have rested instead of toiling and sweating over the ironing board so long to pamper his fastidious notions. Mrs. Alcott was very fond of gathering the young people about her in the evening and playing games with them. She had a theory, and she practiced it too, that it is the duty of every mother in the land to invite a few young men to spend their evenings at their home, and so...

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