'Abundant Evidence of an Extraordinary Life": The Letters of Louisa May Alcott

Scholars of Children's Literature, American Literature, and Women's Studies alike will find this new edition of Louisa May Alcott's letters invaluable. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy have conducted an exhaustive search for published and unpublished Alcott correspondence, locating a total of 649 letters, or about three times as many as were previously known to exist. From those letters they have selected 271—"such letters as seemed repetitious or insignificant have been pruned" (xlii)—of which 138 are published here for the first time.

The publication of these letters fills a significant void in the Alcott oeuvre. To this point students of Alcott were forced to find her letters in out-dated or specialized collections: Edna Dow Cheney's Louisa May Alcott; Her Life, Letters and Journals, which contains some 80 Alcott letters, is one hundred years old (even Stern's own biography of Alcott is now 40 years old), and articles on her letters have focused on particular topics—among them Stern's publication of some of Alcott's feminist letters and letters of self-criticism in Myerson's Studies in the American Renaissance. In fact, because Alcott's correspondence has been so long uncollected, I wonder why the editors refrained from publishing a multi-volume collected edition of Alcott's letters; the calendar of all her letters which appeared in SAR last year is after all little compensation for their decision to discard 378 letters. That decision means the serious student of Alcott must still look through other sources for her complete correspondence, and implies that well over half the letters she wrote are "repetitious or insignificant."

In addition, unfortunately, none of the new letters they uncovered were written during the period of Alcott's life we know little about, from 1845 to 1853 (ages 13 to 21). Alcott looked over many of her letters late in her life, so it is likely that she destroyed most of those missing from that nine-year period. All told there are only three letters printed here which were written before Alcott was 21 years old.

But this is certainly not the fault of the editors, who have done a superb job of selecting letters which are truly representative, and of editing those they decided to print. Whenever appropriate they have allowed Alcott's original wording to stand, relegating her later rewordings or deletions to footnotes rather than imposing them on the text of the letters. They've also kept Alcott's misspellings (she had trouble with "ie" words, and often omitted apostrophes in contractions); while this at times is irritating, it nonetheless reflects the editors' commitment to preserve the original look of the letters whenever possible. They have also edited meticulously, providing the reader with a wealth of biographic information in their notes. And Stern's introduction (a biographical sketch) is thorough and knowledgeable, though she surprisingly does nothing to fill the aforementioned gap in Alcott's correspondence, refusing to speculate on what those letters might have shown us; "Since nothing is known of them," she concludes, "nothing can be said of them" (xlii).

Thankfully, much can be said of those that have been included, since they encompass a wide range of subjects. Although the letters of her youth are missing we still get a good idea of the poverty and struggle of her early years, for in many of her late letters she reflects upon those harder times: "At 21 I took my little earnings ($20) and a few clothes, and went to seek my fortune," she writes. "All those hard years were teaching me what I afterwards put into the books, and so I made my fortune out of my seeming mis fortune" (278). Even at 28 she describes herself as "a young woman with one dollar, no bonnet, half a gown, and a discontented mind" (59). The conditions under which she had to write are revealed in the same letter: "[Today I...