The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia, and: Louisa May Alcott & Charlotte Bronte: Transatlantic Translations (review)

Gregory Eiselein and Anne K. Phillips, eds. The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood, 2001.

Christine Doyle. Louisa May Alcott & Charlotte Brontë: Transatlantic Translations. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2000.

In her "Foreword" to The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia, Madeleine Stern remarks that the volume "embraces the circle of Alcott's life and work, encapsulating in all their rich diversity the details of her experience and her literary canon" (viii). This comment gracefully sums up the contribution of The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia to Alcott studies. Entries are present on a host of topics, including people (friends and family members, authors, publishers, etc.), places (importance of place to Alcott is evident in "Boston" and "Concord"), Alcott's novels and short fiction (and characters who appear in them), periodicals, themes ("Girlhood," "Acting," "Education," etc.), and contemporary events, movements and attitudes ("Civil War," "Women's Movement," etc.). Clearly this is a comprehensive work that will be helpful to Alcott scholars in many ways on a number of levels.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the Encyclopedia is the effort of the editors to present the complete Alcott. Too often this author is presented as the author of Little Women, or as a children's author, or as the author of Gothic fiction. Eiselein and Phillips have endeavored to structure this book so that indeed, all these aspects of Alcott are considered, but the end result is that there is only one woman, only one author. She appears as a complex individual, ambivalent in many ways, but who must be considered as an integrated woman, possessing a variety of aspects that have tended to resist the simple pigeon-holing traditional criticism has sometimes applied. To view the aspects separately is to give a picture that is both truncated and false.

A excellent aspect of the Encyclopedia is how often the authors dig more deeply than might have been expected in the brief space available in the encyclopedia format. The entry on the theme of deception, for example, does not merely invoke Alcott's thrillers and list a few examples of a cunning female protagonist who depends on deception for her emotional and/or economic survival. Instead, it points out that deception is a constant in all of Alcott's fiction; it often occurs "either to conform to a feminine ideal or to better protect and nurture others" (77). In fact, the author of this entry asserts that "the question of 'deception' is at the heart of LMA's split personality as an artist" (78), citing the tension that Alcott felt as she was torn between her own preference for sensationalism and all that it implied, and the cultural imperatives she felt compelled to obey.

Likewise, the entry "Domestic Life" does not rely on Little Women, with Beth's peacemaking statement, "Birds in their little nests agree" (Little Women 3), to typify Alcott's attitude toward an aspect of life in which all nineteenth-century women were engaged. Instead, the Encyclopedia states: "LMA perceived that, in reality, domestic life was frequently abject, decadent, venal, or unhappy" (83); it was partly because of this view that Alcott was driven to examine less traditional arrangements that might offer a woman more scope to develop in directions selected by herself, rather than those selected for her by society.

"Morality" identifies four "recurrent moral themes": the importance of work, passionate love as a vital component of marriage, the damaging result of racial prejudice, and the necessity for women to be strong enough to take charge of their own lives. The entries on Alcott's reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are models of critical brevity, in which a surprising amount of information is conveyed in very little space. The entry on children's literature in the ninteenth century succeeds in establishing not only the historical context of...