I do got a gut.
Anyway, it's
Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen
First, the good. Ms. Reisen sure knew her subject. Her research is phenomenal and she clearly read everything she could get her hands on--old journals, all of Louisa's writings, probably a good bit of her fathers' and I hope she read Emerson and Thoreau and had a familiarity, if maybe not mastery, of Dickens. At some points I could hardly put the book down. And I do recommend it.
But for the bad. I started it over a year ago and put it aside after one chapter. The first quarter of the book deals with Louisa's father and mother's lives in excruciating detail. Sure, they're important--parents are always important. And in the case of the father, extremely important. He was a transcendentalist and a kook. He believed in cold showers (for health) and forced a vegetarian diet of the worst kind on his family until his wife put her foot down and insisted on milk for the baby. By his inability to hold a job, he caused constant unheavals in the childhood hearth, the home. Aspiring to be a teacher, he experimented on his pupils with teaching techniques that seemed to have no grounding in experience or logic. School after failed school was result, and then he tried to establish a self-subsistent farming community. Which failed. The most obvious influence he had on his daughter's character was to give her a deep, burning desire to provide for the basic needs of her mother and sisters. Because he never did.
Louisa did, once she was old enough, by writing thrillers and sensational stories for the trashy newspapers of the day. We don't know if she was embarrassed about them, as her literary avatar was, but she did keep her nom de plume well hidden. Not until 1942 did a couple of enterprising literary detectives trace the pseudonym A.M. Barnard to her. (Which adds another book to my reading backlog: Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths and Their Shared Passion by Leona Rostenberg.)
Embarrassed or no, for the most of her adult life Louisa kept a small income flowing until she finally hit it big with Little Women.
Ms. Reisen's biography was--to me--almost unbearably dull until Louisa started writing and selling her work, coming into her own as a person with ideas and hopes and dreams. I don't mind a certain amount of "back story," I just disliked her parents and got tired of reading about them.
A couple of other things I wanted but didn't find--the petty details that absorb the life of a growing child. A gnawing stomach. An unexpected cake. The disappointment of having her mother laid up from a miscarriage, unable or unwilling to care for her. (I know she felt it.)
It could be that this level of detail just wasn't available. Louisa and her sisters were required to keep journals. (Wish I'd made my kids to.) But they were also expected to share the journals with their parents. Not in a "punishment" kind of way, but in a "how was your day, today, dear?" kind of way. Even as a kid, if you were writing down your innermost thoughts and feelings and you knew your parents might read them....would you write, "I hate my mother!" or would you write something more appropriate for adult consumption? Like, "...I was feeling very naughty today."
And the other thing I wanted was a peek at Louisa's trash. Although Ms. Reisen quoted frequently and copiously from Louisa's poems and works for children, I don't recall a single quote from the pulp thrillers that paid the bills. Louisa must have enjoyed writing them, and I'm itching to read one. Project Gutenberg doesn't seem to have any but I can probably find some at the library.
Last, the ugly. Nowadays we take it for granted that physicians can heal--they have antibiotics and steroid shots; pain-killers, ultrasounds and vaccinations. But not then...not in 1865 when Louisa became deathly ill with typhoid pneumonia and was laid up for weeks. Not when her sister died or...well. I won't go on and spoil the book for you. It's a biography. Everybody dies in the end.
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