Desperate to salvage the community on any terms, Alcott and Lane proposed to follow the example of a much more prosperous utopian venture, a colony of Shakers two or three miles north of Harvard. Relying on adoption and conversion to replenish their ranks, the Shakers had almost entirely segregated the sexes. As late autumn settled over Fruitlands, Bronson Alcott advanced the idea that his community, too, should separate along gender lines. Since the only women left at the commune were Mrs. Alcott and her daughters, Bronson was essentially proposing to separate from his blood family. Louisa wrote in her journal, “We all cried. Anna and I cried in bed, and I prayed God to keep us all together.”21 The family did not divide. However, Fruitlands dissolved only weeks later, and Bronson suffered a severe breakdown from which it took him years to fully recover.

More significant in the long run, however, was the influence of the Fruitlands experiment on Louisa. In the summer of 1843, she had been led to believe that family was the paramount concept in human relations and had been encouraged to regard her father as a kind of über-patriarch, whose “consociate family” might grow beyond every imaginable limit, with literally no end to its diversity or size. Barely half a year later, she had seen with her own eyes how perilously fragile a family could be. Louisa May Alcott perceived both sides of this lesson: both the concept that a “family” might be constructed on some principle other than blood relations and a belief that, in times of crisis, no imperative was greater than that the family must be preserved. The two ideas would each prove integral to her later writings.

Thankfully, the family’s seemingly endless wandering paused in April 1845 for a period of calm that was to last three and a half years. It was then, when Louisa was twelve, that her family moved into the house in Concord on Lexington Road that they called Hillside. The house, now better known by the name that Nathaniel Hawthorne later gave it, the Wayside, proudly claims to be the most literary home in America, having housed the Alcotts, the Hawthornes, and Margaret Sidney, the author of Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. All this fame was still in the future, though, when the Alcotts took possession. What mattered most to Louisa was that the new house gave her a much-coveted room of her own, which her mother “made very pretty and neat” for her and which Louisa used as a retreat when she wanted to think, to dream, and to write. Abba had given her daughter more than a sheltering physical space. Louisa wrote in her diary, “People think I’m wild and queer, but Mother understands and helps me.”22 During these years, Louisa and “Marmee,” as Louisa later called her in her journals, formed an ever-deepening bond. Not only did Abba share her daughter’s love of literature and imaginative stories, but she also sympathized with Louisa’s efforts to manage her seemingly ungovernable temper. Although there is no proof that, as in Little Women, the real Marmee took Louisa aside and confessed to her, “I am angry nearly every day of my life,” we have the transcriptions of Louisa’s journals as evidence that, just as in the novel, Abba advised her daughter to “hope and keep busy.”23 In addition, she counseled Louisa to write frequently in her journal and to write poems as a way of making herself “less excitable and anxious.” Bronson continued to lecture Louisa on morally improving subjects. However, if Louisa did better her conduct during these years, it was less to please her father than to “be a help and comfort, not a care and sorrow, to my dear mother.”24

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The Hillside house in Concord, Massachusetts. Known also as “The Wayside,” it was home to the Alcotts from 1845 to 1848. Hillside was the scene of the happiest years of Alcott’s youth. Although Little Women is set during and after the Civil War, the ages of the March sisters roughly correspond with the ages of the Alcott girls when they lived here. (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)

Unhappily, Bronson failed to see the bond between Abba and Louisa as merely one of love and loyalty; rather, their closeness seemed a threat to his authority. It was hard for him to imagine why, after all his theorizing and clinically precise parenting, he should not stand first in the affections of all his children. Moreover, the stormy temperaments of both the woman and the girl were impossible for his own placid nature to comprehend. In hyperbolic frustration, he told his journal, “Two devils, as yet, I am not quite divine enough to vanquish—the mother fiend and her daughter.”25 There grew up, for a time, a rift in the Alcott family. Pleased as he was with Louisa’s “boundless curiosity, her penetrating mind and tear-shedding heart,” Bronson continued to see his other daughters as belonging more in spirit to him.26 Louisa was a child apart.

It was wonderful, then—as well as crucially important to Louisa’s later writing—that no similar divide arose among the Alcott sisters. They were brought together both by their shared desire to help the struggling family and by Anna’s and Louisa’s passionate interest in theater. Neither May’s youth nor Lizzie’s preference for a seat in the audience were adequate defenses as their older sisters dragooned them into service.