“So the first break comes,” Alcott had written when Lizzie passed.48 There were more breaks in store. May departed for Boston. Bronson immersed himself in renovating Orchard House, and Abba retreated into her memories. Anna, Louisa’s closest confidante, distanced herself still further. Less than a month after Lizzie’s death, Anna announced her engagement to a tall, refined local man named John Bridge Pratt. The couple were to have two children: Frederick Alcott Pratt in 1863 and John Sewall Pratt in 1865. In Little Women, John Brooke’s courtship of Meg strikes Jo with all the force of a betrayal. Anna’s engagement to Pratt broke upon Alcott with no less force. Although she found Pratt’s character unimpeachable—she called him “a model son and brother” and “a true man”—Alcott privately wrote that she would never forgive him for taking Anna from her.49 Whereas Jo’s perceived abandonment in Little Women is played for comic effect, the extended consequences of Anna’s engagement veered closer to tragedy.
With his sage advice and sound moral example, Abolitionist minister Theodore Parker helped Alcott over her suicidal depression in 1858. (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)
In October, Alcott decamped to Boston in search of work. She didn’t find it. This failure, combined with the recent fraying of her family ties, turned her thoughts in a perilous direction. Her feet carried her to the city’s Mill Dam, where she stared into the water, wondering whether she should jump in. But it seemed to her “so mean to turn & run away before the battle was over,” and she stepped away from the edge, “resolved to take Fate by the throat and shake a living out of her.”50 She sought advice from Theodore Parker, a progressive Unitarian minister who had made a name for himself as a staunch enemy of slavery. He counseled her as he did the rest of his flock: “Trust your fellow-beings, and let them help you. Don’t be too proud to ask, and accept the humblest work till you can find the task you want.”51 Later fictionalized as the Reverend Power in Alcott’s 1873 novel, Work, Parker gave Alcott just the encouragement she needed, and she confronted life with new resolve.
Once Alcott had weathered the crisis brought on by the real loss of one sister and the perceived loss of another, her life changed: she drew closer to her father, and her writing life intensified. Her rapprochement with Bronson had actually begun the previous year, when her father’s elderly mother paid a visit and explained to Louisa that she had “never realized so plainly before how much he ha[d] done for himself.”52 Newly respectful of her father’s ideals and efforts, Alcott planned to write a novel about his strivings that she would call The Cost of an Idea. She would search without success for a way to write this book for the next fifteen years. The more proximate force that brought Alcott and her father closer together was Bronson’s concern about his daughter’s depression. He began spending much more time with her and discovered that the once-ungovernable Louisa now “bore herself proudly and gave me great pleasure.”53 Taking a newly heightened interest in her writing, Bronson personally delivered the manuscript of her story “Love and Self-Love” to the editor of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly. The magazine accepted the story, and Louisa redoubled her literary efforts, now feeling as if “I’ve not been pegging away all these years in vain, and may yet have books and publishers and a fortune of my own.”54
Alcott’s zeal for literary success did not prevent her from enjoying an active life around Concord, one that sowed more and more ideas in her mind for the writing of Little Women. By 1858, Alcott and her sister Anna had graduated from performing the melodramatic plays that they themselves had written, but they remained quite active in local theater. In a production of Dickens’s The Haunted Man, Louisa played Sophy, the wife of ’Dolphus Tetterby, who was portrayed by a sixteen-year-old boy named Alf Whitman. Whitman, who had lost his mother some time earlier, impressed Louisa as “proud and cold and shy to other people, sad and serious when his good heart and tender conscience showed him his short-comings, but so grateful for sympathy and a kind word.”55 Rehearsal by rehearsal, Alcott melted Whitman’s reserve. Though he lived in Concord less than a year, the two became fast friends, and Alcott continued to write to him until 1869. Early in that year, she confided to him that he had supplied “the sober half” of Laurie in Little Women and that she had put him “into my story as one of the best & dearest lads I ever knew.”56
Along with the dashing Pole Ladislas Wiesniewski, Louisa’s friend Alf Whitman supplied the inspiration for Laurie in Little Women. (Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)
Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family had owned the Alcotts’ former home at Hillside, which they had renamed the Wayside, since 1852. However, when the Alcotts resettled in Concord, the Hawthornes were in Europe. When they returned in 1860, Alcott acquired a new inspiration for a lively young male character. Julian Hawthorne, the novelist’s only son, had just turned fourteen when his family came back to Concord.
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