Loring, demanded that Alcott radically shorten the book. He also disliked any passages that savored of philosophical depth or moral ambiguity, preferring, as he put it, “a story that touches and moves me . . . a story of constant action, bustle and motion.”71 Alcott gamely sacrificed ten chapters and much else besides, supplying the requested motion but negating much of the subtlety and candor of her initial inspiration. The story was so altered that it seemed no longer, as Alcott had intended, “an attempt to show the mistakes of a moody nature, guided by impulse, not principle,” but rather a much more conventional story of love and marriage.72 When the proofs came back to her, all the chapters “seemed small, stupid & no more my own.”73 As Jo was to do in Little Women, Alcott had omitted “all the parts which she particularly admired,” and, having “meant so well,” was astonished at last to find that, in the eyes of some, she had “done so ill.” Eighteen years later, when her wealth and fame had made it impossible for editors to dictate to her, Alcott revised and republished Moods in a form that restored her original intentions. Her next novel after the original Moods was to be much better.

There remained for Alcott one more crucial formative experience before that second novel, Little Women, could be written. In 1865, shortly after the end of the Civil War, a wealthy friend of the Alcotts, William Weld, proposed to send his invalid daughter, Anna, on a grand tour of Europe. Alcott, with her nursing experience, seemed the ideal traveling companion. In July the two women, in the company of Weld’s half brother George, boarded a steamer bound for England. Alcott’s first trip to Europe lasted precisely a year. In Little Women, May’s descriptions of London, Paris, and Germany, as well as Alcott’s vivid narration of May’s sojourn in Nice, all owe their life and immediacy to Alcott’s travels with the Welds. But it was an episode that had no precise parallels in the plot of Little Women that left the deepest and most durable impression on Alcott and her novel-to-be. In October 1865, Alcott’s traveling party settled in to pass the late autumn at the Pension Victoria in Vevey, Switzerland. There, in November, Alcott made the acquaintance of Ladislas Wiesniewski, a young Polish man with charmingly polite manners whom she found “very gay & agreeable” despite his both being ill and having been imprisoned for his part in a recent failed insurrection in his homeland, in which young Poles had fought against conscription into the Russian army.74 Wiesniewski, whom Alcott called “Laddie,” was an excellent pianist, and he acted the part of Chopin to Alcott’s George Sand in “a little romance” that they shared on the shores of Lake Geneva.75 Months later, when Alcott arrived in Paris, Laddie surprised her at the train station. Having but little money between them, they shared quiet strolls in the public gardens and moonlight concerts on the Champs-Élysées. “Never,” she recalled, “were pleasures more cheaply purchased or more thoroughly enjoyed.”76 Alcott privately acknowledged that Alf Whitman had been a model for Laurie in Little Women. Fred Willis averred that Bronson Alcott had tapped him as Laurie’s inspiration, and it is hard to imagine that Julian Hawthorne did not also fit into the equation somewhere. Nevertheless, in her best-known public utterance on the subject, Alcott asserted, “Laddie was the original of Laurie, as far as a pale pen-and-ink sketch could embody a living, loving boy.”77

After Alcott returned to Concord in July 1866, no great artistic inspiration seized her. Finding that the family accounts had fallen into arrears during her absence, she began churning out stacks of magazine fiction. “I dread debt more than the devil,” she later told her journal, and that dread drove her to work until toward the end of the year she fell ill and was incapacitated for six months.78 Nevertheless, in 1867 alone Alcott authored twenty-five miscellaneous stories and a collection of fairy tales that contained an additional fourteen. As the year 1868 began, she wrote that she still entertained the “heavenly hope” of supporting the family and achieving complete financial independence, though that hope still seemed far from fruition.79

In the fall of 1867, Alcott had been offered the editorship of an illustrated children’s magazine called Merry’s Museum. Simultaneously, a partner at the publishing house of Roberts Brothers named Thomas Niles approached her with another suggestion. Having remarked upon the dearth of good books for young female readers, Niles asked Alcott if she might write a novel to fill the void. Alcott accepted both projects, though neither greatly appealed to her and both seemed to be leading her further away from her dream of succeeding as a serious novelist. After making an abortive start on Niles’s book for girls, she set it aside.

For the moment, she was most absorbed by a writing assignment from the New York Ledger: an essay of advice for young women that she called “Happy Women.” In it, Alcott revealed a side of herself that the public had only partially glimpsed before: a supporter of women’s rights and an advocate of the power of women to benefit society as something other than wives and mothers. She included sketches of four unnamed women who, as she observed of one of them, were “ordinary in all things but one—a cheerful, helpful spirit, that loves its neighbor better than itself.” Although the first three—a doctor, a music teacher, and a home missionary—had all chosen lives without husbands, each had found rich fulfillment in living and doing for others. The last of the four was a veiled self-portrait: “a woman of strongly individual type” who had seen enough of “the tragedy of modern married life” that she felt best advised to “obey instinct and become a chronic old maid.” Representing her stories as her metaphorical children, Alcott affirmed that, for her, “literature is a fond and faithful spouse, and the little family that has sprung up around her, though perhaps unlovely and uninteresting to others, is a profitable source of satisfaction to her maternal heart.” She concluded by assuring her readers that “the world is full of work, needing all the heads, hearts, and hands we can bring to do it.” To women who, like Alcott herself, took no husbands, she gave the exhortation, “Be true to yourselves; cherish whatever talent you possess, and in using it faithfully for the good of others you will most assuredly find happiness in yourself, and make of life no failure, but a beautiful success.”80

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Thomas Niles, an editor at the publishing firm of Roberts Brothers, urged Alcott to write a book for girls. Alcott stated privately, “I don’t enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many.” Still, she agreed to attempt the project.