|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Louisa May and Abigail Alcott
| Article
# : |
20498 |
|
|
Section : |
LIFE
|
| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1992 |
2,571 Words |
| Author
: |
Peggy Robbins
Peggy Robbins, a Tennessee native, is a free-lance writer
living in Gulfport, Mississippi. Over the past three decades,
she has written extensively about American heritage and
military history. |
Late in 1854, when Louisa May Alcott was twenty-two, she sent her mother, Abigail May Alcott, a copy of her just-published first book, Flower Fables, along with this note: "Whatever beauty or poetry is to be found in my little book is owing to your interest in and encouragement of all my efforts from the first to the last; and if ever I do anything to be proud of, my greatest happiness will be that I can thank you for that, as I may do for all the good there is in me; and I shall continue to write if it gives you pleasure."
The close bond that had developed between mother and daughter during Louisa's childhood was something beyond the mother-daughter love between Abigail and her three other little girls. Louisa was more like her mother than the others; they both had hot tempers and restless natures, and they helped each other keep their explosive feelings under control. They helped each other deal with the trials and tribulations of the poverty caused the proud family by philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott, Louisa's visionary, impractical father. Together they worked to remain unconquered by the drudgeries of their life and the constant struggle to acquire life's necessities.
Louisa was born in Germantown, now part of Philadelphia, on November 29, 1832, which was her father's thirty-third birthday. She was the second daughter of Bostonian Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott, the son of a poor Connecticut farmer. The two had married when Abby was a few months under, and Bronson a few months over, the age of thirty. According to one historian, the romantic relationship between the couple had "begun to deteriorate after Louisa's birth" as Bronson became "more and more absorbed with his dreams and self-involved reflections."
Amos Bronson Alcott was one of the founders of the transcendental school of philosophy in New England; he let nothing--not even his family's needs--lessen his commitment to his "sure ideal," which was that the spiritual and superindividual must reign supreme against all things material and empirical. He was on terms of friendship with many noted persons, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau, but many of his contemporaries ridiculed him. Thomas Carlyle said that "Alcott stays bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age."
Alcott was gentle and kind as both husband and father, and his children's education came mainly from his teaching, eccentric though his methods might have been. But he did not, could not, realize enough from his teaching and
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
