Harriet Reisen on Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women
Last night I went to the Odyssey Bookshop http://www.odysseybks.com/ to hear Harriet Reisen talk about her new biography for adults: Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women. Like many of us, Harriet Reisen’s passion began as a girl reading her way through Louisa’s novels, and grew during the past twenty years of writing this biography and co-producing a film biography which will be aired Dec. 28 as part of American Masters on PBS. She talked about conversations with costume designers about making the linen outfits the family wore on the utopian farm, Fruitlands. There were visitors, many of whom wrote journals, but while Henry David Thoreau, for example, might lavish pages on a tree, there’s no written description of the tunics and bloomers. The costumers did their best with this period when the Louisa was ten and her family avoided cotton, because it was based on slave labor, and wool, since it relied upon unconsenting sheep, and leather: though practical Mrs. Alcott surely insisted on shoes once the weather got cold. As authors we can do our best with words, but costumers and illustrators have to get more specific. Here’s what illustrator Jean-Paul Tibbles did with the cover of my book (Putnam 2001).
Like Harriet Reisen, the topic of the Alcotts is one I could go on and on about. I liked that the quote from the diary Louisa wrote when she was ten - how she and her older sister Anna were called to a meeting to see if the family should stay together -- which inspired my novel also kind of broke her heart. I loved hearing a few research stories: the unanswered phone calls, the plodding, the serendipity of a letter that fell out from a volume at a used book store with a phone number at the end. Harriet Reisen read two excerpts, and it’s clear she worked hard not only to elegantly and truthfully show Louisa, but put her vividly into the context of her time and place. Harriet Reisen loves a material world both for its clues and color. And she shows Louisa as a runner. Often twenty miles a day.
She cited authors who have been influenced by Louisa Alcott including Simone de Beauvoir, Cynthia Ozick, and J.K. Rowling. I might add more than half the the writers I know. I look forward to reading the biography and seeing the television documentary, with a script that is all quotes, many from Louisa’s diaries and letters, with some commentary by scholars.