LOUISA MAY ALCOTT IN 2010

Quarreled with this biog throughout the read. Great to have it so soon after John Matteson’s study. The two books complement each other though I kept returning to Matteson as the definitive final say. Too many attempts to psychoanalyze Bronson and family members, including a discussion of whether or not he has a ‘homo-erotic relationship with Charles Lane!!’ Perhaps that sensationalizing was for press purposes but manufactured out of what they used to call ‘wholecloth,’ it does real disservice to the reader.
Kept seeing the writer interpreting (quarreling with earlier biogs as academics are wont to do while their readers stamp their feet impatiently in the cold), her sighing behind the scenes, expressing her dissatisfaction that all the materials available to earlier writers are not to her, how dismal it is to be writing yet another Alcott biog, even a feeling of her disengagement from the subject towards the end, as though she were giving a series of lectures on a subject about which she had once cared.
Lots more to say on this, though not here. I’ll look up the PBS doc with trepidation, even though it would be good to see Orchard House and perhaps the annual reenactments of the Pratt wedding.
Sometimes you get the feeling around certain literary figures that their biographers set out to completely ‘own’ them and dictate to the world how they are to be seen, with strong opinions. That seems to be Reisen, at least what I’ve managed to read and see from bits of the documentary. Wish I could feel there was no bias here but so far it keeps turning up.
Harriet does do well in some areas by noting the things women are more likely to care about, which Matteson could not help but miss, but her interpretations seem forced. Haven’t found an Alcott biog I can really trust yet and I’ve read quite a few.
Finally, you can’t help but see how delighted Louisa would’ve been with the advances of this century, especially: running clothes, especially SPANDEX!, Washer-driers, jets, the possibilities of teleportation (her love of travel), women permanently wearing pants (and much less), no-iron fabrics, video cameras (though not cell phones), money transfers by e-mail, supermarkets that pick out and deliver – nearly all of the outward hardness of her times resolved in ours, leaving only the spiritual to be rescued from its current position at the bottom of our deep well of culture.