December 15, 2018
A tightly focused biography on a brief period in the life of Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888): her time as a nurse during the Civil War.Alcott's life seems like something out of our imagination. She was raised in Concord, Massachusetts, with a transcendentalist father and social worker mother, and she became closely acquainted with John Brown, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass, with whom she shared abolitionist sympathies. Though she experienced a wealth of intellectual stimulus, she and her family also struggled financially, causing her and her sisters to seek work where they could find it. As young adult nonfiction author Seiple (Death on the River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Amazon Adventure, 2017, etc.) shows, that was a most difficult task in 1860s America, where options for women were severely limited. Thankfully, Alcott realized her writing talent early, and by her late 20s, she had published a book as well as articles in the Atlantic Monthly. In 1858, tragedy struck with the death of her younger sister, despite Louisa's devoted nursing. By 1862, she discovered the popularity of sensational thrillers published in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and provided a steady stream of stories under a male name, thus providing a small income. Even with her literary success, she felt the need to affect the ongoing war, so she volunteered and traveled to Washington, D.C., to serve at the Union Hotel Hospital. There she met a badly wounded man who opened her heart and wakened her authentic voice, transforming her characters and stories forever. During her time at the hospital, Alcott nearly died of pneumonia and returned to Concord. There she wrote Hospital Sketches, Thoreau's Flute, and Pauline's Passion and Punishment, which earned enough to save her family. Then she published Little Women, in which "she expertly weaved her progressive beliefs and empathetic insights...creating original and unforgettable characters." Throughout, Seiple's fluid style of writing displays few fireworks but makes the story read like a novel.A useful addition to the Alcott archives that would also appeal to younger readers.
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Starred review from December 1, 2018
With this work, YA nonfiction author Seiple (Ghosts in the Fog: The Untold Story of Alaska's WWII Invasion) steps into the adult arena to craft a narrative that makes novelist Louisa May Alcott (1832-88) as accessible in all of her passions, strengths, weaknesses, and actions as the characters in her books. Select passages from Alcott's journals show her wrestling with many of the issues that beleaguer her heroine Jo March from Little Women. These cover her experiences as a nurse during the Civil War, including a train ride to the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington, DC, in which she describes walking through the patient ward hoping to appear motherly since "my thirty years made me feel old, and my suffering made me long to comfort every one." There's a beautiful humanness in Seiple's descriptions of Alcott, who bravely worked in a ward "full of amputated limbs," even as she grappled with internal battles about issues ranging from slavery to the politics of marriage. VERDICT Readers will discover in these pages an author as vibrant as her writings, and find themselves returning to her work with fresh eyes. Alcott scholars will encounter a liveliness if not substantive new information.--Emily Bowles, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison
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