"Little Women": Alcott's Civil War

When, toward the end of Little Women, Jo finds her at last, her father blesses her with the prospect of inner peace and an end to all ambivalence: You have had the bitter, now comes the sweet. Do your best and grow as happy as we are in your success. And Alcott adds her benediction: So, taught by love and sorrow, Jo wrote her little stories and sent them away to make friends for themselves and her, finding it a very charitable world to such humble wanderers.' Finding her true at last was not, however, such a peaceful arrival in safe waters for Alcott herself. She responded with alacrity to the opportunity afforded by the anonymous No-Name Series to write something not in her style, declaring that she was tired of providing moral pap for the young and enjoying the fun of hearing people say, I know you didn't write it, for you can't hide your peculiar style.' 2 She prayed more than once for time enough to write a good book and realized that without it she would do what was easiest and succumb to the pressure of the dears who will cling to the 'Little Women' style.3 And at the end of Jo's Boys, the last of her books on the March family, she longs to close with an earthquake which should engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it. Alcott's commitment to her style was evidently somewhat less a choice than a necessity, somewhat less generated from within than imposed from without. Her initial resistance to the proposal from Thomas Niles, a partner in Roberts Brothers Publishing Company, that she write a book for girls had its origins perhaps in an instinct for self-preservation; certainly the success of Little Women limited her artistic possibilities thereafter. Hard it was to deny the lucrative rewards attendant upon laying such golden eggs; hard to reconcile the authorial image inherent in Little Women with the personality capable of the sensational Behind a Mask; harder still