Marmee and Louisa

Marmee and Louisa by Eve La Plante

Book Info:

 

Louisa May Alcott was one of the most successful and bestselling authors of her day, earning more than any of her male contemporaries. Her classic Little Women has been a mainstay of American literature since its release nearly 150 years ago, as Jo March and her calm, beloved “Marmee” have shaped and inspired generations of young women. Biographers have consistently attributed Louisa’s uncommon success to her father, Bronson Alcott, assuming that this outspoken idealist was the source of his daughter’s progressive thinking and remarkable independence. But in this riveting dual biography, award-winning biographer Eve LaPlante explodes these myths, drawing from a trove of surprising new documents to show that it was Louisa’s actual “Marmee,” Abigail May Alcott, who formed the intellectual and emotional center of her world. Abigail, whose difficult life both inspired and served as a warning to her devoted daughters, pushed Louisa to excel at writing and to chase her unconventional dreams in a male-dominated world. In Marmee & Louisa, LaPlante, Abigail’s great-niece and Louisa’s cousin, re-creates their shared story from diaries, letters, and personal papers, some recently discovered in a family attic and many others that were thought to have been destroyed. Here at last Abigail is revealed in her full complexity—long dismissed as a quiet, self-effacing background figure, she comes to life as a fascinating writer and thinker in her own right. A politically active feminist firebrand, she was a highly opinionated, passionate, ambitious woman who fought for universal civil rights, publicly advocating for abolition, women’s suffrage, and other defin-ing moral struggles of her era. In this groundbreaking work, LaPlante paints an exquisitely moving and utterly convincing portrait of a woman decades ahead of her time, and the fiercely independent daughter whose life was deeply entwined with her mother’s dreams of freedom. This gorgeously written story of two extraordinary women is guaranteed to transform our view of one of America’s most beloved authors.

Author Info:
Eve LaPlante's newest books are MARMEE & LOUISA, a groundbreaking dual biography of Louisa May Alcott and her mother, and MY HEART IS BOUNDLESS, the first compilation of the personal writings of Abigail May Alcott. Please visit with Eve at www.EveLaPlante.com.
A New Englander with degrees from Princeton and Harvard, Eve has published articles, essays, and three previous nonfiction books. SEIZED is a narrative portrait of a common brain disorder that can alter personality, illuminating the mind-body problem and the limits of free will. AMERICAN JEZEBEL tells the true story of Eve's ancestor the colonial heretic and founding mother Anne Hutchinson. Eve's second ancestor biography, SALEM WITCH JUDGE, about the 1692 judge who became a feminist and an abolitionist, won the 2008 Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction.
Shaun O'Connell, in his anthology, BOSTON: VOICES & VISIONS, which includes the preface to AMERICAN JEZEBEL, observes, "Just as Nathaniel Hawthorne dug into the dark history of his ancestry, which reached back both to the original Boston settlement of the 1630s and the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s, so too did LaPlante trace family members who were rooted in the same eras.... Hawthorne took shame upon himself for the misdeeds of his Puritan ancestors, and LaPlante offers praise for her forebears who testified against Puritan repression. As her prefaces to these biographies, a kind of spiritual autobiography, show, Anne Hutchinson and Samuel Sewall were not the dark Puritans many imagined them to be. They remain living presences, even models of rectitude, into the twenty-first century."

My review:
So I am going to say this review will be a little biased because I love Louisa May Alcott! Little Women is one of my favorite books! (I also like Alcotts other works as well and I have been to Orchard House as well)! I thought this book was well written, interesting, and a worthwhile read! I learned so much about the author that I didnt know and the information in this book was told in an interesting way (it wasnt boring to read). I really liked the cover of the book to it is very nice. I think this book is also really cool in the fact that it is a dual biography of Louisa and her mother.  For any Louisa May Alcott fan this book is a must read! I would highly recommend this book it is a good and worthwhile read!

I wold like to thank the people from Free Press for letting me read and review this book!