I've started reading Harriet Reisen's Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, and right from the start she's caught my attention. How can you not appreciate an author who on the first page writes:
"Like so many other girls, I fell under the spell of Louisa may Alcott when my mother presented Little Women to me as if it were the key to a magic kingdom. I was taken into Louisa's story so completely that a book with covers and pages has no place in my memory of the experience. While I was there, by my mother's decree, my life was suspended."
The passage actually gave me shivers. I love the idea of a story being so wonderful and captivating that it transcends the physical, a book with pages, and the reader literally falls into the story and becomes part of its world. Those are always the best books and it's not every read that achieves that completeness.
I don't actually remember when I first read Little Women. I think I must have read an abridged version or some sort of junior reader, as it seems I always knew the story, but I don't have a recollection of being swept up in its pages. I read it properly just a few years ago and enjoyed it immensely, but I think it probably works its magic best on a younger, fresher reader. Of course this is not to say I didn't appreciate it very much, as I did and have been curious about the woman who wrote it. I decided now's the time to read biography--in anticipation of the documentary airing next month.
It seems Reisen has long wanted to make a film about Louisa May Alcott. She's spent more than twenty years reading Alcott's work and researching her life and finally got together the funding for her project. The book is a result of her work and seems to have been written in conjunction with the making of the film. I've only just started reading, and my teaser is from the first chapter as Reisen introduces the reader to Louisa's mother and father. I find her father, Bronson, especially interesting. He had only a rudimentary education, but but worked hard to educate himself. "They (Bronson and his cousin William) assembled their own library of stray books hoarded by relatives, now and then scraping together enough money to purchase a volume." Imagine scraping money together to buy "A volume". I'm feeling especially fortunate at the moment.
My teaser, however, is about the school Bronson worked at and the innovations he tried.
"At last Bronson landed a teaching job at the Cheshire public school. Eagerly he set out to overturn education as he had known it. He transformed the Spartan schoolroom along Athenian lines, dignifying his students as he added backs to the uncomfortable benches, improved the lighting and heating, and provided individual slates for writing, paying for it all himself. He banished rote learning and memorization that suffocated curiosity, and avoided corporal punishment in favor of more respectful forms of social organization, including an honor system. He elicited his pupils' opinions, guiding their discussions along Socratic lines, posing questions rather than imparting facts."
The educational system was quite different than how we know it now, wasn't it? Bronson seems a fascinating individual, but why do I think the Alcott's lives were on the tumultuous side? I'm not as familiar with Louisa's story or the Transcendentalists or the life stories of any of the other authors working at that time in New England for that matter (what little I learned in high school has long since faded away). I'm hoping this will be a good introduction to this period and I feel another reading tangent coming on. First, though, I'm off to read about Louisa May Alcott!