Reviews for Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father

by John Matteson

Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Little Women in rebellion: apparently, Louisa May Alcott couldn't stand the simple life her father preached; she wanted wealth and glory. From an English professor at John Jay College. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.


Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Matteson (English, John Jay Coll., CUNY) relates that "in the marvelous year of 1868, there were suddenly two best-selling authors residing under the roof of Orchard House...father and daughter achieved their most significant literary breakthroughs in the same month." In his account of Louisa May Alcott and her father, Bronson Alcott, he relies heavily on the journals, letters, and works of both authors to portray their unique lives, also quoting extensively from the writings of famous friends and neighbors like Ralph Waldo Emerson. In doing so, he allows readers to glimpse both the minds of these two literary figures and the times in which they lived. Matteson succinctly covers major events in his subjects' lives, e.g., the publication of Louisa May's novel Little Women and Bronson's attempts to establish "a saintly community of scholars in which money would be unknown." Adding another dimension to his portrayal is his concise and perceptive analysis of both Alcotts' literary works. Matteson's graceful style and careful scholarship confirm his premise that the two were indeed "Eden's outcasts... for both, life was a persistent but failed quest for perfection." Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/07.]-Kathryn R. Bartelt, Univ. of Evansville Libs., IN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.


Choice
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

This engrossing dual portrait retells the story of Bronson and Louisa May's passionate pursuit of moral improvement and social justice in the face of poverty resulting from Bronson's inability to provide for his family. The "pathetic family" (as Louisa May called it) was ultimately saved financially by Little Women. Taking their lead from that semi-autobiographical book, critics have emphasized Louisa May's affectionate ties to her mother, the original "Marmee," and a distant/absent father figure. By contrast, Matteson (John Jay College) looks at Bronson's and Louisa May's emotional upheavals, the psychological impact of Bronson's emotional crises during his daughters' formative years, and Louisa May's interest in emotional problems in her 1894 novel Moods. Matteson seems to discount feminist readings of Louisa May's work (e.g., Martha Saxton's Louisa May, CH, Mar'78, and work by Judith Fetterly and Sharon O'Brien) and arrives at bland conclusions (e.g., Bronson and Louisa May wanted "to communicate all that they had to tell each other" but each failed "to receive the messages that the other was sending"). Citing current acceptance of "a connection between literary creativity and ... manic-depressive illness," he suggests that Louisa May have been manic-depressive. An interesting take on a well-known family. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. J. J. Benardete New School University


Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Pulitzer Prize–winner Matteson deepens the stories of the Alcotts, the subject of Eden’s Outcasts (2007), and the Fullers, begun in The Lives of Margaret Fuller (2012), and expands the circle as he tells the “fine and fearful stories” of how Louisa May Alcott, Arthur Fuller, Walt Whitman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Confederate officer John Pelham were transformed by the hellfire of the Civil War. In precise and engrossing prose neatly inlaid with excerpts from letters, journals, and published writings, Matteson immerses readers in the nightmare of filthy military hospitals in Washington, DC, where valiant Alcott destroyed her health tending to the sick and wounded, and where Whitman sensitively and ardently comforted struggling soldiers while his brother was injured and held as a prisoner of war. Army-chaplain Fuller abruptly took up arms. Holmes was shot twice, and struck with dysentery. Handsome, skilled, and reckless Pelham was a battlefield hero. Equally compelling is Matteson’s tracking of difficult family relationships, literary breakthroughs, and how Holmes’ war experiences influenced his thinking as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Here, too, are dramatic scenes of Abraham Lincoln's political and moral quandaries—the book's title is his phrase—in the aftermath of the horrific Battle of Fredericksburg, a touchstone for the exceptional and influential individuals Matteson incisively portrays in this masterful and distinctive inquiry.


Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

They were both born on November 29 (he in 1799 and she in 1832), but willful, passionate Louisa May Alcott couldn't have been more different from her serene, unworldly father, Bronson, whom fellow transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau revered for his wide-ranging philosophical pursuits and occasionally ridiculed for his lack of common sense. Bronson's failed educational and utopian ventures placed a great burden on his wife, Abba, while elder daughters Louisa and Anna worked as teachers and paid companions to support the family. Yet Louisa honored her father's steadfast principles, avers Matteson, a professor of English at John Jay College, who views both father and daughter with a sympathy that doesn't quite conceal the book's slightly specious premise. Bronson was far closer to Anna and younger sister Lizzie; Louisa's fiery nature sometimes dismayed him. She only gained his full approval when mistreatment with a mercury-based medicine during the Civil War made her a near-invalid for the rest of her life. This is really a biography of the whole Alcott family, though it narrows to a dual portrait after the wild success of Little Women in 1868 gave Louisa the independence she longed for and Bronson enjoyed more modest acclaim for his book Tablets and lecture tours out West. 26 illus. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved


Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Neatly interlaced biography profiles a father of New England Transcendentalism and his bestselling daughter. Bronson and Louisa May Alcott shared a birthday (November 29, 1799 and 1832 respectively) and died within 40 hours of each other in 1888. As Matteson (English/John Jay College) ably shows in his debut, their lives were inextricably intertwined, even during the occasional brief periods when they lived apart. After offering a snapshot of a low point in Bronson's life, the 1837 auction of furniture, supplies and books from his beloved, failing Temple School, the narrative moves back to his birth on a Connecticut farm and proceeds chronologically thereafter. Young Bronson mystified his parents with his passion for reading. With little formal education, he traveled as a peddler before devoting the rest of his life to educating others—sometimes in schools, sometimes in lectures and "conversations," sometimes in his writings. Matteson shows all facets of Bronson's character: his fierce work ethic, his feckless financial ways (the Alcotts were perennially saved from ruin by the kindnesses of friends), his loyalty to his family. An early and ferocious opponent of slavery, he could be a remarkably clear thinker, but he was also clueless about his own foolishness and irresponsibility. Louisa, a tomboy with a temper, seemed at times the living refutation of her father's genial theories about human development. In her childhood, she sat at the knees of Emerson, Thoreau and other Concord notables. While serving as a nurse during the Civil War, she became severely ill and was treated with a toxic, mercury-based medication that caused her much suffering and shortened her life. Matteson capably describes Louisa's feverish devotion to her family and to her writing, the failures in love, the struggles to succeed that came to fruition with the publication of Little Women, her subsequent celebrity, travels and literary triumphs. Carefully researched and sensitively written. Essential. Copyright ŠKirkus Reviews, used with permission.


Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

"*Starred Review* Bronson Alcott filled hundreds of pages with minute observations of his infant daughters, believing that fatherhood was the ideal laboratory for testing his beliefs in the natural genius of children and a holistic mode of education. Yet he was baffled by the willfulness of his second-born, Louisa May. And so begins the dramatic father-daughter relationship on which first-time biographer Matteson so adeptly builds a riveting double portrait of two exceptional Americans and abolitionists: one a man of quixotic dreams and abject failures; the other a resourceful, self-sacrificing, and revolutionary woman writer. Making penetrating use of primary sources, Matteson gracefully interprets an astounding family drama of compassion and creativity, folly and courage, deprivation and mental instability. Sharing a birthday and dying within two days of each other, Bronson and Louisa were the driving forces of the Alcott household as he impressed and dismayed their friends Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau by taking innovative ideas to ruinous extremes, and she became the destitute family's wage-earner and author of one of the world's most beloved novels. Matteson's lucid, commanding biography casts new light on an unusual father-daughter bond and a new land at war with itself."--"Seaman, Donna" Copyright 2007 Booklist

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