About this item
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.
About the Author
Eve LaPlante's latest books are MARMEE & LOUISA, a groundbreaking dual biography of Louisa May Alcott and her mother, and MY HEART IS BOUNDLESS, the first compilation of Abigail May Alcott's personal writings. 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."
A first cousin of Louisa May Alcott and a great-niece of Abigail May Alcott, Eve lives in New England with her husband and four children.
