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I bailed on Susan Cheever‘s biography of Louisa May Alcott. It jumped all over the place,time-wise,people-wise,idea-wise.Too much about other literary figures of the time:Emerson,Thoreau,Hawthorne,Elizabeth & Sofia Peabody, Margaret Fuller,etc.Not that they are not fascinating figures in & of themselves,& they did influence Louisa, but it felt like the author spent an inordinate amount of verbiage on people & world events.It just felt scrambled.

I hate to think of my favorite author enduring abuse at the hands of her zealot, Transcendentalist father. How could he actually believe that dark haired children were of the devil? I learned so much and it just makes me admire her even more. I can't wait to visit Orchard House.

When traveling, I often try to find a book that represents that trip. After visiting Concord a couple days ago, I browsed Brattle Book Shop in Boston this morning and found an author signed copy of this biography of Louisa May Alcott. This afternoon I took a few minutes of quiet during my sightseeing to read the preface “A Trip to Concord” in Bates Hall at the beautiful Boston Public Library at Copley Square.

#LiteraryTourism

I‘m giving up on this book. Probably my own fault, I picked the shortest bio rather than the long, authoritative one. If you‘re well read on Louisa‘s life the jumps and gaps in this book might not matter. In the bit I just read it talked about her first novel without any info about how it was published,then a few pages later it tells you about the first time she was paid for writing which wasn‘t that novel.