Louisa May Alcott’s life is fascinating to me; fascinating in how rich her experiences were and in the contrasting flatness of her work. Her life was interesting but her writing is damn boring. She was raised by transcendentalist parents and counted among her family friends Thoreau, Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller. Her family veered into poverty after a disastrous attempt to live off the land (in line with transcendentalist ideals and after her father’s transcendentalist school went too far transcendent for the parents of the students). They ended up living in Concord, Massachusetts in a house bought through fortunately-timed inherited money. From then on it was largely the money made by Alcott through her writing that supported her family. The grand success of Little Women yanked them firmly out of impoverishment. Alcott was prolific in her writing, penning theLittle Women series under her own name, and potboiler romances and moralistic tales under two other names (best if she didn’t mix them up but she actually did mix in a fair bit of moralizing with her romances). She is like the French novelist George Sand, another one who led an interesting life (Sand’s was absolutely thrilling at times), churned out the writings to support her family, and yet whose writings just are not that great.
I read Alcott’s The Abbot’s Ghost yesterday, hoping it would be a fun and scary Victorian ghost story centered around Christmas (the sub, sub title is “A Christmas Story”). It falls far short of the best of the genre, authors of which include the most wonderful Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, as well as Dinah Mulock Craik, Rhoda Broughton, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Charlotte Riddell. The Abbot’s Ghost contains all the necessary elements: a grand gathering at an ancient estate in England, a disinherited heir, a titled heir (but does he deserve the title?), a scheming beauty, an innocent beauty, a crippled man in need of a miracle (guess what?), a narrow-minded matriarch, and an army man or two. Oh yes, and a SECRET and, of course, a ghost. But there is nothing much more, other than flat physical descriptions, inert characters, predictable plot lines, and a painfully drawn moral conclusion.
My advice: read about Alcott’s life, for example in the book Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father, by John Matteson, and let her books stay in the library, warming the shelves.
