Black Milk - Elif Shafak [73]
When Little Women was published it brought its author fame and success beyond her modest expectations. Alcott wrote intensely, sometimes forgetting to eat or sleep. That her readers and critics wanted to see a sequel to the story must have both motivated and limited her. She had originally planned that Jo would not get married, earning her bread by the sweat of her own brow, but her publisher was of a different mind. Under constant pressure from him and others, a male character was introduced into Jo’s life: Professor Bhaer. And the reader knew Jo was torn between two impulses—her sense of responsibility toward her family and her desire to nurture her individuality and freedom. “I’ll try and be what he loves to call me, ‘a little woman,’ and not be rough and wild, but do my duty here instead of wanting to be somewhere else. . . .” Struggling with her family’s expectations of her, Jo eventually chose marriage and domestic life instead of a career in writing—a drastic decision Alcott herself would have never made.
Alcott regarded the matrimonial institution with suspicion. It was clear to her that women who wanted to stand on their feet would have a hard time adapting to conjugal life. “Liberty is a better husband than love to many of us,” she said, insinuating that sometimes the only way for a woman writer to find freedom was to remain a spinster.
Her sister May—a creative, prolific painter who had chosen to live abroad—was happily married. She seemed like a woman who had achieved it all—a successful career and a good marriage. Louisa Alcott compared her loneliness with her sister’s fulfillment, saying, “she always had the cream of things and deserved it.” Unfortunately, May died shortly after giving birth to a baby girl. Her last wish was to send the baby—named Louisa May after her aunt and nicknamed Lulu—to her Aunt Louisa to be raised by her.
So it was that Louisa Alcott, who never married, found herself raising the daughter of her sister. She gave her full love to this child and even wrote short stories for her, thus creating what later was to be named “Lulu’s Library.”
There is a wonderful passage in the second volume of the Little Women series, which was titled Good Wives, where Alcott describes Jo’s, and I believe her own, urge to write fiction. I think it is one of the best descriptions ever written about the creative process and I can’t help but smile each time I read it: “She did not think herself a genius by any means, but when the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh.”12
Always a hardworking writer and a Chekhovian by nature, she said, “I don’t want to live if I can’t be of use.” That’s how she died, when she couldn’t write anymore due to old age, in Boston in 1888.
Mary Ann Evans, born on November 22, 1819, was a shy, introspective and emotional child who loved to read and study. The story of her life is one of transformation—a journey that turned her into the restless, headstrong and outspoken writer known to everyone as George Eliot. When she was thirty-two years old, she fell in love with the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes. He was a married man, but his was an “open marriage”—even by today’s standards. His wife, Agnes, had an affair with another man, and when she bore his child, Lewes was happy to claim the baby as his own. Though the couple remained legally married, they had ceased to see each other as husband and wife. Mary Ann and George lived together. She adopted