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The Woman Behind Little Women
by Harriet Reisen
A vivid, energetic account of the life of Louisa May Alcott, the first complete biography of the beloved author whose work has delighted millions of readers
Louisa May Alcott portrays a writer as worthy of interest in her own right as her most famous character, Jo March, and addresses all aspects of Alcott's life: the effect of her father’s self-indulgent utopian schemes; her family's chronic economic difficulties and frequent uprootings; her experience as a nurse in the Civil War; the loss of her health and frequent recourse to opiates in search of relief from migraines, insomnia, and symptomatic pain. Stories and details culled from Alcott's journals; her equally rich letters to family, friends, publishers, and admiring readers; and the correspondence, journals, and recollections of her family, friends, and famous contemporaries provide the basis for this lively account of the author's classic rags-to-riches tale.
Alcott would become the equivalent of a multimillionaire in her lifetime based on the astounding sales of her books, leaving contemporaries like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James in the dust. This biography explores Alcott' life in the context of her works, all of which are to some extent autobiographical. A fresh, modern take on this remarkable and prolific writer, who secretly authored pulp fiction, harbored radical abolitionist views, and completed heroic service as a Civil War nurse, Louisa May Alcott is in the end also the story of how the all-time beloved American classic Little Women came to be. This revelatory portrait
'Reisen too often interprets Alcott's life through her work, as if Alcott did not transmute experience into art after all...yet Reisen's rich empathy for Alcott never falters." - Publishers Weekly
"This compelling biography allows readers to know Alcott and appreciate her as 'her own best character.'" - Library Journal
"[D]eliciously palatable biography of the iconic writer ...an absorbing portrait of the protean author whose 'life was no children's book.'" - Kirkus Reviews
"As Harriet Reisen's enchanting biography reminds us, Alcott patterned the March family on her own and Jo on herself. .... One of the many pleasures of Ms. Reisen's "Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women" is that she quotes abundantly from Alcott's private papers." - Wall Street Journal
"Brilliantly researched. ... Her biography will occupy an essential place on any Alcott bookshelf." - John Matteson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father
This information about Louisa May Alcott was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Harriet Reisen’s interest in Louisa May Alcott dates to her marathon reading of Alcott's eight children's novels during a rainy spell one childhood summer. Over the past twenty years, what began as an idea for a film biography of Alcott developed into a passion for the subject herself. A former fellow in screenwriting at the American Film Institute, Reisen has written dramatic and historical documentary scripts for PBS and HBO, and radio commentary for Morning Edition and Marketplace. She lives in Massachusetts.
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