Erin Blakemore - The Heroine's Bookshelf - Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder

These passages are not-so-shockingly similar to Louisa’s own angsty letter to her sister a few years before:

If I think of my woes I fall into a vortex of debts, dish pans, and despondency awful to see…. All very aggravating to a young woman with one dollar, no bonnet, half a gown, and a discontented mind. It’s a mercy the mountains are everlasting, for it will be a century before I get there. Oh, me, such is life!

The expression of Louisa’s despair through Jo might seem like a mere narrative device, but there’s that outlet again. It took guts to declare your dissatisfaction with life in the 1860s, in a day and age where women’s wrongs were not just ignored, but actively stifled. And it feels good to see the sloppy, ungovernable emotion beneath Louisa’s self-proclaimed hack job.

Better yet is the delicious vent Louisa gives her own heroine. Like her creator, Jo must act when mired in the slough of despond; like Louisa, she writes her way out of every hole. Discontented with her feeble options and frustrated with her own ennui, she goes up to the attic, readjusts her ridiculous writing cap, and gets to work. Here is the true apex of Louisa’s literary rebellion: unlike her creator, Jo is allowed literary success writing books she loves. Her stint writing pulp has been unprofitable and left her numb; as it was for Louisa, the creative work she performs from a place of insecurity or lack is bound to be unsuccessful. Jo writes for herself, out of her own experience, and the truth that comes from that heroine’s self gives her the success Louisa chased her entire life.

I would rather write that Jo’s literary triumph mirrors her creator’s, but in reality they were different creatures indeed. Little Women itself was a literary sensation, but it came at an awful price. “Paid up all the debts, praise the Lord!” wrote Louisa after completing the book. “Now I feel as if I could die in peace.” But shouts of happiness over her new financial freedom were undercut by worry that her work would never be taken seriously. The ambition that drove her literary success prevented her from devoting herself to the adult novels she longed to write.

Angry with a public who disturbed her privacy and demanded constant access to their favorite literary celebrity, Louisa struggled vainly against her new role. Unable to take herself seriously, the girl her father had called “duty’s faithful child” did the only thing she knew how to do: she worked, hard, cranking out stories of placid childhoods and good little women long after there was a financial need. Her nervous system was so used to deprivation and want that she never really learned how to enjoy her fame or her money. She could not have known that she was already dying. Louisa herself thought that the cure to the typhoid she had contracted during her nursing days had brought mercury poisoning along with it; present-day scholars suspect she suffered from lupus. Either way, the work that plagued her, obsessed her, and even killed her was also her literary gift to us.

It’s hard to imagine a heroine more companionable than Jo March, a young woman whose attitude toward work was somewhat more balanced than her creator’s. In the 1860s, her power was as an alternative to the buttoned-down, boring girl who followed all rules and mastered self-sacrifice. That girl has long since faded from fashion, but Jo remains as a tantalizing option, the opposite of fear and insecurity, inaction and perfection. Jo is an Erin Brockovich in a world of corporate sheep, a Christiane Amanpour in a land of pseudo-journalists, an alternative to mundane, muted reality. When Jo works, she does so from a sense of duty, a knowledge that the bills must be paid while Father is off at the war. But she also eventually works from a place of pleasure, tackling projects that are self-supporting and self-defined. Hardworking Jo never shies away from a challenge, and her success gives us something Louisa May Alcott craved but never attained: the possibility of a life in which ambition firmly occupies its proper place.

A workaholic myself, I have much to learn from a heroine who divides her most tedious sewing into hemispheres and talks about geography as she sews. I could do worse than turn my daily struggles into a Pilgrim’s Progress like the March girls. As heroines, we inherit our foremothers’ less appealing traits and trials: a tendency to overwork, off-kilter time management skills, and the never-ending challenge of bringing our work in line with the rest of our lives. Ambition is a heroine’s trait only when it adds to life instead of detracting from it. Louisa would be proud and happy to see that a modern woman can choose any avenue for her life’s work, that our road is easier than the one she trod so resolutely and so ruefully. But fewer obstacles doesn’t mean fewer obligations. Though we have it relatively easy, we still face the challenges of being taken seriously, of proving that our efforts have some meaning and worth. It takes guts to show up for life, to tackle what we are handed. And it takes even more strength and courage not to confuse self-sacrifice with self-sustenance.

A heroine’s work—growth, self-definition, barrier-smashing—is never really done. Let us heed Louisa’s warning and do as Jo does, taking up the work that’s right for us instead of that which we feel obligated to pursue, work that consistently creates the independence Louisa sought when she wrote, “I think I shall come out right, and prove that though an Alcott I can support myself. I like the independent feeling [of working], and though not an easy life, it is a free one, and I enjoy it… I will make a battering-ram of my head and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world.”

READ THIS BOOK:

• After a fight with a family member or daughter

• When you’re ready to walk out on your job

• On days when you’d rather sell your hair than get out of bed

JO’S LITERARY SISTERS:

• Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath

• Frankie Landau-Banks in The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart

• Lucy Snowe in Villette, by Charlotte Brontë

Mary Lennox in The secret Garden,

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

“Somehow, something always happens,” she cried, “just before things get to the very worst. It is as if the Magic did it. If I could only just remember that always. The worst thing never QUITE comes.”

FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT, A LITTLE PRINCESS

Frances Hodgson Burnett hadn’t aged well. Gossip had always been her closest companion, but it seemed to finally have taken its toll. Now the worst had come: not only was she a laughingstock, but her florid, romantic writing style, the words that had made her a star, had gone out of vogue. She had tried to stay relevant, penning books with toxic undercurrents of rape, scandal, and physical abuse instead of the flowery stories for children that had sealed her fame, but her efforts had done nothing to revive her literary reputation. Alone in her garden in 1910, she had plenty of time to think things over.

Solitude used to be a blessing. It was in solitude that she discovered the seedy and the beautiful side of Manchester, England, the city in which she was a little girl, blissfully unaware of her family’s rapid slide into poverty and obscurity. It was in solitude that she discovered the wilds of the countryside around Knoxville, Tennessee, where she moved with her mother and siblings in search of a better life away from Manchester’s dying economy, which had been ravaged by the decline of cotton production due to the American Civil War. A lonely teenager, Frances picked wild grapes in the woods, selling the fruit and using the proceeds to buy paper for the writing she had already discovered could bring in infinitesimal sums to help support her family. Back then, she feared she would never be successful: her surroundings were simply too plain and fortune too far away to grasp. “What is there to feed my poor, little, busy brain in this useless, weary, threadbare life? I can’t eat my own heart forever,” she wrote fretfully to a suitor. “I can’t write things that are worth reading if I never see things which are worth seeing, or speak to people who are worth hearing. I cannot weave silk if I see nothing but calico—calico—calico.”