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The Two Loves of Louisa May Alcott

Before Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women, she wrote a book about a young girl named Sylvia in love with an intellectual like Ralph Waldo Emerson and a naturalist like Henry David Thoreau. But the novel was really the story of the two loves of Louisa May Alcott.

She called it Moods.

Louisa May Alcott in her 20s

Two Loves of Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott had an unrequited love for her schoolteacher Henry David Thoreau – and for her generous next-door neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Thoreau, 16 years her senior, would not win wide acclaim as the author of Walden and Civil Disobedience until well after his death. But the townspeople of Concord, Mass., knew him as someone who marched to the beat of a very different drummer.

Emerson, nearly three decades older than Louisa May, had both fortune and fame as the leading Transcendentalist intellectual of his age. He brought together the literary and philosophical community of Concord, where Louisa May spend much of her childhood. Emerson had inherited a large estate from his wife, Ellen Tucker, who died at 20, just two years into their marriage.

Emerson’s Largesse

He supported Thoreau by promoting his work. Emerson also hired him for odd jobs and let him live at his large house with his second wife and children. He gave and loaned money to Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife Sophia Peabody. And he bought houses for Bronson Alcott, the founder of alternative education and the father of Louisa May and her three sisters. Louisa immortalized them as Meg, Beth and Amy, modeling Jo after herself, in Little Women.

The Alcott home in Concord

Alcott was an entertaining eccentric and a vegan before the word existed. He was also a poor provider for his family. Louisa May grew up poor in material things but rich in intellectual companionship.

Smitten Schoolgirl

Born on Nov. 29, 1832, she was a rambunctious, independent child. Susan Cheever described her as ‘that hoping, dreaming girl with the long glossy hair.’

When she was about seven her father enrolled her in a school taught by Thoreau, then 23. Thoreau often took his students out of the classroom into the woods. He taught them about birds and flowers, gathering lichens, showing them a fox den and deer tracks, feeding a chipmunk from his hand.

Sometimes he took the children on his boat, the Musketaquid, and gave them lessons as they floated down the Sudbury and Assabet rivers. As they passed the battlefield where the American Revolution started, he explained how the farmers had defended themselves against the redcoats. Louisa later recorded her vivid memories of those field trips in Moods.

Henry David Thoreau, one of the two loves of Louisa May Alcott

Thoreau had love interests other than the smitten schoolgirl. Perhaps his lack of personal hygiene, his shabby clothes and terrible table manners put them off. Not Louisa. “Beneath the defects the Master’s eye saw the grand lines that were to serve as the model for the perfect man,” she wrote.

Wildflowers

Louisa May’s crush on Thoreau competed with her interest in Emerson. Her family moved to a cottage next door to him. As a teenager, she often borrowed books from Emerson’s library and left wildflowers on his front step. He pretended he didn’t know where they came from.

Thoreau died in 1862, only 44 years old. By then, Louisa May Alcott was nearing 30, officially a spinster, after years of living in poverty. She had been working and writing potboilers, which brought in a little money, and volunteered as a Civil War nurse in Washington, D.C. There she fell ill and returned home to Concord in 1863.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pan Is Dead

Mourning Thoreau’s death while in the hospital, Louisa May had written a poem about him called Thoreau’s Flute. It was published in The Atlantic in the summer of 1863. When it fell out of her papers, her father read it. The poem began:

We sighing said, “Our Pan is dead;
His pipe hangs mute beside the river;
Around it wistful sunbeams quiver,
But Music’s airy voice is fled.
Spring came to us in guise forlorn;
The bluebird chants a requiem;
The willow-blossom waits for him;–
The Genius of the wood is gone.

In 1869 Louisa achieved lasting literary fame with Little Women. Some say she based the character Laurie on Emerson … or was it Thoreau?

Louisa May Alcott died on March 6, 1888.

With thanks to American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever. This story about the two loves of Louisa May Alcott was updated in 2022.

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Sophia Ford – The Great Love Henry David Thoreau Didn’t Want

Henry David Thoreau was many things – a philosopher, poet, author, activist, and more – but no one would accuse him of being a ladies’ man. Sophia Ford, however, was obsessed with him.

She wanted nothing more than to marry the crusty Thoreau. He wanted nothing to do with her.

Louisa May Alcott. Her tutor, Sophia Ford, loved Henry David Thoreau.

“What the essential difference between man and woman is, that they should be thus attracted to one another, no one has satisfactorily answered,” Thoreau famously wrote.

Thoreau did fall in love — once, as a young man. At 22, he and his brother John competed for the affections of Ellen Sewall, the lovely daughter of a minister from Scituate, Mass. John, bolder than Henry, asked her to marry him. She accepted, but then changed her mind after her parents objected. Henry then sent her a marriage proposal by mail, which she also rejected.

After that, Henry David Thoreau showed so little interest in women that some scholars have debated whether he was actually gay. But no evidence suggests he felt a greater attractions to men than to women.

His friends thought him uniquely unsusceptible to love or lust.

In eulogizing his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson noted: “He had no temptations to fight against. No appetites. No Passion.”

And his friend Bronson Alcott would say of him: “All those strong wants which do battle with other men’s nature, he knew not.”

Thoreau himself acknowledged that marriage did not appeal to him, and he made virtually no compliments about any woman’s beauty. He reserved his passions for nature and ideas.

Sophia Ford

Sophia Ford, on the other hand, had a wilder spirit. She came to Concord, Mass., to teach school, but wound up as a tutor to Louisa May Alcott and her sisters. It was here that she met Thoreau, leading the children on nature lessons with him. She was a natural with children, friendly and fun.

Pencil sketch of Henry David Thoreau

Though 15 years older than Thoreau, Ford was smitten, and in 1847 she wrote to Thoreau proposing marriage. The 30-year-old Thoreau was gobsmacked, and he wrote about the proposal to Emerson:

“I have had a tragic correspondence, for the most part all on one side, with Miss ——,” he wrote. “She did really wish to — I hesitate to write — marry me. That is the way they spell it. Of course I did not write a deliberate answer. How could I deliberate upon it? I sent back as distinct a no as I have learned to pronounce after considerable practice, and I trust that this no has succeeded. Indeed, I wished that it might burst, like hollow shot, after it had struck and buried itself and made itself felt there. There was no other way. I really had anticipated no such foe as this in my career. “

Twin Souls? Not

But Ford’s attraction did not wane. At one point, she threatened to kill herself over him. And she believed that she and Henry were twin souls, destined to be reunited in the after-life.

Thoreau received several more letters from her, which agitated him so much he burned them without replying, according to Walter Harding’s The Days of Henry Thoreau. His sister overhead him saying, “he must put a stop to this.”

Eventually Sophia’s ardor faded, but her affections never died. When Thoreau struggled with tuberculosis and appeared to be failing, Sophia insisted her old friend Louisa May Alcott write to her and let her know if he died. In 1862, Alcott did as she requested.

When Sophia Ford herself died in 1885, unmarried at age 85, Alcott wrote a tribute to her:

“Sophia Ford was one of those who, by an upright life, an earnest sympathy in all great reforms and the influence of a fine character made the world better while here, and left a sweet memory behind her…

“The warmth and vigor of her own nature were most attractive, and sincerity made her friendship worth having and her life-long desire for high thinking and holy living won her the regard of many admirable persons, of which she was too modest to boast.”

This story about Sophia Ford was updated in 2023. Read more about Thoreau in Laura Dassow Walls’ Henry David Thoreau: A Life. You can help independent bookstores and The New England Historical Society by buying it here.

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Erle Stanley Gardner and His Fiction Factory

Before Erle Stanley Gardner created the fictional lawyer Perry Mason, he lived the part of a pugnacious defense attorney. He represented the downtrodden and often-exploited Chinese and Mexican immigrants flooding into California in the early 1900s. And before that, he scrapped his way through a childhood spent in an Oregon mining camp. But it all started in 1889 in Malden, Mass.

Erle Stanley Gardner

By the time he passed away in 1970, Gardner had created what he called his ‘fiction factory’ that had turned out 80-plus Perry Mason novels (including several that hadn’t yet been published) and the character had been successfully adapted for film, radio and television.

Erle Stanley Gardner

Gardner’s work habits were legendary. Rising well before dawn, he would begin the day by dictating new novels for several hours. A staff of typists would transcribe the recordings and he would spend the remainder of the day revising and preparing his manuscripts to send to the publisher.

Despite the never ending appetite for the Mason stories, Gardner had to develop other serial characters to fill his time. Doug Selby, a fictional district attorney, was one recurring character and the detecting duo of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam made the core of another series that Gardner churned out under the pseudonym A.A. Fair.

At his peak, the New York Times estimated that Gardner novels were selling at a pace of 2,000 an hour, round the clock, 365 days a year.

Go West, Young Man

Yet writing was very much a second career for Gardner. His childhood in Massachusetts lasted just 10 years. His father, a mining engineer, moved the family to the West Coast and found work in Oregon. Gardner became a boxer as a young man, and got tossed from high school for fighting. But his father Charles wanted Gardner to become a lawyer.

Gardner put in a short stint at an Indiana law school. But had to flee back to the West Coast after a fistfight with a professor put him in hot water. By 1911, however, he had passed the California bar exam and was hustling for work. Most of his clients came from the Chinese and Mexican communities. Gardner made a good living showing up the police in and around Oxnard, Calif., when they tried to hang a loosely-investigated case on an unsuspecting immigrant.

For two decades Gardner made a name for himself defending the underdog. All the while, his writing took more and more time. But he was hardly an overnight success as an author. His early effort, Nellie’s Naughty Nighty, was pure titillating pulp, written for one of the short-story magazines popular in that era.

His mother, Gardner said, was disgusted and declined to read his work. Though Gardner loved the California desert more than any place, he was always fond of his Massachusetts childhood. He would recall for interviewers that his mother, Grace (Waugh) Gardner, had roots that went back to the Mayflower. And his own talent for writing first started developing as a youngster in New England.

Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) and Della Street (Barbara Hale) in “The Case of the Corresponding Corpse” (1958)

Finally, Perry

It would be 400-plus stories, novels, and articles later that the first Mason novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, would be published in 1933 and launch Gardner’s enduring character.

The story, and the crusading attorney, were a smash. At this point, Gardner gave up his law practice, already a very small part of his work. He wanted to focus entirely on his writing. In 1935 he separated from his wife of more than 20 years (with whom he had a daughter). He admitted he wasn’t cut out for family life. For the next 35 years Gardner worked nonstop at his fiction factory until he passed away in 1970.

Perry Mason producer Gail Patrick Jackson (left) and Erle Stanley Gardner speak with Hollywood columnist Norma Lee Browning during filming of the last Perry Mason episode, “The Case of the Final Fade-Out” (1966).

Though the critics were frequently harsh in their analysis of his work, Gardner said it never bothered him. He wrote to make himself money, he said, and to provide a diversion for his world-weary readers. If he could help them take their minds off their troubles enough to let them drift off to a good night’s sleep, he had done his job well.

This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Gardner with Jackson and Browning By Self scan of original black-and-white glossy photograph by Louis Wolf, Chicago Tribune, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46686445.

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