Love: Marmee & Louisa

Rather than focusing on romantic love for this theme, I opted for familial love. Coincidentally, this is also how I love to celebrate Valentine's Day - it's about EVERYONE I love, not just my man-mate (though I was less successful at that this year, sorry for the e-card Mom!).

Any-who, I have only just started this book, Marmee & Louisa by Eve LaPlante, about the strong, loving relationship between Louisa May Alcott and her mother. The title is from how this relationship was immortalized in the book Little Women, which I love. Though I was rather miffed about the ending at first - that's a point for another day. I am not so well versed in the Alcotts but even I have gathered that Louisa's father, Bronson Alcott, gets much more press than her mother did. This book is about correcting some of that historical oversight, that Louisa valued her relationship with and was influenced by her mother just as much, if not more, than by her father.

I am only about 40 pages in but this book already had me in tears. Perhaps I was a bit hormonal that day but works from this time period tend to get me.

*************SPOILERS*********************

It's the child mortality folks, gets me EVERY TIME. This book is very much a historical, biographical account and thus starts with her mother's family. Abigail May's parents lost more than one of their children early on, but it was the death of one of their sons in middle childhood that greatly influenced her upbringing, by bringing her close to her brother Sam Jo. This small child's death really hit me, I just can't imagine losing a child and it was so commonplace at that time. Samuel Joseph May provides Abigail with many opportunities she would normally not have gotten, purposefully bringing his little sister into many of his educational experiences. Her father wasn't really down with this and Abigail caused some drama by refusing to many a suitor or really even be on the market for suitors. She was really captivated early in her life by education and very much aware of the many opportunities denied to her by her gender. I like that this book very firmly places her life in it's historical context but maintains a modern eye; let's be real we are all thinking about the contrast so I appreciate it when authors work with it. So, so far so good. I hope this post motivates me to get moving a bit faster on this book. American's Best Science and Nature Writing 2012 edited by Dan Arielly has been distracting me. Love that stuff.