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Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House Transports You Back to the Time of ‘Little Women’

A restored home in Concord, Massachusetts, serves as the former residence of renowned author Louisa May Alcott and her family and revives the spirit of what made Little Women a phenomenon spanning over 150 years.

The Orchard House is where Louisa took a page from her family life to write the 1868 classic about the four March sisters coming of age in New England. The home serves as a museum featuring the “shelf desk” where Louisa wrote Little Women to artwork created by her youngest sister who inspired the character of Amy March.

Nov. 29 marks Louisa’s 189th birthday. Born in 1832 in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, she was the second daughter of Transcendentalist philosopher and educator Amos Bronson Alcott. The family moved to Concord, known as the home of post-Revolutionary War American literary and philosophical greats including Louisa and her father, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Feminism and financial freedom

The Orchard House welcome sign

The house features the desk Louisa wrote Little Women. The desk, according to the curators, was built by her father at a time when desks were not considered appropriate for women to use. Louisa sat at the desk, day in and day out, to write her children’s classic while her mother, Abba May Alcott, brought tea to her bedroom occasionally, the curators said. She trained herself to be ambidextrous, using both hands to write her book.

I will do something by and by.  Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!

Louisa May Alcott

Already the writer of several short stories and novels mainly for adults, Little Women was a book that Louisa’s publisher wanted to satisfy the young adult audience, especially the girls. She was told a story about four girls would rake in money. An introvert with a mood pillow still intact in the family room of the Orchard House, Louisa couldn’t draw inspiration from any friends, so she looked at her sisters to mold the characters and storylines that continued in subsequent books such as Little Men and Jo’s Boys.

Once Little Women was published, it became a windfall for the financially struggling family. Though Bronson was a well-known educator and philosopher and Abba a social worker, the Alcotts seemed to still be considered impoverished. A Civil War nurse who battled illnesses on the battlefield, Louisa’s experiences as a seamstress, teacher, and governess are reflected in her novel, Work: A Story of Experience, one of the rare works available through the Orchard House gift shop.

The pullquote from the house’s website shows how Louisa promised herself to support her family and that also meant she wouldn’t marry in order to support their makeshift home that was originally built almost 200 years before the Alcotts bought it in 1857. Named for the over 40 apple trees that were on the property at the time of its sale, the Orchard House was a fixer-and-upper that experienced additions in later years to accommodate the growing family needs.

Artistry and abolitionism

The last flowers in bloom in the Little Women Garden at the Orchard House

With the Little Women profits, Louisa sent her youngest sister, Abigail May Alcott Nieriker, to Europe to study art because it was impossible for May to receive training in the U.S. as a woman. May would draw on the walls; her work revived by artists and historians in the Orchard House through tracing over a plastic sheet to reveal her original traces that had been damaged by age. Upon her European art tour, May wrote the book, Studying Art Abroad: And How to Do It Cheaply. Her real-life love for art is reproduced via Amy March, as the bulk of May’s artwork is featured in the house.

May’s most famous work, “La Negresse,” was viewed as her ticket to stardom if she hadn’t died at the age of 39 following childbirth. The portrait features an enslaved Black female, which was considered a complex work of art conveying the gloom of being a slave with a so-called good master.

The inspiration may have stemmed from the Alcotts’ strong belief in abolitionism. In the winter between 1846 and 1847, the Alcotts hosted a runaway slave traveling through the Underground Railroad to Canada. The area near the Orchard House is recognized as a part of the Underground Railroad network.

Heart and home

The Orchard House

The house is located near Concord’s historic downtown that includes the Nathaniel Hawthorne estate. Because 80% of the artifacts in the Orchard House were owned by the Alcotts, photography of any kind inside is prohibited. Yet the items displayed creates the timeline of the family’s historical footprint.

Louisa’s burgundy mood pillow sits up on the sofa in the family room, a sign that she was open to socializing, the curators said. Her shelf desk is still intact, small and rounded wrapped across the wall near a floral watercolor piece by May. Dolls created by the sisters for the sons of the oldest daughter Anna Alcott Pratt when they moved back to the home after the sudden death of her husband are parked in a box in their added bedroom. A portrait of the third daughter, Elizabeth Sewell Alcott, sits on the piano, the only known image of the sister who died before the family moved into the Orchard House and inspired the character of Beth March.

For any Little Women fan, the house serves as an awe-inspiring literary adventure full of interesting facts about Louisa and her family.

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experiences

‘Books in Bloom’ Literary Festival Lauds Progressive Voices

Annual literary festival Books in Bloom on Sunday marked the grand opening of a multifaceted bookstore chain and welcomed a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist to its main stage.

Based in a mixed-use cultural center called the Merriweather District in the master-planned community of Columbia, Maryland, Books in Bloom has become one of the D.C. metro area’s most well-known progressive book events. In its fifth year, the festival hosted several authors at Color Burst Park throughout the day with The 1619 Project creator and The New York Times investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones serving as the featured author. Over 150 spectators roamed the park’s grounds to eat, drink, and be bookish.

The festival also highlighted the soft opening of the new location of Busboys and Poets, a popular D.C. bookstore chain known for its added restaurant, bar, café, and venue concept. Dozens lined up at the bookstore-eatery after the festival, where the business had a pop-up stand. Beside its tent was the Howard County mobile library.

With past headliners such as White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, political journalist April Ryan, and award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, this year’s headliner Nikole Hannah-Jones was joined by the following authors:

Amy Argetsinger, author of There She Was: The Secret History of Miss America

Milagros Phillips, author of Cracking the Healer’s Code

Jake Tapper, author of The Devil May Dance

Maureen Corrigan, author of So We Read On

Ram Devineni, Ashley A. Woods, and Yusef Komunyakaa of Jupiter Invincible

Laura Lippman, author of Dream Girl

Stacey Vanek Smith, author of Machiavelli for Women: Defend Your Worth, Grow Your Ambition, and Win the Workplace

Aparna Verma, author of The Boy with Fire

In anticipation of the Penguin Random House Nov. 16 release of The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story and the children’s version The 1619 Project: Born on the Water with Piecing Me Together novelist Renée Watson, Nikole sat in an hourlong conversation with Busboys and Poets founder Andy Shallat. She broke down the pivotal year of 1619 and how the conflicting nature of events fails to be taught in our schools.

“Two things happened in 1619: the arrival of the White Lion and the beginning of African slavery in the thirteen colonies, but it’s also when the country took its first step towards democracy,” she said. “It’s when the English colonists took a vote on this land for the first time. Democracy and anti-democracy are birthed in the same moment. The idea of freedom and slavery is birthed in the same moment in this country, but we’re not taught that.”

Tweeting under the user name Ida Bae Wells, Nikole also explained why Ida B. Wells is her role model, especially when the newspaper she works for now once called the groundbreaking Black investigative journalist a “slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress,” also referenced in Nikole’s Twitter bio.

“What Ida B. Wells means to me personally is she was the first example of a Black woman doing what I hoped to do, which shows you a lot about our field, right?” she said. “That I had to go to a woman born right at the Emancipation Proclamation to see a model of a Black investigative reporter who was a woman, who was a feminist, who was a civil rights activist, who was doing the type of reporting that I wanted to see.”

“But also that legacy of lineage matters,” she continued. “To understand that there were badass Black women who were doing things at a time when there was no help that was going to come to protect Ida B. Wells when she was investigating lynchings.”

She added the actions of Black female writers before her sets the tone for her work:

It gives you courage. It gives you strength. It helps you understand what you’re doing, and it gives you humility that you didn’t create this. There are a lot of folks who came before you. There are a lot of folks who had to sacrifice and suffer for you to do the work that you do and that, to me, gives the motivation for the work that I’m trying to do because I have to repay this debt that I owe.

Besides the literary content, the park’s atmosphere was filled with Instagrammable features, including a welcome arch made from books, light-studded signs, and pumpkin-and-hay stacks, splashed with the festival’s lavender-hued branding. A chalkboard requested attendees write down what they’re reading. The district also had restaurants with outside seating like Dok Khao Thai Eatery, The Charmery, Clove & Cardamom, and Cured and 18th & 21st.

The event was free with tickets available on Eventbrite. Almost all attendees followed the mask mandate. Street and garage parking around the Merriweather District was free for the festival.

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experiences

Free Black Women’s Library Holds Lavender + Lit Poetry Reading

The Free Black Women’s Library held a read-and-relax event Sunday afternoon at the Underground Museum in Arlington Heights section of Los Angeles.

Taking place in the Purple Garden among purple parasols and plants, the Lavender + Lit on July 21 featured a reading by poet Mahtem Shiferraw, who shared her new collection of poems, Your Body Is War. Her curated reading list sparked a conversation on handling generational trauma.

“With the newer generation trying to distance themselves, they end up replicating the same traumatic act of violence or aggression without actually doing it themselves,” said Mahtem, who spoke from her cultural experience of being Ethiopian and Eritrean. “So part of the process of healing, or when distancing ourselves, we can also recognize what happened because of that ugliness and beauty. We came from that.”

Under the parasols shielding the 40 attendees from the 80 plus-degree heat, the poet and attendees, mostly millennials, discussed their roles in helping an older generation understand the obstacles.

“For Ethiopian people specifically, I know they open more when they’re around friendly faces and when they’re eating and they’re joking, so things come out like that, then they get serious,” Mahtem said. “If I try to have a one-on-one sit-down, they will never talk to me. It’ll be like, ‘Who are you asking me this?’ I don’t mean with just strangers; even my family members will not talk to me like that.”

The two-hour event also allowed the attendees to roam among woven baskets of books separated by genres that make up the library that includes hundreds of works all by black women writers. The Los Angeles arm of the New York-based organization launched in April.

 

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experiences

Book Launch: ‘More Than Enough’ by Elaine Welteroth

Elaine Welteroth. Photo: Renell Medrano.

Elaine Welteroth, who reached prominence as the first black Teen Vogue editor and now as a Project Runway judge, stopped in Los Angeles Thursday for her book tour and discussed why she wrote the women empowerment memoir to an estimated 400-member audience.

What appeared to be a well-read black girl magic rally at the California African American Museum in Exposition Park started with the cheerful announcement that Elaine’s book had notched itself to the coveted New York Times Best Sellers list. She was then introduced by her former Teen Vogue colleague and friend Lynette Nylander, who conducted the fireside chat.

Right away, Elaine began reading from Chapter 16 in More Than Enough: Claiming Space For Who You Are (No Matter What They Say), which is dubbed “Disturbing the Peace,” which starts with a quote from Audre Lorde and describes how Elaine returned to work from a Christmas vacation from Rwanda for a surprise racial interaction. Her hair was braided into Senegalese twists down her waist—the first time she came to a corporate setting in an overly ethnic hairstyle—and a white female colleague in disbelief asked how her hair had allegedly grown feet over a short amount of time.

This question is sometimes posed to black women who decide to add synthetic or real hair to their braids for a new look to celebrate their heritage, so Elaine took it in stride after an inner dialogue berating the beauty industry for neglecting what is considered beautiful to women of color with telling the woman, “Oh, you of all people must know these are extensions.”

That set the tone for the evening: Elaine describing her humble background in the San Francisco Bay Area as a first-generation college graduate to a high-ranking editor in a magazine media empire. Starting her career in the beginning of the recession, she said she felt the weight of being “black, young, and female,” the trifecta of the media industry teeming with racism, ageism, and sexism.

“We all live in a 180-character world where we are scrolling each other’s success stories every day, and we’re only getting the shiny slice, we’re only getting the prettiest picture, we’re only getting the clearest caption,” she said. “I felt like I owed this community more than I can fit into a caption on Instagram about the most universal aspects of the success story. The parts that get left out from the messy relationships that so often intercept with how we show up in our careers.”

At 32, she said she feared her audience would doubt she was ready to write a memoir, even as her own brother echoed this sentiment soon after she submitted a manuscript questioning her reason to pen an “autobiography.”

“I wanted to throw the plate in his face,” she said of the interaction over a Christmas vacation while he was washing dishes in the kitchen. “I was so emotional because that was the very question that threatened to keep me from doing this and leave it to be my family—it’s always family—that are your harshest critics. At the time, I was so emotional I can only think to say, ‘They don’t even call it autobiographies anymore, you asshole!'”

A round of laughter erupted from the audience, but she continued with the true translation of that moment.

“Then later I really sat with it. I don’t blame my brother for asking that question. That’s the patriarchy talking. We’ve all been conditioned by this mindset that tells us, ‘Your stories are not valid if you look like me.'”

The two-hour event brought up more gems from Elaine’s book like her decision to attend a state university because the boy she was dating was supposed to be there but turned out to be in jail and how on her first Ebony photo shoot she had a serendipitous moment with the hairstylist who happened to be friends with her aunt.

Eso Won Books, the main black-owned bookstore in Los Angeles, was the official bookseller at the event.

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experiences

Book Launch: ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ by Celeste Ng

With so many concerts going on around the LA area Friday night, I decided to look for an event more my pace. Luckily, on Facebook I found Celeste Ng was scheduled to speak and sign books at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. Her newest novel Little Fires Everywhere had been gaining momentum on the best-seller lists, and since I recently read and enjoyed Everything I Never Told You, I went to the event to get insight on the author’s work and writing process.

In Little Fires Everywhere, a suburban mother is dealing with her house burning down amid her seemingly perfect life and trying to piece together what sparks ignited the blaze. The story takes place in Shaker Heights, Ohio — the author’s second hometown — and at the event she spoke about the “metaphorically rich” planned community and how rules shape it. She used the example of how residents couldn’t leave trash cans out on the curb for collection; it was too messy, so the city had golf carts go in the back of residents’ houses to fetch the trash to bring it up the driveway to the truck at the curb.

This fascinated me. In the book jacket, her bio reads she grew up in Shaker Heights — where she said she lived from 10 to college — and Pittsburgh. Recently I had just realized I spent half my childhood in Chicago and the other half in Sacramento. The most recent novel I’m working on surrounds a teenage girl secretly becoming a mermaid at a nightclub in Chicago, but I based the character’s neighborhood on my original neighborhood of Rogers Park that had such an idyllic quality that it didn’t feel like it was in Chicago, and from Celeste’s description maybe more like Shaker Heights. And I too had moved to Sacramento at age 10 up to college. Chicago has more personality, of course, but maybe Northern California suburban living might creep up into a later story.  

Celeste also discussed her writing process and how the idea of her latest novel  germinated in 2009 but the actual writing didn’t come until after 2014’s Everything I Never Told You. So the characters evolved in her head, so she encouraged writers to not be so consumed with how long the story is taking to get on paper and then the long road to being published. She even praised how Sweet Tarts and other candies got her through writing, with a tweet about Sweet Tarts catching the attention of the company that sent her a package. Like many writers, she worked at home, the library, and cafes, which felt inspiring since it felt like I could create a great novel though I spent so much time writing it in all the same places near me.

The event drew a packed room with about 75 or so people braving rush hour traffic. I bought the hardcover book and got it signed, but I choked when I met her because I wanted to tell her about my author aspirations. Sometimes, I can get my words out when meeting authors quickly at book signings and sometimes not, but she was polite and I’m looking forward to reading the novel soon.