Eden's Outcasts

June 11, 2007
They were both born on November 29 (he in 1799 and she in 1832), but willful, passionate Louisa May Alcott couldn’t have been more different from her serene, unworldly father, Bronson, whom fellow transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau revered for his wide-ranging philosophical pursuits and occasionally ridiculed for his lack of common sense. Bronson’s failed educational and utopian ventures placed a great burden on his wife, Abba, while elder daughters Louisa and Anna worked as teachers and paid companions to support the family. Yet Louisa honored her father’s steadfast principles, avers Matteson, a professor of English at John Jay College, who views both father and daughter with a sympathy that doesn’t quite conceal the book’s slightly specious premise. Bronson was far closer to Anna and younger sister Lizzie; Louisa’s fiery nature sometimes dismayed him. She only gained his full approval when mistreatment with a mercury-based medicine during the Civil War made her a near-invalid for the rest of her life. This is really a biography of the whole Alcott family, though it narrows to a dual portrait after the wild success of Little Women
in 1868 gave Louisa the independence she longed for and Bronson enjoyed more modest acclaim for his book Tablets
and lecture tours out West. 26 illus.

February 1, 2021
Pulitzer Prize-winner Matteson deepens the stories of the Alcotts, the subject of Eden's Outcasts (2007), and the Fullers, begun in The Lives of Margaret Fuller (2012), and expands the circle as he tells the "fine and fearful stories" of how Louisa May Alcott, Arthur Fuller, Walt Whitman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Confederate officer John Pelham were transformed by the hellfire of the Civil War. In precise and engrossing prose neatly inlaid with excerpts from letters, journals, and published writings, Matteson immerses readers in the nightmare of filthy military hospitals in Washington, DC, where valiant Alcott destroyed her health tending to the sick and wounded, and where Whitman sensitively and ardently comforted struggling soldiers while his brother was injured and held as a prisoner of war. Army-chaplain Fuller abruptly took up arms. Holmes was shot twice, and struck with dysentery. Handsome, skilled, and reckless Pelham was a battlefield hero. Equally compelling is Matteson's tracking of difficult family relationships, literary breakthroughs, and how Holmes' war experiences influenced his thinking as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Here, too, are dramatic scenes of Abraham Lincoln's political and moral quandaries--the book's title is his phrase--in the aftermath of the horrific Battle of Fredericksburg, a touchstone for the exceptional and influential individuals Matteson incisively portrays in this masterful and distinctive inquiry.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.