Teen-Age Biography
FERGUSON, DELANCEY
Teen-Age Biography Miss Alcott of Concord. By Marjorie Worthington. Doubleday. 330 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by DeLancey Ferguson Former Chairman, Department of English, Brooklyn College Ninety years...
...Reviewed by DeLancey Ferguson Former Chairman, Department of English, Brooklyn College Ninety years after Little Women was written it can still enthrall the young, though the world it pictures is remote as Lyonesse from modern youngsters' experience...
...Ednah Cheney, who edited the letters and journals in 1928, was evidently a monument of discretion...
...But Louisa Alcott - competent daughter of an incompetent father - has not been well served by editors and biographers...
...So far as her bibliography shows, she did not even examine such obvious sources as Emerson's letters or Townsend Scudder's Concord: American Town...
...This may not be high art, but it is life, and young minds instinctively recognize it...
...one narrative episode leads smoothly and effortlessly to the next...
...Louisa May Alcott was preachy, prejudiced and her writing was often stilted...
...Interpretative biography, though, is possible without using manuscripts...
...Doubtless the originals often used initials instead of full names, but Miss Cheney seems not to have identified the people, and may have added more initials on her own account...
...But no such limitation is anywhere made, and Miss Worthington's novels are written for adult readers...
...Thus Louisa mentions the U. S. C. S. Magazine...
...Yet the themes and ideas of her voluminous fiction are worth study...
...Failing access to these, there are other resources...
...Instead of consulting the Union Serial List in the nearest public library, Miss Worthington remarks blithely, "whatever that was," and passes on...
...But here again Miss Worthington ducks the question...
...being so widely read by children, they shaped, genuinely though intangibly, the basic social ideas of the next generation as well...
...To these literary qualities add the facts that she had salty wit in her own right and knew intimately some of the best minds of her day, and you have a personality which merits a much closer study than it has yet had...
...If this excursion into biography is also for adults, it must be judged accordingly...
...But she had the one gift which outweighs all defects, and without which a novelist, however attentive to the rules, can never hope for long survival-she could tell a story...
...Her characters are quickly introduced and clearly differentiated...
...An author might even claim a right to be judged by his published works and not by his private opinions...
...They do more than reflect the tastes and standards of the years in which they were written...
...An author who can thus transcend the limitations of time and society is a phenomenon worth studying...
...A serious biographer might be expected to seek out the original manuscripts...
...If Miss Alcott of Concord is intended for teen-agers, such criticism as this amounts to breaking a butterfly...
...Apart from a brief discussion of the unsuccessful novel, Moods, and a brief eulogy of Little Women, there is no real appraisal of Louisa's work, though the itinerary of her first European tour gets a whole chapter...
Vol. 41 • November 1958 • No. 63
