Spotlight

American Masters profiles Louisa May Alcott

Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2009

The author of Little Women is an almost universally recognized name. Her reputation as a morally upstanding New England spinster, reflecting the conventional propriety of mid-19th-century Concord, is firmly established. However, raised among reformers, Transcendentalists, and skeptics, the intellectual protégé of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, Alcott was actually a free thinker with democratic ideals and progressive values about women — a worldly careerist of sorts. Most surprising is that she led, under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, a literary double life, undiscovered until the 1940s. As Barnard, Alcott penned scandalous, sensational works with characters running the gamut from murderers and revolutionaries to cross-dressers and opium addicts — a far cry from her familiar fatherly mentors, courageous mothers, and appropriately impish children.

Combining elements of documentary, drama, and animation, “Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women” airs Monday, Dec. 28 at 9/8 p.m. CT on KET and Sunday, Jan. 3 at 9/8 p.m. CT on KET2. The dialogue is taken exclusively from writings or firsthand reports of conversations. The program was recorded in original locations, including Orchard House, the Alcott family home in Concord; Emerson’s house in Concord; and Fruitlands in Harvard, site of the Alcotts’ utopian experiment. Interwoven with dramatic scenes are interviews with several Alcott scholars and novelist Geraldine Brooks.

“Louisa May Alcott is best known as a children’s author, yet her own life was much harder than Little Women would suggest,” says Susan Lacy, executive producer of American Masters. “Before Alcott became the J.K. Rowling of her time, she worked as a servant, a seamstress, and Civil War nurse. She grew up in the thick of the abolition and women’s suffrage movements (once signing herself “Yours for reform of all kinds”) and lifted her family from dire poverty to great wealth.”