THE RESTLESS SPIRIT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22836, 21 March 1936, Page 4

THE RESTLESS SPIRIT

LOUISA ALCOTT AND HER FAMILY "Tho Story of Louisa Alcott." By Cornelia Meigs. London: Harrap. 12a 6d. Tt seems impossible to regard Louisa without finding the rest of the Alcott family showing prominently on the fringe of focus. They may be regarded as an indispensable flavouring to be taken with Louisa, and as necessary a Sesame to her subtleties as hot cloves are for npp.e pies. This new Alcott biography shows a broad appreciation of the relationship —perhaps too broad. One feels that Miss Meigs has made too much of the cloves, having so decidedly presented Louisa through the mediums of her father, mother, and sisters that Louisa herself appears only in a curiously distant manner —a striking dissonance in the presentation when one remembers, from the loved "Little Women" and Louisa's later works, the extraordinary virility and energv that marked her personality. Although the book has been prepared for younger readers —it won the Newbery med'al for 1934 as " the most distinguished contribution to American literature, for children "—and is as naturally straightforward and honest as a child's story should be, its treatment tends to a smooth sweetness —a setting neither new nor suitable for the restless spirit that was Louisa's. Her affection was boundless and lovely, it is true, but a consuming, almighty thing that always set her energies rushing into streams running swifter than ever. It is no great loss, however, that Mies Meigs has made so much of the cloves in the pie, for Louisa Alcott Avas one of a brilliant and lovable family circle— Bronson the father, teacher and philosopher of high ability, Abba, the mother, a magnificent woman, and her sisters— Anna, Elizabeth, May—whose generosity of spirit helped to make Louisas childhood a delicious, carefree existence. Emerson and Thoreau were close friends of the family, and their portraits are worth discovering in the book. In a day of books of brilliantly misleading titles, it is a virtue of the work that its sober heading "The Story of Louisa Alcott" is amplified exactly.- It goes forward with that easy rhythm that children beg, an unquestioning, uncritical tale of Louisa's adventurous life (29 moves within 28 years, nursing during the Civil War, travel abroad), and her writing, and so stands pleasantly in relief against a deluge of biographies of confused and complex treatment. Yet, franklv, it does not achieve the invincible fascination for all classes that is a quality of greater books for children. The real fascination of the hook is one that must belong to any earnest biography of Louisa Alcott —a resurrection of an abiding family love, a unique force in literature that drove Louisa to make fame and fortune with her pen for the sake of her "mere" parents and sisters, as we might he tempted to call them. ■ F. H. H.