Louisa May Alcott a feminist? On Saturday’s Tuttolibri, Felicia Kingsley, who translated “An Out of Fashion Girl” for Newton Compton, a novel for very young people but certainly inscribed today in the so-called young adults category, underlines how in little Polly’s adventure, from the rural province to the glittering world of the city’s social life, there is much more than a romantic fairy tale. Because the American writer (1832 – 1888) who became famous for her little women, she was not at all sugary as we tend to think. She was indeed – she explains – a first wave feminist, albeit “temperate”, but it was the culture of her time, which forcefully claimed the dignity and autonomy of women.
This is a theme that comes back often in recent times. More or less at the same time, for example, the “New York Review of books” dealt with it (in relation to a collection of essays by the Bostonian writer), recalling how, at least since the 1970s, critical studies and biographies have amply demonstrated her true stature . Martha Saxton’s book (“Louisa May: A Modern Biography”, 1977, also translated into Italy) and, more recently, the biographies of Harriet Reisen, Susan Cheever and Eve LaPlante, and scholars such as Pulitzer Prize winner John Matteson, have demonstrated that Alcott was certainly not an author of “moral gruel for young people” – as she herself defined herself, in a decidedly (fiercely?) self-deprecating way. In fact, she had a very broad stylistic and imaginative horizon: she wrote gothic tales, satires, fantasy stories, novels for adults, memoirs and essays, insisting on the need for female independence and the costs that it entailed. She wrote of her anger at being, as a woman, an established best seller but still a second-class citizen. And she worked hard to build and maintain her popularity. But not only.
In this existential struggle to affirm her identity and dignity, she participated in the American Civil War as a nurse (her father allowed himself a perhaps not too elegant joke when she was assigned to a hospital near the front, namely that he was sending the her only son – as Saxton says) met and frequented Giuseppe Mazzini, she was also a woman of action. And above all of literary strategies: in fact, and who can blame her, she had a huge passion for thrillers and gothic novels, possibly with at least deplorable episodes. She wrote quite a few of them for popular magazines during the war years, later publishing them in volume under the pseudonym AM Barnard; and with excellent public response (in other cases she also used other, less fortunate pseudonyms). No one ever suspected anything. Only in 1943 were the letters sent to her by the publisher insistently asking her to sign with her real name were discovered, given that there were no prejudices of any kind, neither social nor commercial. She didn’t want to know. Her secret remained inviolate for almost a century. We will have to (re)read it.