Happy birthday

[pegkerr]

Happy Birthday to Louisa May Alcott, Madeleine L'Engle and C.S. Lewis.

Comments

[ari-o.livejournal.com]

Wow! They all share the same birthday?!

I adore L'Engle. I pull out her books whenever I am depressed or sick.

[pinkfinity.livejournal.com]

And Bill Weasley. Hm, wonder how to connect him to those luminaries?

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

Wow. Three of the people who shaped my childhood and my worldview.

[chamisa.livejournal.com]

It was a good day for this planet when those three were born. I adore all three of them. :-) Happy Birthday to them indeed! Thanks for this post.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

Amazing that L'Engle and Lewis have the same birthday. Rereading A Wrinkle in Time this summer, I realized how much it has in common with Lewis's space trilogy. Do you know if anyone's written about that, or if L'Engle herself made any comments about an influence?

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

As I recently discussed in my LJ, a movie of A Wrinkle in Time is now out on DVD. Apparently, from a comment, it was a miniseries on TV. I thought they did a good job adapting it.

And tomorrow...

[skg.livejournal.com]

Happy Birthday to LM Montgomery!

[avengangle.livejournal.com]

This is strange indeed. I do love how they refer to him as the "most prominent Christian apologist" . . . kind of reminds me of people like St. Paul and Augustine, at least some of whom didn't really start out Christian.

I adore L'Engle and Alcott and I haven't read the Narnia books since I was old enough to understand them. I should reread them. When I have time. :)

Although, now that I think about it, it's not that odd that there were lots of people born at the end of November. Must have been snowstorms those years. *grins* (I'm allowed to say this -- I was born in September.)

[kfitzwarin.livejournal.com]

Wow. Talk about a high-power birthday! I reread books by all three regularly (as time permits)!

[dawn-came-dim.livejournal.com]

Wow. The only thing the Almanac got right about Louisa was her birthday.

I don't know what's more disturbing -- that they may have intentionally written false information, or that they may be honestly that mistaken.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

All right, I'll bite and risk showing my ignorance. What is erroneous about it? I ask, because everything in that entry I've read elsewhere about Alcott.

[dawn-came-dim.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry -- I didn't mean it to sound like a taunt! But I will explain.

Yes, she was born in Germantown, PA on 11/29/1832.

She did write sensational stories about all of those topics, following more luridly in the footsteps of Nat Hawthorne, and leaving a moral rather more to the imagination. She did refer to the stories as "blood and thunder" lit, and was speaking of herself rather ruefully in the line they quoted about her ambition. She did not start out writing them, though. Her first stories were faciful tales for children, begun as an early teenager. She did have a passion for drama, which manifested itself in her first novels pieces that were more along the lines of the play Jo and her sisters acted in in Little Women -- A Long, Fatal Love-Chase (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0440223016/qid=1101773828/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/103-9993072-5652622?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) and The Inheritance (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0140436669/ref=pd_sim_b_2/103-9993072-5652622?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance) (written at 17 and 16, respectively).

After writing pieces like these, she served as a Nurse in the Civil War, and returned home a few inches from death, ill with typhoid. As she grew stronger, she wrote recollective pieces from her months of service, and essays for a number of local papers and magazines. Unfortunately, there was no money in writing of this sort. It was when financial straits became dire indeed, that she truly began writing the less tasteful sensation pieces. She published under male pseudonyms not to keep from embarassing her family, but because no one would publish sensational serials written by a woman; she tried to publish under her own name and failed.

She took a hiatus from writing the serials to take a trip abroad as a child's nurse; that salary allowed her to focus on her own designs. When she returned stateside, she did more work with fanciful children's pieces -- and published these under her own name. (Harvard has original copies of most of the periodicals in their library.) It was after writing hundreds of pieces that her father's editor pressured her into writing LW, which was so lucrative that she could not in good conscious cease -- her family counted on her as the primary bread winner.

Her irritation with having to write said "moral pap" came over time, as she herself turned to a greater interest and a number of scholarly pieces on the importance of Social Reform, she grew more dissatisfied that children -- and adults -- were willing to accept the "moral pap" without a desire for anything stronger or more difficult. She was resentful of the time the stories took, because they were so simple and dissatisfying.

Her stories were finally beginning to be republished in 1975 -- Madeleine Stern and Leona Rostenberg were brilliant feminists who would not sit down in the face of old white men looking down their superior noses at women daring to consider that a children's literature author had anything relevant to say about their own field of study. STERN pushed for a critical reassessment of the writer, and it took 13 years for her to earn it.



*steps off soapbox*
Sorry. Alcott would have been the topic of my dissertation if I'd contnued on that path. She was a pivotal figure in literary and social history, and it really pisses me off when publications that should know better slam her as a woman simply discontent with being "the female invalid, the cerebral spinster, the vestal devotee."