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Post by dreamer on Dec 28, 2009 15:22:25 GMT -5
Louisa May Alcott The Woman Behind 'Little Women' TODAYMonday, December 28, 2009 on PBS (check local listings www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/schedule/)Watch a preview: (video is to be found here) www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/louisa-may-alcott/the-woman-behind-little-women/1295/Louisa May Alcott, 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. Raised among reformers, iconoclasts and Transcendentalists, the intellectual protégé of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Alcott was actually a free thinker, with democratic ideals and progressive values about women – a worldly careerist of sorts. Most surprising is that Alcott led, anonymously and under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, a literary double life not discovered until the 1940s. As Barnard, Alcott penned some thirty pulp fiction thrillers, with characters running the gamut from murderers and revolutionaries to cross-dressers and opium addicts – a far cry from her better-known works featuring fatherly mentors, courageous mothers and impish children. Visit the filmmakers’ Web site www.alcottfilm.com/ for more, and don’t miss what WETA’s The Book Studio www.thebookstudio.com/books/pbsbooks/alcott has to say about The Woman Behind ‘Little Women’. www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/louisa-may-alcott/the-woman-behind-little-women/1295/
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Post by dreamer on Dec 28, 2009 15:23:23 GMT -5
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Post by dreamer on Dec 28, 2009 16:01:51 GMT -5
Sherry has just made me aware of this article: A Writer Whose Life Had as Many Ups and Downs as a Victorian Novel
By MIKE HALE Published: December 27, 2009 Anyone who has ever complained about the difficulties of the writing life should watch “Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind ‘Little Women,’ ” a biography of the novelist who sold 1.8 million books in the late 1800s. In 20 years she made three times as much money as Henry James and Herman Melville did in their lifetimes, combined. That success comes late in this film, an “American Masters” presentation being shown Monday night on most PBS stations. The bulk of the 90 minutes is spent on the hardships that preceded “Little Women,” including genteel poverty, family discord, sickness and death, and endless grinding hack work for the magazines of the day. “I had lots of troubles,” Alcott says, “so I write jolly tales.” Those words are spoken by the actress Elizabeth Marvel, whose previous roles (like Ivo van Hove’s avant-garde stagings of “Hedda Gabler” and “A Streetcar Named Desire”) have been miles away from PBS and “Little Women.” Between vintage photographs and chattering biographers and professors, Ms. Marvel plays the adult Alcott in short scenes using words presumably taken from her journals, letters and books. (It’s a minor irritation that the sources of the dialogue in these re-creations, said to be writings or firsthand accounts, are rarely identified.) This doesn’t give Ms. Marvel much room to build a character, and her lightly sardonic Alcott doesn’t necessarily match up with the woman we’re hearing about: obstreperous and independent but fiercely devoted to the welfare of her somewhat useless family. When Katharine Hepburn is seen playing Alcott’s surrogate, Jo, in the 1933 film of “Little Women,” you suspect that, despite the Hollywood gloss and the sentimentality of the story, you might be seeing something closer to the writer’s true nature.
But Alcott’s life is the stuff of a Victorian novel, and the writer Harriet Reisen and the director Nancy Porter lay it out intelligibly in “The Woman Behind ‘Little Women.’ ” (The film might have been better at an hour, without the re-creations.) Alcott’s childhood among the Transcendentalists — Thoreau and Emerson were family friends, and Emerson, 29 years her senior, was clearly the love of her life — might have been idyllic if not for the impracticality of her father, Bronson, who ran through his money and drove away his wife in an attempt to start a utopian community. Forced to support the family, Alcott worked as a seamstress, teacher, laundress, woman’s companion and governess. “I sew like a steam engine while I plan my works of art,” she wrote. Her two younger sisters died during her lifetime; Alcott contracted typhoid fever, and later in life used opium, morphine and hashish to control pain that might have been caused by lupus. And all the time she was writing, attempting novels while making money (under pen names) with lurid pulp fiction: “He stretched his hand to her and said ardently, ‘Heaven bless hashish if its dreams end like this.’ ” Finally an editor asked her to write “a girl’s story.” She wrote: “Lively simple books are very much needed for girls. I said I’d try.” The rest was history, as well as money, furniture, clothes and trips to Europe. But her troubles weren’t over. Her sister May, the model for Amy March in “Little Women,” died after giving birth, and Alcott, at 46, found herself taking care of an infant niece and a bedridden father. The success of “Little Women” boxed her in; she spent the 1870s churning out sequels and juvenile stories she called “moral pap for the young.” The film touches only briefly on Alcott’s literary standing, citing a number of other writers who credit her as an inspiration. It quotes from Henry James’s review of her first novel, “Moods,” in 1864, in which he cited “the author’s ignorance of human nature and her self-confidence despite this ignorance.” It sounds about right for a daughter of dreamers who wrote: “I will do something. Teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family. And I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die. See if I won’t.” www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/arts/television/28alcott.html?_r=1:GIGGLES: Kate's version is still the ONE ;D
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Post by charliesgirl7681 on Dec 28, 2009 20:35:49 GMT -5
LOL Kate is leading in a landslide!!!
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Post by martha on Dec 29, 2009 23:00:16 GMT -5
i've just done my duty. and yes, the landslide continues for kate as jo ...
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