A STRANGE LIFE

Essays from the author of Little Women.

Even occasional readers know that Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) wrote Little Women. Few may be aware that she was also a remarkably witty essayist. This volume collects some of Alcott’s nonfiction, which editor Rosenberg calls “even more brilliant—or perhaps more consistently brilliant—than her novels and stories.” The book includes three long essays and excerpts from six additional pieces. The snippets, including “Happy Women,” where she begins, “One of the trials of womankind is the fear of being an old maid,” and then cites several women who did just fine without a man, have their pleasures, but the highlights are the longer essays. “How I Went Out to Service” describes the weeks she spent working for “a tall, ministerial gentleman” in search of “a companion for his sister,” whom he called “a martyr to neuralgia.” The hilarious “Transcendental Wild Oats” chronicles the escapades of family members who had no talent for farming yet tried to build an Eden in the woods. The most poignant piece is “Hospital Sketches,” Alcott’s account of her service as a nurse during the Civil War, an essay Jane Smiley, who provides the preface, describes as “maybe the most idiosyncratic and interesting depiction of war that I have ever read.” Although it contains dated racial terms that make for uncomfortable reading, this essay gives a then-unprecedented view of war from the hospital ward, where Alcott describes harrowing conditions (“the floor covered with the more disabled, the steps and doorways filled with helpers and lookers-on”). Many of the pieces contain moments of humor, as when a hospital attendant prepares “a fearful beverage, which he called coffee, and insisted on sharing with me.” The author also proves that some things haven’t changed, as when she writes about a woman working alongside men: “The men got two francs a day; the woman half a franc.”

Lively, occasionally grim, and genuinely funny essays from a beloved author.