in literary text and visual art. Struc- Janice Andreae is a Toronto visual first volume won the Bancroft Prize. turally, this text resembles Mary Ann artist and writer whose interests are Both biographers work from rich Caws’s Women of Bloomsbury: Vir- contemporary literary and visual art published and archival sources, in- ginia, Vanessa and Carrington (1990). textual practices, informed by femi- cluding the conscientious journals She too weaves together stories that nist and queer theoretical perspec- and improving correspondence of cross disciplinary boundaries of the tives. Her reviews, essays, bookworks their subjects’ circles, highly personal work and life of Virginia Woolf, Van- appear in Parachute, Canadian Art, essays, and autobiographical fiction. essa Bell and Leonora Carrington. Fuse, Mix, C magazine, Tessera, This wealth of life writing, liberally Caws uses psychoanalytical theory to Resources for Feminist Research, quoted, occasionally reduces the bi- tease out the relations between what and Canadian Woman Studies/les ographer’s role to the adding of mere, she knows of their lives and their rep- cahiers de la femme. in Matteson’s case even superfluous, resentations of self, just as Reid does. explication. Matteson writes primar- However, Reid also draws from her ily a family biography, of a detailed vast background as a visual arts writer thoroughness that sometimes lapses (and more recently, a painter) known EDEN’S OUTCASTS: THE into a daily chronicle. Capper con- for her well-written and highly acces- STORY OF LOUISA MAY structs a “social biography [of] Fuller sible essays, reviews, and interviews ALCOTT AND HER FATHER thinking and acting with others” as with/about Canadian women artists well as with intellectual and political and writers. In Women Between, she John Matteson movements (preface to vol. 1). He makes good use of Meigs’s life-long New York: W. W. Norton, 2007 dismisses all previous biographies of painting practice in relation to her Fuller as unreliable and intellectually autobiographical text Lily Briscoe: MARGARET FULLER: AN uninteresting. A Self-Portrait (1981) and Pratt’s Matteson’s subtitle acknowledges in connection with A Personal Cal- AMERICAN ROMANTIC LIFE the fact that Amos Bronson Alcott ligraphy (2000). Characteristically, (1799-1888) was mostly known as Reid’s discussions begin with the Charles Capper the “Father of Little Women, while art or literary work itself and then Vol. 1, The Private Years; vol. 2, The the title extends to Louisa the spiritual explore direct connections and as- Public Years. interpretation that her father gave sociations within and between works. New York: Oxford University Press, to his own life. However, the arcs of Next her attention shifts to gathering 1992, 2007 their lives were dissimilar: the father the threads connecting differences suffered repeated failures but late in between the lives of her subjects in reviewed by gisela life enjoyed a long period of public relation to what she reads/sees and argyle respect, good health, and satisfaction, the work each produces inside or whereas the daughter’s life was cut outside discipline or genre. The two main subjects of these short just when she felt freed from In the process of reading “between exhaustive biographies, Louisa May uncongenial duties to pursue the the lines” the reader finds Reid’s own Alcott (1833-88) and Sarah Mar- great work she aspired to. Louisa died life story, a story of survival, between garet Fuller (1810-50), were the a few days after her father. Matteson as she phrases it “modernism and principal female members of the recounts “Louisa’s two dominating post modernism.” Reid sees Pratt, Concord Transcendentalists. They raisons d’être had been to earn her Meigs, Dyck and Butala as “freeing have recently appeared in this role in father’s approval and to assure her agents” and the inter-connections Susan Cheever’s American Bloomsbury mother’s comfort.” She obeyed the between their lives are vital to her (2006), reviewed here in an earlier latter impulse by generally siding with text. What they share as a community issue. I shall refer to Alcott by her her mother in marital conflicts and by of survivors connects them in spite first name to distinguish her from continuously working as “the angel of geographical distance; differences her father, who shares the focus of of the house” as well as through her of sexual orientation, spirituality, Matteson’s book. Both women were commercial writings for the house. class and ethnicity; and different educated by their fathers and raised Louisa burnt most of her mother’s strategies of their practice as artists, to “heroic” ambitions, which neither writings, but she memorialized her material- and technology-wise. In achieved in her abridged life. Both in her fictions, notably in Marmee deciphering Reid’s textual strategies regretfully came to see themselves of Little Women. Strong-willed and of weaving together performative, excluded from motherhood and tempestuous but loyal wife of an autobiographical, material, and in- marriage (this condition changed for acknowledged “saint,” Abba was a ter-textual connections, her reader Fuller) and quested for a significant social activist in her own right. While weaves herself into the text. public voice. Matteson’s biography sharing Louisa’s judgment of Abba’s has won the Pulitzer Prize, Capper’s merits and marital circumstances,

VOLUME 28, NUMBERS 2,3 179 Matteson principally focuses on and finally spectacularly successful the whole family effect his approval Bronson, spending the first half of dedication to earning money for of Louisa, until then his problem the book on his “persistent but failed her family’s and others’ needs. The daughter, moody, passionate, and quest for perfection,” patterned on former were guaranteed by Bronson’s rebellious. Louisa’s fullest experience Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Setting education of his three daughters and of heterosexual love occurred during the tone, Matteson starts with the by the intellectual milieus of Boston her European trip when she met a “disgrace” (the title of chapter one) and Concord, “one of the dullest little young Polish student in her pension of the auction in 1837 of Bronson’s towns in Massachusetts,” in Louisa’s in Switzerland. Musical and ill with library consequent on the scandal words. Matteson says that it “deserved tuberculosis, he was in her imaginings and failure of his Temple School in its reputation as the literary epicenter Chopin to her George Sand. Like Boston. He subsequently chronicles of pre-Civil War America.” He also several earlier close companions, he the development of Bronson’s corrects Louisa’s personal heroic was much younger than she (twenty- radically unorthodox educational, narrative of her success, in which one to her thirty-three), a pattern for social, and religious ideas under she posed as Cinderella but without which Matteson rejects a Freudian the influence mainly of Rousseau, a fairy godmother, by invoking her explanation as “both too clever and Pestalozzi, the German Romantics, Concord mentors: Emerson, whom too clumsy.” and Carlyle. As a man of ideas, Mat- she called her “master” and to whose While Louisa’s magazine pot boil- teson explains, Bronson, master of the library she had free access, and Tho- ers—children’s stories, romances, and spoken word, remained “invisible,” reau, who taught her how to observe “female revenge” thrillers—came other men appropriating his ideas in nature and whom she honoured after easily to her, the writing of her more their published writings, for instance his death in her best-remembered ambitious novels engulfed her in Emerson in his essay Nature. Mat- poem, “Thoreau’s Flute.” obsessive “vortices” of writing (her teson frequently employs Emerson’s By 1859, two Boston cases of word), lasting days or weeks, followed skepticism to judge the practical fugitive slaves being returned by law by periods of dejection. Matteson application of Bronson’s ideas in his had turned the pacifist, self-absorbed speculates that she inherited from family, various experimental schools, Concord Transcendentalists into her father and her uncle a manic- and most disastrously for his family fervent supporters of anti-slavery depressive disposition, which she also and his own physical and mental violence, not only helping with the portrayed in the heroine of her first health, the utopian “consociate” Underground Railway but also cel- novel, Moods (1863). These novels farm Fruitlands: Emerson admired ebrating Captain John Brown, the are all strongly autobiographical “men like Thoreau and Alcott who Alcotts taking in his daughters as and, after her experience of writ- carried [transcendentalism] into the boarders and Louisa giving a recep- ing about her nursing, realistic. In field. [But] he already sensed that tion for the widow of “St. John the her best selling contribution to the transcendentalism was a naturally Just,” in Louisa’s words. The Civil American and the feminine literary introspective, solipsistic idea. One War offered Louisa an escape into canon, Little Women (1868-69), her could practice it well enough as an heroic collective action from the father, although near-absent in the individual,” but not convert it into tedious mixture of domestic work shape of the March girls’ father, is a social philosophy. Of the late turn and sewing, teaching, and commer- “spiritually omnipresent” through in Bronson’s fortunes Matteson gives cial writing. Joining as a nurse, she her recasting of Bunyan’s moral sympathetic and laudatory accounts. arrived just in time to receive the drama. Her heroines’ dreams, in Restored in health and resigned to wounded soldiers from the disastrous Moods, Little Women, and Work end more modest aspirations, Bronson battle at Fredericksburg. Hospital up “at best compromised and at worst from his sixties on was gratified by Sketches (1863), her “virtually true thwarted.” To the question whether the success of his tours of public account,” first published serially, Louisa was a feminist author, Mat- “Conversations” and of essays on in its combination of humour and teson replies affirmatively that she various topics, including especially pathos became a publishing success. stipulated altruism for both women the Concord Transcendentalists, as However, she contracted typhoid and men. Despite the influential role whose last surviving member he pneumonia and was compelled to that she has continued to play for her finally became a tourist attraction. cut her three-month term of duty readers, Louisa was dissatisfied with Under her father’s regimen Louisa’s short. As so common at the time, the her literary achievements and fame. life for more than twenty years was treatment, with the panacea calomel Margaret Fuller makes few ap- “an almost impossibly dissonant (mercurous chloride), resulted in pearances in Matteson’s book, im- combination of superior intellectual permanent, slowly fatal neurologi- portantly as one of Bronson’s “most opportunities and frightful worldly cal poisoning. More even than her loyal defenders” during the fatal deprivation.” She escaped the lat- new fame did what Bronson saw scandal caused by his unorthodox ter through her own unremitting as her patriotic service on behalf of teaching methods at Temple School,

180 CANADIAN WOMAN STUDIES/LES CAHIERS DE LA FEMME where she had assisted for a short journalist a much wider public than More in keeping with gender roles term. Capper makes the case that her models Emerson and Carlyle. was her directorship of one of the despite the small body of published Capper defends his ante-litteram use field hospitals in Rome. And she had writings, she must be recovered as of “intellectual” as best fitting what now married (Capper insists on this “nothing less than the first woman Fuller herself called “thinker” (pref- much-disputed fact) and had a son in America to establish herself as a ace to vol. 2). By Capper’s account, with Count Giuseppe Ossoli, a mem- dominant figure in highbrow culture Fuller’s journalism pursued two main ber of the Radical-dominated Civic at large [able to] shed light on the subjects: gender as the intersection Guard. He was considerably younger, early American connection among of transcendentalist self-culture and Catholic, and not an intellectual. gender, intellectual culture, and women’s rights, “a rights-minded Capper is throughout sympathetic the avant-garde” (preface to vol. 1). androgyny,” and America as the to Fuller’s erotic adventures, seeing Capper’s first volume constitutes intersection of nationalism and cos- them as experimental phases in her Fuller’s “Lehrjahre” (apprenticeship, mopolitanism. Both subjects were Goethean self-culture. Dependent as in Goethe’s Bildungsroman). Born informed by her Romantic liberalism, on Fuller’s ability to earn money, into the Cambridge Renaissance, namely individual self-development, the young family sailed to America encouraged by her father’s “grandiose social reform, and transcendence in 1850 and drowned in a shipwreck yet domestic republican intellectual- in both the personal and the social off its coast. The manuscript of her ity” (preface to vol. 1), close friends sphere. Her main forum was the history of the Italian revolutions with the Concord Transcendentalists, liberal New York Tribune, which she is presumed lost in the shipwreck. and inspired by British and German joined as the first American woman Women in the Nineteenth Century Romantics as an antidote to American on the editorial staff of a major compares the condition of women utilitarianism, she chose the famous metropolitan newspaper. In the six- with slavery. Contrary to others’ English Unitarian reformer Harriet month period from 1845 to ‘46, she skepticism about Fuller’s future in Martineau, whom she met during contributed 250 articles on literature, America, Capper believes that her ex- an American visit, for her patron. art, and music, which exhibited an perience of Italy’s nationalist struggle, For a model of an engaged American uncommonly wide field of allusions. added to her early protests against the intellectual she looked to Thomas Her book Women in the Nineteenth annexation of Texas and the Mexican Jefferson. Although the role of the Century (1845), revised from a series Wars as pro-slavery and racist, would artist was her ideal, she felt that it of articles, achieved big sales as well have led to a role in abolitionist would make her “palsy.” Instead, as being pirated in England. activism. Nearly forgotten after her as editor of the transcendentalist The subject of America’s identity death, Margaret Fuller has found a magazine The Dial, she introduced was continued explicitly in her letters new public through second-wave a new cosmopolitan literary criticism from Europe to the New York Tribune. feminism. In The Bostonians Henry with “bold” inclusive rankings; for Like the journalism of her famous James said of the protagonist Olive her translation of Eckermann’s Con- colleague Heinrich Heine (whom Chancellor, based on Fuller: “It was versations with Goethe unfortunately she met in Paris), hers was a new the usual things of life that filled her only the English plagiarist reaped mixture of personal, cultural, and with silent rage; which was natural the reward (London, 1849). As an political topics. Capper introduces enough, in as much as, to her vision, alternative to school teaching, for an increasing cast of famous liberal almost everything that was usual women limited to young children, and radical figures, such as Giuseppe was iniquitous.” Capper establishes she conducted “Conversations” for Mazzini and Adam Mickiewicz, with Fuller’s vision as just, her attitude as groups of women, which Capper whom Fuller became friends dur- optimistic, and her voice as public argues contributed to the growth ing her visits to London, Paris, and and influential. of American feminism and initi- finally Rome. He singles her out as ated an American counter-cultural the only American Italophile who was Gisela Argyle, Senior Scholar of tradition. interested in Italy as a modern state. Humanities at York University in The second volume brings Fuller’s She reciprocally “merged revolution- Toronto, has published Germany career from that of the angel in the ary Italy and her ideal America.” as Model and Monster: Allusions house, after she became the head of During the Roman revolution and in English Fiction, 1830s-1930s her family on her father’s death, and siege she became America’s first war (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univer- the angel out of the house, paradig- correspondent, and excerpts of her sity Press, 2002), another monograph matic of a new development for many dispatches were widely published and articles on Victorian literature educated middle-class women, to the around America. Finding Italy in and comparative literature, as well radically new role of America’s female need of a good American ambassador, as literary translations from German cultural arbiter and intellectual she believed that she could fill the post into English and the converse. prophet, who moreover affected as a if it were not for her gender, then.

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