American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work by Susan Cheever

Author:Susan Cheever [Cheever, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2006-12-18T16:00:00+00:00

In the winter of 1844, the Alcotts returned to Concord, not for the first or last time. Abigail’s father’s estate had yielded $1,000 and Emerson contributed $500 so that Abba could buy Hillside, Horatio Cogswell’s pig farm on the Lexington Road across and to the west of the Emerson House. Bronson protested; he wanted nothing to do with property or commerce. Throughout their friendship, Bronson was able to claim that he didn’t care about property, while Emerson paid for the property he and his family needed.

The house was a mess; it had been an old wreck when the British retreated past it down the Lexington Road in 1775. Since then, few improvements had been made. Cogswell had let his pigs have the run of the place, which had four low-ceilinged rooms and a few falling-down outbuildings. Bronson Alcott was by now a competent gardener and carpenter. He began on the house, dividing the huge downstairs rooms and building a new story, and he planned a series of terraces in the hill behind. The pasture on the other side of the road ran down to a brook, and Bronson planted a stand of trees to shelter the family bathing place from those passing on the road.

The next four years were a relatively peaceful and abundant time for the Alcott family. Compared to the adventure of Fruitlands, almost anything would have seemed secure and comfortable. They took in Sophia Foord as a boarder; she had also boarded with the Emersons. She tutored the children and took them on long, delicious walks in the woods. To his deep chagrin, Henry David Thoreau had somehow excited Miss Foord’s passionate desire. She decided she was in love with him; they were meant for each other. When Thoreau came to visit his friend Bronson, things were quite exciting at Hillside. On other afternoons, the Alcotts, or just Louisa, visited Thoreau in his cabin on Walden Pond.

Once again, Louisa fell in love with the boyish man who seemed to be at one with nature. He showed her how the bluebird carried the sky on its back and how the scarlet tanager looked to be about to set fire to the leaves. Out on the pond, lazily drifting in Thoreau’s boat, he played the flute, and Louisa felt that the water had become part of the same element as the sky and that she and her childhood teacher had floated into another dimension.

Louisa May Alcott turned fifteen in 1847; she had spent most of her life in Concord. A tall, slender girl with a sad, handsome face, she wore her masses of glossy chestnut-colored hair piled around her head. Her feelings for Thoreau were balanced by a crush on the distant, learned Emerson, whose library had become one of her favorite haunts. One day, she picked up a translation of Bettina von Arnim’s Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child, the steamy story of an erotic connection between a fifteen-year-

old and the older Goethe.

Although Emerson seemed responsive to Louisa the eager reader, she had picked the wrong Goethe in the businesslike older neighbor.

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