"Miss Alcott's E-mail": Heart-to-heart with Louisa May Alcott

"Miss Alcott's E-mail: Yours for Reforms of All Kinds"
by Kit Bakke
Godine, 255 pp., $24.95

Five years ago, Kit Bakke was just one of millions of Americans groping for meaning and direction after the attacks of 9/11.

As a young woman, Bakke herself had been involved with a group advocating violent overthrow of the American government. During the 1960s she rated an FBI file of 400-plus pages, thanks to her membership in the notorious Weather Underground.

But she had mellowed with motherhood and the passing of years. By September 2001 she was 50-something, successful and settled in Seattle. Still, midlife compels one to take stock of one's life, and 9/11 gave her further impetus to do some deep soul-searching about what she had achieved up to that point and how to proceed into the future.

For inspiration, Bakke turned to someone she had first met and trusted and spent a lot of time with as a child: Louisa May Alcott.

The author of "Little Women" had lived a life characterized by spunk, humor, hard work, a zest for independence and zealous support for the progressive reforms of the day.

Granted, Alcott had been dead for more than a century. But getting advice from her turned out not to be a problem after all, thanks to the magic of cyberspace.

Bakke is cagey about how this was accomplished: "I wish I could explain more about the mechanics of our correspondence, but I can't, because, other than frying six surge protectors, I don't know how it worked."

She claims that one day she simply fired off a fan letter via e-mail. Somehow it got back to Alcott's parlor in 19th-century Massachusetts — and Alcott, a compulsive correspondent in her lifetime, was unable to resist the appeal of conversing across centuries.

And so "Miss Alcott's E-mail" was born — a combination biography/social history/memoir.

Bakke provides a series of overview essays, gleaning Alcott's experiences from diaries and archived letters, adding the social context of the day, and throwing in questions and personal commentary. Then Alcott responds with pungent observations of her own.

As the daughter of philosopher Bronson Alcott and neighbor of 19th-century Transcendentalist icons Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott was surrounded by talk of living in accordance with one's ideals.

But it was she, perhaps more than the rest, who put ideas into action. Thoreau might have spent a token night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax (the basis for his essay "Civil Disobedience"), and Emerson may have penned eloquent tracts on the evils of slavery. But when the War Between the States broke out, it was Alcott who headed for the heart of the action, traveling by train to the nation's embattled capital to nurse wounded Union soldiers.

Alcott's lust for involvement was something Bakke, the former revolutionary, could identify with completely. And so was Alcott's compassion for the sick and ailing, for Bakke eventually went into nursing, too, working at Children's Hospital in Seattle for more than a decade.

In "Miss Alcott's E-mail," the two compare notes on civil rights, women's rights, health care and social justice. They examine the parallels between the strife of the 1860s and the 1960s, and the role of the individual in working for reform.

However, Bakke shies away from investigating another common thread: the ramifications of political extremism. All of the touch points are there, from abolitionist John Brown's bloody raid at Harpers Ferry (the Alcotts were acquainted with Brown and admired him), to Bakke's career in the Weather Underground, to her subsequent shock at the events of Sept. 11, 2001. But Bakke skates over the surface of this particular pond without really plumbing its troubling depths.

By now you've deduced that Bakke exercised major "editorial discretion" concerning the correspondence she struck up with Alcott. But she also plucks choice quotations directly from the papers of Alcott and her Transcendentalist friends to share with readers today. Alcott's personality shines through in her frank assessments, droll humor and keen desire to set things right.

"Miss Alcott's E-mail" illuminates the continuum of social causes and reform movements that have invigorated and improved American life over the past 150 years. It is terrific, as far as it goes.

If only it went further!