Miss Alcotts E-mail [Hardcover]

I read this book in one sitting. It was a non-stop read. What was intriguing to me was the use of the correspondence between the author and Louisa May Alcott which seemed quite legitimate because they share similar backgrounds in different eras. It reminds me of another great book, written 30 years ago, by Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, "A Woman of Independent Means" which uses the letter-writing conceit exclusively. Kit Bakke is on to something and I hope she is at work on another book.

What is it about those old Concord folks that causes us to revisit them and put them in fictionalized settings? First it was "Mr. Emerson's Wife" (by Amy Belding Brown), and now "Miss Alcott's E-mail." I admit that after hearing about this new title, I just shook my head and figured its premise would be silly before I even held the book in my hands. I'm happy to report that I was wrong, wrong, wrong! Ms. Bakke has brought Louisa May Alcott to life for contemporary readers. More than that: she's made Alcott relevant to 21st-century Americans.

Using a unique writing style, Bakke first retells part of Miss Alcott's life story, taking time to weave her own reminiscences into the historical narration. She then "e-mails" the chapter to Louisa herself, who reacts and responds to what Bakke has written and continues the correspondence. Once we suspend our disbelief that this technique is possible, we find this a memorable format that's sure to appeal to readers who enjoy learning more from historical fiction than they did back in school history classes. Topics covered include Concord, Fruitlands, transcendentalism, the abolitionist movement, women's rights, writing, earning a living, dealing with family, and nursing. In see-saw fashion, both women discuss committing to a cause and doing what seems morally right in a situation. Bakke's involvement in the Vietnam anti-war movement and her career in the health profession make her the perfect person to relate to Louisa's own involvement in abolition and as a Civil War nurse. The biographical chapters and personal letters cause us to equate the 1860s with the 1960s, and we can understand the connections without being told they're there. The further along we read, the more we realize that our struggles are/were very similar. And we might speculate how far men and women have really come in the past century. Or not.

Librarians and bookstore clerks will struggle to figure out where to shelve this book, for it is fiction, biography, and contemporary memoir rolled into one package. I hope that dilemma doesn't deter its potential audience from finding it, for these pages are well worth delving into.

"Miss Alcott's E-mail" is a well-crafted book that should be read by many women and shared by mothers and daughters, especially when half of those readers (either the mothers or the daughters) are Baby Boomers who are part of Ms. Bakke's generation. The title will also appeal to book groups, since a set of beginning discussion questions appears at the end of the volume. Fans of the Transcendentalists should be pleased with this one as well.

This book sneaked under my radar but I'm glad that a kind friend, who had seen my review of a book of Alcott scholarship, sent me a copy of the ARC, which may differ slightly from the published version.

Kit Bakke belonged to the radical Weather Underground and thus identifies with Louisa May Alcott's idealistic and radical side, to the extent that she disparages LITTLE WOMEN (shock! horror!) in favor of such mature novels as WORK and MOODS. To her credit, she practically persuades the reader that these are important documents of American literary history, although she never really convinces me into believing that LITTLE WOMEN is a lesser work than we had thought. She just isn't skilled enough as a polemicist to make the case. Nor is she talented enough to pull off the fancy of being two people writing e-mails to each other over a century, herself and Alcott, especially when she has to update Alcott about all the social and cultural changes that have occurred since Alcott's death like US involvement in Vietnam and the Beatles vs. the Stones argument. (Rock music is "very experimental, loud and dramatic, with lyrics by handsome young men all about relationships, nature, and politics.")

However, what sets Kit Bakke apart from other writers is her sheer love of life and the ease with which she fits together two eras that seem, at the outset, so very different as to have nothing to say to each other. She tells us about a contemporary who, inspired by the Cuban revolution, named her daughter "Guevara," then changed the baby's name to "Guava" when radical chic faded and nouvelle cuisine caught her eye.

Bakke also makes Alcott's minor works sound interesting, especially her final uncompleted novel, DIANA AND PERSIS, which she sums up into four leading questions, "Can a productive and creative single woman be happy?" "Can a married woman maintain her personal life and friends?" "Can women be both personally happy and professionally successful?" "Can people be happily married and still respect each other's privacy and basic human rights?" Not all of these questions are of the same timbre or register, but it is almost as though they were too weighty for Alcott to answer fully, in the occluded times she shared with millions of other deracinated American women, not even "given the vote" for another 40 years, and that the effort made in posing the questions quite possibly carried her off--for she did die young, after all, needlessly so, having worn herself out in a lifetime of suffering, labor, sorrow, misunderstood love, and a dream of equal rights for all. Many recent commentators on Alcott have pointed to her productivity and likened her to a writing machine, a woman who'd write anything, from horror to melodrama to jokes, as long as she got her penny per word, and made her out to seem like an Erma Bombeck of the 19th century. In Bakke's version, that's all wrong, and she labored mightily to actualize herself in everything she did and, more importantly, in the words she left behind.

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