LOUISA M. ALCOTT,
HER LIFE, LETTERS, AND JOURNALS
Edited by EDNAH D. CHENEY.
With Portraits and View of the Alcott Home in Concord.
One vol. 16mo. Uniform with "Little Women."
Price, $1.50.
Mrs. Cheney has allowed this popular author to tell the story of her early struggles, her successes, and prosperity and life work, in her own inimitable style, gracefully weaving the daily record of this sweet and useful life into a garland of immortelles, in a manner at once pleasing and within the comprehension of the thousands of readers and admirers of Miss Alcott's books. It might truly be called the biography of "Little Women."
A most fascinating as well as a deeply pathetic book. The story,–the long, hard struggle for money to keep the household in comfort, and the well-earned success coming, alas, too late to save her health,–is delightfully told in her own words, from letters and journals, so that we have the bright, the witty, and the always charming personality of the children's author before us from the first page to the last. We have to thank Mrs. Cheney that she hid not from us the hard, grinding toil, nor spared us the record of one discouragement in the life so interesting to us; for in this narrative we have a valuable lesson for the young writer of our day.–The Epoch.
One who knew Miss Alcott well says: "Nobody can read of the struggles of the Alcott family, and of the tender yet resolute heroism with which Miss Alcott met and relieved them, without being touched to tears by the pathos and reality of the picture. Louisa Alcott was not a member of any church; but her belief in God, her loyalty to conscience, her fidelity to duty, her rescue of the Alcott family from its peculiar perils, place her among the women saints of the century, and it will be hard to find any one of her sex who has more faithfully responded to the duties of the position in which God had placed her."–Cincinnati Commercial Gazette.
Louisa May Alcott is without a rival as a writer for the young. The millions who have read her stories–and been made better by the reading–will want this book that they may get near the inner life, the fruitful source of their entertainment and profit. They will see that purity, simplicity, love, earnestness, and patience were so interwoven with her genius that her stories were the natural outgrowth of her beautiful character. The book needs no commendation from us. Every reader of her stories will be glad to know that they may now become intimately acquainted with that beautiful life which is here brought out of its long cherished seclusion.–Saturday Evening Herald.