ExclusiveAbigail May Alcott Nieriker: The Real Amy from Little Women

Welcome to American Legends. My name is Tiffany Brannon. Each culture has its legends, and that could be myths or different stories, but here in America, our greatest legends are the wonderful heroes who are right from our history pages. Now, some of these heroes are very famous and some are obscure, but each person deserves to be discovered because each man or woman stands as a great example of how we can be better Americans Little Women is a beloved work of fiction about four daughters who grow from childhood into adulthood amid the Civil War. 150 years or more after its publication, it remains a beloved work of literature, not only because of its historical significance and its literary merit, but because of its genuine authentic portrait of family life during this time period. It's genuine and authentic because it was based on real events. The authoress, Louisa May Alcott, was indeed one of four sisters, but she was not the only creative member of that family. The youngest sister in the family was also the youngest member of the family, who inspired the youngest sister in the book, was a painter, illustrator, and travel writer who also had a very creative and interesting life. Abigail May Alcott was the youngest of the four Alcott daughters. She was named after her mother, Abigail May, and she was born in 1840, eight years after Louisa, who was the second of the four daughters. Abigail is the inspiration for the character of Amy in the book Little Women. Like Amy, she was perhaps the most self-assured and self-centered of the sisters, and she had a great inclination for artistic talent. Her sister wrote, she was never so happy as when copying flowers, designing fairies, or illustrating stories with queer specimens of art. Her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, described her as follows. Her temperament was elastic, susceptible. She had a lively fancy, a clear understanding. Independence was a marked trait. She held her fortunes in her hands, and failure was a word unknown in her vocabulary of effort. Like all the sisters, Abigail was raised in an environment that was very philosophical and deep thinking, steeped in learning and literature. Both their parents were members of the Transcendentalist movement, which was an American philosophical idea that was chiefly sprung up in the United States and fostered the importance of individualism and self-reliance. Some of the main leaders of this movement, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, were close family friends who would come over to the house, educate the girls, and whose children were friends and playmates of the Alcott sisters. Abigail went by many nicknames throughout her life, sometimes being Abby or Abba, and eventually going by the name May. Thus, she was called Amy in the books because that was an anagram of her real name. May's childhood was spent in the New England area, and some of her formative years were in Concord, Massachusetts. The family moved around a lot because the father struggled to make a good living as he was an educator and was always trying to start some new endeavor. He started a couple of different schools and even was involved with the founding of a utopian transcendental community at one point, Fruitvale. During her childhood, May enjoyed a very good education, learning a lot about literature as well as eventually art. Her first job, which like many of the other sisters she took to help the family income, was teaching. She took over a teaching job for her older sister Louisa when she was just 16, and she continued teaching throughout her life to earn some money. One of her first main artistic jobs was doing the original illustrations for the first edition of Little Women. You can still see some of these illustrations, which are sketched in pencil and almost childish in their simplicity. They were not too well received, but this didn't stop the book from being a great success, nor did it stop May from continuing her artistic pursuits. In 1869, she published her first collection of drawings, which was called Concord, and it included sketches of the surrounding area where she'd grown up, such as Walden Pond, and it featured a forward by her famous sister. This too showed a more quirky, whimsical style, as it's been appraised by later artistic critics. What she really wanted was a more thorough and deep artistic education, which she finally got in the 1870s, thanks to her older sister, who was now making a lot of money from Little Women. So on the proceeds from that book, May was able to take several trips to Europe, where she spent long periods of time studying in the great studios of Paris, London, and Rome. She loved being in Europe, and there she perfected styles such as watercolors in particular. She became well regarded for her watercolor work, and she also became an excellent copyist. That might not seem like a great creative skill, but how many of us could copy an excellent masterpiece of a painting? She became regarded as one of the best copyists of the esteemed London painter Turner. She also studied oil painting and sculpture. At that time, the female American artist was struggling to gain a footing, and just as her sister Louisa was proving the possibility of being independent as a female writer, May was showing how women could be excellent artists. In Europe, women had more opportunities for art education than they did in the United States. Of course, her father had started the Temple Institute, which was a school for many different types of education, and there was an art program as part of that, but like many of his endeavors, it was short-lived. However, May brought a lot of her education and talent back from Europe, and helped found more artistic institutes, such as one in Boston. Because of her experience as a female art student traveling from America to Europe, May realized the need for other young women to have some sort of a guidebook on how to save money and be both industrious and economical in studying art abroad, so she ended up writing a book on the subject. The book was called Studying Art Abroad and How to Do It Cheaply. It was published in It's a rather short volume, only around 110 or so pages. You can find many copies of it for free online, and it's a very interesting read. It makes you wish that you lived in 1879 so that you could follow her advice and take your sensible traveling suit and your bag of a few necessities and your sketch pad and go out and sketch the beautiful abbeys in London, and stay with the baker in the village, and then travel to Paris where you'll find Garrett. She really shows that these are not mere whimsies. I mean, few travel writers today are so detailed about exactly what you should do. She lists the name of every artistic teacher you should find, every inn where you should stay, which clothing manufacturers can make the best writing hats for a good price. She even advises what to pack. She says don't pack your good under things because you'll find that the grime of London and the acid used in washing in Paris will just destroy it. It'll make it rot and become shreds. Instead, take your old things because they may be sturdier, but then when they start to fall apart, you can use them as painting rags, which are something that all artists need and are very expensive. So then you have your old under things as painting rags and you can buy some sturdy new things in Europe for a better price than you would in America. Her work is very candid and remarkably enjoyable. You don't have to be an artist or a female traveler or live in the 1870s to find it entertaining. Just as Louisa captured the real American home life, in this non-fiction work, May captured what it was like for a young American woman to travel in Europe at that time. And it gives remarkable insight into the challenges, but really the advantages that women had then. She said how women could, of course, travel alone, which was still somewhat controversial in all these areas, but that they would be guarded by the captain of the ship or the conductor of a train and would be sort of that gentleman's ward until carefully deposited into a taxi cab. All too often, an independent young woman of today might wish that she lived in a time like that when she finds herself fumbling with too many bags. Because, as we see, although May gives advice on how to be practical with packing things, there would never be any shortage of gentlemen to assist, in a romantic way necessarily, but just because they were gentlemen and they would help ladies. Like her sister, May chose to forego marriage for most of her early life as she pursued her art. She was the only American woman whose work was presented in some art exhibits in Paris at this time, as her watercolour was chosen. And a painting she made of a lovely black woman is considered her masterpiece. And it also is a uniquely dignified portrait. It's titled Of a Negress. And many works of that time of people, particularly women of African descent, would be almost caricature-like, exaggerating features or focusing on the exoticism, even making the work too debasing of her womanhood. But such is not the case with May. She paints a very lovely form and face of the lady who is graciously dressed and just shows her very genuinely. And she looks very, very real. She really looks like a person you could see in true life, just as her writing suggests such things. And these later works, which we see, the later illustrations, watercolours, and other paintings from May, show the refinement which she developed in Europe with a greater finesse. In 1877, remarkably late in life for a Victorian woman, May finally found romance. While in Europe, she met a Swiss tobacconist and violinist named Ernst Nierecker. He comforted her as she was grieving her mother's death. And by February of 1878, they were engaged. They got married the following month. She was 37 and he was 22. A remarkable age gap even today, and especially so then when women usually married older men. But in him, she found the sort of intellectual equal and artistic kindred spirit that, I would say, her sister Louisa always sought in vain. Apparently, her family disapproved of the match, no doubt because of his significantly younger age. But Louisa was very supportive. She was quoted as calling her sister's wedding day a happy event, and she described Ernst as handsome, cultivated, and a successful tender friend. She declared that May is old enough to choose for herself and seems so happy in the new relation that we have nothing to say against it. May was indeed very happy in this marriage, and she wrote to her family of how greatly contented and joyous she was living as a married painter in Europe. She continued her artwork, and Ernst was totally supportive of it, just as she was supportive of his music. So they enjoyed a great mutual support and an agreement of feelings. The following November, they welcomed their first child, Louise, named after her sister, who would be nicknamed Lulu. Sadly, their marital bliss was very short-lived, as May died in December, just less than two months after her daughter's birth. It may have been childbed fever. We're not sure why she died, but she was the age of 39. After that, since Ernst was still very young and had to travel a lot because of his business, he didn't feel that he had a proper home in which to raise his daughter, so she went to live with Louisa in America for the first eight years of her life before, upon Louisa's death, returning to Europe to live with her father and his family. Abigail May Olcott-Nierkerk is an example of the many different possibilities which were available to women in the 19th century. I think people look back at it now and see what was the goal. 93% of American women were married, and most of them married early in life. This was a combination of the fact that childbearing was very important and most women preferred the traditional and feminine values of marriage and motherhood to other pursuits. Now, there were few women who were in business at that time, but the one exception, which you'll find decades earlier than other careers, was the arts. Literature, painting, music. Women would pursue these things because, since ancient times, the creativity of the female sex has been greatly admired. Some women would continue these pursuits alongside more domestic ones, and others, like both Louisa and May, forewent marriage for many years in pursuit of other things. Now, unlike Louisa, who was a lifelong spinster, May eventually found her soulmate and, despite the fact that she was definitely considered an old maid by that point and long past the standard marrying age, she was able to marry a very young man and have a brief but very happy marriage with him. And, like Amy in the books of Little Women, she showed how some women had both a marriage, a family, children, and some kind of artistic pursuit. Abigail May Alcott didn't achieve the fame of her older sister, nor is her name well known. Yet, it would be doing her a great disservice to not appreciate the contributions which she made to the role of women in the arts in America. Largely because she had a little more notoriety due to her famous sister, she showed what great strides women could make in painting, sketching, and other artistry. She studied with the great masters of the time in Europe, and she created very charming and technically accurate and lovely paintings, especially in the last decade of her life. Her watercolors are still to be admired for their beauty and delicacy of tone. In considering the history of American women in the greater art scene of the world, it would indeed be a great oversight to not mention and appreciate Abigail May Alcott. Thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you'll join me next time for more American Legends.