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"Louisa May Alcott was one of the most successful and bestselling authors of her day, earning more than any of her male contemporaries. Her classic Little Women has been a mainstay of American literature since its release nearly 150 years ago, as Jo March and her calm, beloved &#8220;Marmee&#8221; have shaped and inspired generations of young women. Biographers have consistently attributed Louisa&#8217;s uncommon success to her father, Bronson Alcott, assuming that this outspoken idealist was the source of his daughter&#8217;s progressive thinking and remarkable independence. But in this riveting dual biography, award-winning biographer Eve LaPlante explodes these myths, drawing from a trove of surprising new documents to show that it was Louisa&#8217;s actual &#8220;Marmee,&#8221; Abigail May Alcott, who formed the intellectual and emotional center of her world. Abigail, whose difficult life both inspired and served as a warning to her devoted daughters, pushed Louisa to excel at writing and to chase her unconventional dreams in a male-dominated world. In Marmee &amp; Louisa, LaPlante, Abigail&#8217;s great-niece and Louisa&#8217;s cousin, re-creates their shared story from diaries, letters, and personal papers, some recently discovered in a family attic and many others that were thought to have been destroyed. Here at last Abigail is revealed in her full complexity&#8212;long dismissed as a quiet, self-effacing background figure, she comes to life as a fascinating writer and thinker in her own right. A politically active feminist firebrand, she was a highly opinionated, passionate, ambitious woman who fought for universal civil rights, publicly advocating for abolition, women&#8217;s suffrage, and other defin-ing moral struggles of her era. In this groundbreaking work, LaPlante paints an exquisitely moving and utterly convincing portrait of a woman decades ahead of her time, and the fiercely independent daughter whose life was deeply entwined with her mother&#8217;s dreams of freedom. This gorgeously written story of two extraordinary women is guaranteed to transform our view of one of America&#8217;s most beloved authors."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://books.simonandschuster.com/Marmee-Louisa/Eve-LaPlante/9781451620689>