Susan Cheever and American Bloomsbury

Posted on January 2, 2007

Writer Susan Cheever discusses her new book, American Bloomsbury, which examines the lives of five classic American authors who all lived and knew each other in Concord, Massachusetts during the 1830s: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau.

"All the best things happen by accident," Cheever said by phone from her New York City home. "It may even be the mother of creativity. In my life, accident and indirection have been very influential. Then, as I read more about these people, it began to seem like destiny."
Cheever was determined to know what was going on beneath the surface. "Maybe people are not well served when they are revered - it dehumanizes them. I hadn't read Thoreau's 'Walden' in 30 years either. When I reread it, I was amazed. He was so angry and so eloquent! And you know, these people had so much trouble getting along with other people."
She found many connections between them. "They inspired each other; they sold houses to each other; they planted each other's gardens; they delivered vegetables to each other; they helped each other in every conceivable way." And life was so different in the 19th century; it was not easy. "They were always cold; there was no medicine that worked; there were no dentists; there was almost no old age. So many were taken so early. Alcott was considered old at 36."
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"But these early books started American literature on its path. Thoreau invented the memoir. Alcott gave us the idea that women's business could be the stuff of the novel. Their books were astonishingly good. Good as Tolstoy, good as anything! If there are 20 great books in the world, the fact that half of them lived in these three Concord houses is amazing."
Cheever's personal favorites were the two women, Alcott and Fuller. "They did things women had never done before. They were not owned by men anymore. Instead of being second-rate whatever, they reinvented themselves in an era when womanhood was completely prescribed by society."

American Bloomsbury sounds most interesting. Cheever says that she was very careful about what she put in the book: there was quite a bit of rumor that Margaret Fuller and Hawthorne had a romantic entanglement, but because she couldn't prove it, she left it out of the book. But she did leave in the bit about Louisa May Alcott's mad crush on Thoreau. She used him as a chracter in her novel, Moots.