Writing “En Masse”: Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War Experience and the Commonwealth

Abstract

Louisa May Alcott could not have known that becoming a war nurse would transform her writing career. Seven months after her brief 1863 nursing stint, she had published four installments of “Hospital Sketches” in the abolitionist newspaper the Boston Commonwealth, as well as a full-book version, and, thereafter, she supported herself and her family with her writing. While Alcott had long worked to establish herself as a fiction writer, she gained fame in stead by initiating a new genre of Civil War nursing narratives. If not strictly fiction, the sketches were indeed fictionalized. Because they were published in a newspaper, however, these sketches were positioned to be read as authentic accounts of war experience. Alcott claimed not to understand why, as she put it, “people like a few extracts from topsey turvey letters written on inverted tin kettles, in my pan try, while waiting for gruel to warm or poultices to cool, for boys to wake and be tormented, on stairs, in window seats & other sequestered spots favorable to literary inspiration.” 1 This story of the text’s initial production, however, was essential to its appeal. And Alcott’s claim, while perfunctory for a female author presenting herself modestly, also authenticates her writing as an unmediated account of war. She insisted even years later that she wrote “Hospital Sketches by the beds of my soldier boys” and crafted an aura of un-crafted war writing each time she revised the sketches for the two book editions of