MARMEE & LOUISA, November '12

Eve LaPlante

The author with her great-aunt Charlotte May Wilson, the family genealogist, on Cape Cod in 1966.

Marmee & Louisa, Eve's biography of Abigail and Louisa May Alcott, will be published by Free Press in early November. Based on newly uncovered family papers, this groundbreaking and intensely moving portrait of Louisa May Alcott’s relationship with her mother will transform our understanding of one of America’s most beloved authors.

Since its release nearly 150 years ago, Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women has been a mainstay in American literature, while passionate Jo March and her calm, beloved “Marmee” have shaped generations of young women. Biographers have consistently credited her father, Bronson Alcott, for Louisa’s professional success, assuming that this outspoken idealist was the source of her progressive thinking and remarkable independence.

But in this riveting dual biography, Eve LaPlante explodes those myths, drawing on unknown and unexplored letters and journals to show that Louisa’s “Marmee,” Abigail May Alcott, was in fact the intellectual and emotional center of her daughter’s world. It was Abigail who urged Louisa to write, who inspired many of her stories, and who gave her the support and courage she needed to pursue her unconventional path. Abigail, long dismissed as a quiet, self-effacing companion to her famous husband and daughter, is revealed here as a politically active feminist firebrand, a fascinating thinker in her own right. Examining family papers, archival documents, and diaries thought to have been destroyed, LaPlante paints an exquisitely moving and utterly convincing portrait of a woman decades ahead of her time—and the fiercely independent daughter who was both inspired and restricted by her mother’s dreams of freedom.

A story guaranteed to turn previous scholarship on its head, Marmee & Louisa is a gorgeously written and deeply felt biography of two extraordinary women and a key to our understanding of Louisa May Alcott’s life and work.

Eve's previous biography, Salem Witch Judge (HarperOne), the winner of the Massachusetts Book Award for Nonfiction and a Boston Globe paperback bestseller, followed the biography American Jezebel (HarperOne), also a Globe bestseller, and the award-winning Seized (HarperCollins). Eve contributed to the essay collection Why I'm Still Married (Penguin), the anthology Boston: Voices and Visions (UMass Press), and the rhetorics text The Aims of Argument (McGraw-Hill). She has degrees from Princeton and Harvard and has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, Ladies’ Home Journal, Parents, Country Living, and Gourmet. She lives in New England with her husband and four children.

The winner of the 2008 Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction.

"LaPlante's touching biography of Samuel Sewall... seems hauntingly familiar. Beneath the sensational title is a figure more familiar than we realize... Salem Witch Judge upends popular stereotypes about Puritans... [and] reminds us how quickly the conventional wisdom can shift, forcing even the powerful to move."
The New York Times Book Review


"LaPlante's splendid biography brings a personal touch to Sewall's story... Much as she did in American Jezebel, the marvelous biography of her 12th-generation ancestor Anne Hutchinson, LaPlante richly narrates his life... drawing on Sewall's diaries and stories told by her Aunt Charlotte."
Publishers Weekly



Eve LaPlante is available for media interviews and to speak at public events. To schedule a book talk or other event, please contact her directly at this website. For a review copy of Salem Witch Judge or American Jezebel please contact publicist Julie Burton at julie.burton@​harpercollins.com or (415) 477-4407.