From improper.com:
“Behind every great woman is her mother, or so argues Eve LaPlante’s 2012 dual-subject biography of Little Women author Louisa May Alcott and her mother, Abigail May Alcott. LaPlante, a Brookline native and Alcott descendant, draws on new documents that contradict the popular assumption that the 19th-century writer owed her then-uncommon literary success to her father. Instead, this scrupulous ancestral study reveals that it was Abigail’s progressive thinking that influenced her daughter’s writing. Skeptical? Read the book yourself.”