Alcott in Our Own Time

In this episode, where the title nods to a seminal Alcott text, Alcott in Her Own Time, edited by Daniel Shealy, Jamie and Jill reconnect about what has changed since they first began making Let Genius Burn in the winter of 2019-2020. We discuss what we are currently reading and thinking about in regards to Alcott.

For Jamie, that's thinking about the paths for women, including connections to the novel Dream Count by Chimamanda Adichie and Spinster by Kate Bolick. She relates these questions to Taylor Swift's recent engagement, about which she is feeling conflicted. She also speaks about trauma and neurodivergence, particularly in relation to Karyn Valerius's work: "'Is the Young Lady Mad?' Psychiatric Disability in Louisa May Alcott's Fiction," wondering if Alcott's lifelong struggle with "moodiness" would be seen differently by today's standards.

Jill talks about books she has recently been reading, including Little Women at 150, The Afterlife of Little Women by Beverly Lyon Clark, and Alcotts: Biography of a Family by Madelon Bedell. She gives an in-depth look at an article entitled "Family and Fortune: Louisa May Alcott, Inheritance, and the Legacy of Aunts" by Susan S. Williams, talking about economics and aunthood. Jill is excited about the idea of chosen family and an expansive definition of family that puts our ideas of Little Women as a typical-nuclear-family story through a different lens.

We wrap up by talking about Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation, a recent favorite of both hosts, by author and scholar Tiya Miles. The book focuses on women in the outdoors, and it brings into focus athleticism, outdoors(wo)manship, and connections to nature, classifying Alcott as a nature-writer.

Bibliography:
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Dream Count: A Novel. United States, Knopf Canada, 2025.

Bolick, Kate. Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own. United States, Crown Publishers, 2015.

Miles, Tiya. Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation. United States, W. W. Norton, 2023.

Little Women at 150. Ed. Daniel Shealy. United States, University Press of Mississippi, 2022.

Valerius, Karyn. "'Is the Young Lady Mad?': Psychiatric Disability in Louisa May Alcott's Fiction." Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health. Switzerland, Springer International Publishing, 2019.

Williams, Susan S. "Family and fortune: Louisa May Alcott, inheritance, and the legacy of aunts." The New England Quarterly 93.1 (2020): 48-73.