Interview: Kelly O'Connor McNees, author of "The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott"

Randy Richardson

CWA: The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott is your first novel. Tell us a little about it.

Kelly: The idea for this novel grew from two sources. One was the fact that Louisa May Alcott was known to have burned her letters and journals. She was famous in her own lifetime and knew she would be written about; she wanted to control the story that was told about her after she was gone. The other inspiration was a quotation from Julian Hawthorne, the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was a neighbor of the Alcotts in Concord. He said this about Louisa: “Did she ever have a love affair? We never knew. Yet how could a nature so imaginative, romantic and passionate escape it?” When I rubbed these two sources together, they made a spark. After all, even though there’s nothing in Louisa’s papers to suggest a love affair, Julian Hawthorne knew her personally and wondered enough about it to write it down, and Louisa obviously wanted to eliminate something from the record when she burned some of her letters and journals. That launched my imagination.

My story imagines what took place in the summer of 1855, when the Alcotts moved to Walpole, New Hampshire because they couldn’t afford their house in Concord and a relative offered his house to them rent-free. We know very little about what actually took place that summer, which made it the perfect setting for a story of a love affair that would later be erased from the record but inspire the character of Laurie in Little Women. 

CWA: I presume you are an Alcott junkie? When did you get hooked?

Kelly: I always loved Little Women, but it wasn’t until I started reading about Louisa’s life a few years ago that I really became interested in her work. I had heard somewhere that she hadn’t really wanted to write Little Women. I found that intriguing, since the book is so incredibly popular and has never been out of print since 1868. But she dismissed it as “moral pap for the young.” She wrote many, many stories and novels of all different kinds, some under a pseudonym and some that remained unpublished because they were deemed too racy. Stories were discovered within the last forty years, and some people think there are probably more stories out there yet to be found. It’s amazing to think about that. My favorite novel is The Long Fatal Love Chase. It’s about a stalker.

CWA: What is it about Alcott that captured you?

Kelly: The more I read about her life and her commitment to her writing, the more I came to admire her. She was incredibly determined: she never gave up, despite poverty, illness, discouragement, anger, and endless housework. She wrote so much with her right hand that the muscles seized up and stopped working, and so she learned to write with her left. That was the kind of person she was. And she loved a good story.

CWA: How long did it take you to write The Lost Summer? What kind of research did you have to do?

Kelly: It took about a year and a half, working a few hours every day. As for research, Louisa’s own letters and journals were by far the most important in trying to develop her voice in dialogue, and in trying to depict her interior life.  Second to that were several biographies of Louisa and her father, Bronson, along with books on New England in general during the mid–nineteenth century. I have this very nerdy love of reference books. I found a few gems that describe what day-to-day life was like, how people dressed, how they stored and cooked their food, what they did to amuse themselves. It’s the little details that matter. There are so many wonderful books about very specific topics—most of them now out of print. For example, in a library in Kitchener, Ontario, I found one about the many different types of carriages used throughout