The Bee & the Fly by Lorraine Tosiello
What's It About?
Two 19th-century writers lived just 74 miles from each other. One is the renowned author of Little Women, the other, one of America’s foremost poets. Emily Dickinson would undoubtedly have heard of Louisa May Alcott, yet there is no historical record of the two ever meeting or corresponding despite their proximity. Had they met, would they have become friends? What would they have discussed? These two brilliant spinsters already had something vital in common as writers. The idea of such a relationship is tantalizing.Two 19th-century writers lived just 74 miles from each other. One is the renowned author of Little Women, the other, one of America’s foremost poets. Emily Dickinson would undoubtedly have heard of Louisa May Alcott, yet there is no historical record of the two ever meeting or corresponding despite their proximity. Had they met, would they have become friends? What would they have discussed? These two brilliant spinsters already had something vital in common as writers. The idea of such a relationship is tantalizing.
Lorraine Tosiello and Jane Cavolina explore the possibility of such a friendship in their novel, The Bee & The Fly: The Improbable Correspondence of Louisa May Alcott & Emily Dickinson (Clash Books). The result is an exquisitely written book that is both haunting and satisfying.
Tosiello takes on the voice of Louisa while Cavolina speaks for Emily. Immersing themselves for five years in Alcott’s and Dickinson’s lives and numerous writings, the pair achieve the authenticity of voice that fans of either classic author would demand. The Bee & The Fly concludes with a historical perspective along with annotations for those who may want to take a deeper dive.
A TREASURE TROVE OF LONG-LOST CORRESPONDENCE
The prologue’s sensory detail of the discovered letters sets the stage for the 25 years of correspondence that follows:
I will never forget the faint, old-fashioned scent that wafted from the hidden recess: apples, blancmange, and plummy buns, the tumbled aromas of a warm and boisterous home, the output of a greathearted spinster. It was followed by the fragile bouquet of roses, sweet peas, nasturtium, and lemon verbena, pressed flowers from a sweet garden, the legacy of a reclusive and passionate gardener.
The authors then describe the appearance of the letters, revealing much about these women as writers and people:
One set was written mainly on blue-lined paper in a hurried scrawl, efficient words and little attention to punctuation; the second, scribbled in petite letters on scraps of paper, often in pencil. The penmanship has a decided right slant, large spaces between the words, and dashes the predominant punctuation mark.
AN EPISTOLATORY TALE OF FRIENDSHIP
Laced with humor, poignancy, deep affection, respect and truth, the letters blossom into a true-to-life fictional friendship between the two writers. Initially, Emily first approaches Louisa in May of 1861, sharing a recently published poem and asking for advice on making her work more widely known. Louisa is immediately captivated by Emily, sensing something more between the lines of her brief correspondence.
Total opposites, the women candidly begin sharing their lives and feelings, discerning a port of safety where they can freely express themselves. Along with writing, Emily and Louisa discuss the complexities of family life, with Louisa sensing a resemblance between her late sister Lizzie and Emily. There are intimate letters concerning personality, behavior, sentiment and health concerns. They share about what it means to be women of their time.
Tosiello and Cavolina take wonderful flights of fancy in exploring this unusual friendship. At one point, Louisa reveals how she integrates Emily into her book Eight Cousins, describing how Emily inspired an array of characters. After realizing how consumed Louisa is by guilt and duty, Emily watches over her friend, encouraging her and warning her against being too hard on herself.
The Bee & The Fly is a book to savor, particularly in the beauty of Emily’s letters. Even though this is a fictional story, the reader can learn much about Alcott and Dickinson that is factual. Louisa’s letters, in particular, are quite revealing about the demanding life of this beloved author.
How I wish it were all true! That’s how much I enjoyed The Bee & The Fly.
Q: Please describe how The Bee & The Fly came about. How did you two connect? Was it because of your mutual interest in Louisa May Alcott and Emily Dickinson?
Lorraine: Jane and I were great friends in high school. We did not see each other or even communicate very much after graduation. Six years ago, after our high school alumni association sent around a list of classmates, I noticed that Jane lived in New Jersey; I had recently moved to the Jersey Shore. We met for a walk on the beach and bonded again so strongly. Our interests were similar but shaped by our different life experiences. I already had the idea for this book percolating in my head, and she agreed to be Emily during that first meeting!
Jane: All true, but when Lorry first asked, “Who is your favorite poet?” I had a brief internal argument and landed on Emily Dickinson instead of my other great love, Walt Whitman. Then she told me about her book idea and asked if I would join her. I said yes. As we took on the characters of Emily and Louisa, our friendship mirrored theirs as presented in their letters.
Q: It sounds like you each did quite a bit of research to step into the characters. How did you each approach that aspect of the project?
Lorraine: So much is known about Alcott’s life that I felt the need to read all of her juvenile and adult fiction (including her potboilers), biographies and literary criticism. In addition, I read contemporary retellings of Little Women. Alcott’s letters, edited by Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy, were invaluable in learning her natural lingo and turn of phrase. My reading also included John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Walden by Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s letters, and Bronson Alcott’s Concord Days to understand what shaped Louisa’s thinking. I further delved into Concord town history, abolitionism, Civil War nursing, the Grand Tour of Europe, and women’s suffrage, all things to which Louisa was devoted.
Jane: In addition to rereading Emily’s poems daily to refresh my sense of who she was, I read about her life to better understand her circumstances. I took away impressions that intersected with my portrait of her as a woman who built a deep and moving interior life while surrounded by (or in response to) mostly unsympathetic family members, who, I believe, inadvertently nourished the flame within her. Her poems were where she could be fully herself and tell us all we need to know about her.
Q: What drew you to Alcott and Dickinson?
Lorraine: Little Women drew me to Alcott, and in fact, I knew very little about Alcott’s life before I began this project. It started with a visit to Orchard House six years ago. My sister, who was with me, expressed an interest in seeing Emily Dickinson’s homestead. I also did not know much about Dickinson, except for the most traditional of her poems, taught in high school, such as “Success is counted sweetest” and “Some keep the Sabbath.”
I experienced the epiphany of the narrator of the prologue in The Bee & The Fly, sensing that the two women knew each other after entering their homes; I was shocked to hear that Dickinson’s life spanned the same years as Alcott’s and heard mention in both home tours of common friends Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Ralph Waldo Emerson. I went home that day convinced that it was plausible that they were aware of each other and may have even known each other, despite Dickinson’s reclusive nature. Research brought out so many more connections (Helen Hunt Jackson, Daniel Chester French, and the piece de resistance, Mabel Loomis Todd!) that the correspondence seemed, at least, plausible.
Jane: I’d been reading and rereading Emily Dickinson since high school. I have a well-flagged copy of her collected poems and what I feel is an understanding of who she was, at least to me. I find my view of her differs somewhat from what I’d read about her, that she wasn’t a poor old recluse hiding in her bedroom but a woman who lived a full life of the mind and heart within the confines of her home and garden. That’s what the poems tell us.
Q: What do you hope readers will get out of The Bee & The Fly?
Lorraine: We use an unlikely pair to show women’s solidarity, the power of words, and the ability of friendship to overcome tremendous obstacles. I would love for our readers to be inspired by both women, and to know that a quiet, unknown voice can survive into posterity just as well as a famous, renowned one. I would like readers to question the history we are told and look at the historical lives of each woman and fill in the gaps that may have less factual documentation. Unfortunately, it is women’s lives that are often less well chronicled. There’s correspondence out there that can illuminate history, perhaps in your own attic!
Jane: I hope we’ve expressed the personalities of our two writers in ways with which readers will relate.
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About Lorraine Tosiello:
Lorraine Tosiello read Alcott’s Little Women in the first grade, and again and again most years of her childhood after that. That set her off on her life journey of reading, working as a physician, motherhood, traveling and general rabble-rousing. Rereading Little Women in later adulthood renewed her Alcott enthusiasm and years of study resulted in her first novel, Only Gossip Prospers: A Novel of Louisa May Alcott in New York. She lives with her husband in midtown Manhattan and at the New Jersey shore.
About Jane Cavolina:
Jane Cavolina has been absorbed in a book since her mother signed her up for a book club before she started nursery school. That led to a career in publishing, first as a senior editor at William Morrow, Crown and Pocket Books, and now as a copyeditor. She is the coauthor of Growing Up Catholic, which was on The New York Times bestseller list for forty-weeks, and other works. She has read every Louisa May Alcott book in the Bayside Public Library with the exception of Little Women, and has worn out several copies of Leaves of Grass, by her other favorite poet, and cherishes her well-flagged copy of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.
