Louisa May Alcott's "Polish Boy"

The Secret Inspiration for Little Women's Laurie

It’s 1868. The aftermath of a bloody civil war saw a rise in the popularity of children’s literature, likely inspired by grieving families who sought tales of peace after a long period of upheaval. A little red book soon appeared in shops called Little Women. Its author, Louisa May Alcott, had published several stories in periodicals, but the work was her debut serious novel that took the country by storm, sweeping adults and children alike into the adventures of the March sisters: Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy.

Yet Louisa May Alcott never wanted to write “a book for little girls,” as her publisher described it, and wrote the book half-heartedly. At the time of the novel’s inception, she’d recently been released from service as a volunteer nurse after contracting typhoid fever and was likely still having nightmares about the soldiers she’d seen die. Perhaps she thought herself emotionally unfit to write something that would appeal to children, but her family was in perpetual need of money, and Louisa had long been the primary breadwinner. Seldom giving herself time to sit and mope, she sat at her writing desk and gave the idea a chance.

Today, most of us are familiar with the March girls’ antics—from Jo’s boyish tendencies to gentle Beth’s unfortunate fate—but back in the 1860s, the novel was more than familiar: it offered its readers, many of whom grieved the fathers or brothers they had lost to the war, a chance at peace.

Ironically, Louisa never liked Little Women the way her readers did. When the positive reviews came pouring in, her biggest complaint was about her readers’ preoccupation with the question of who Jo March would marry. She might’ve been irked by the question because the character of Jo was a self-insert. Louisa wrote the novel using herself and her sisters as inspiration: Meg was her sister Anna; Beth was Lizzie; Amy was May.

Louisa had long before resolved to enjoy life as a spinster, believing that there was more for girls to look forward to than marriage. She was, therefore, mortified when readers demanded that the character Jo should marry Laurie, the frequent companion of the little girls who lived with his wealthy grandfather.

Eventually, she humored them by giving Jo a husband—but he wasn’t Laurie.

Why didn’t Louisa want Jo to marry Laurie? Could it have been that there was more to Laurie than his existence as a fictional character? Perhaps. From Louisa’s journals, we know that Laurie was inspired by a real man.

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Louisa met the man in question after she’d been dismissed from the hospital and before she became a famous author. Jobless and traumatized by what she’d witnessed at Washington’s Union Military Hospital, thirty-six-year-old Louisa accepted an offer from a friend to accompany her disabled daughter to Europe. During this months-long journey, the party, which also included the girl’s brother, made several stops, one of which was in Switzerland, where Louisa became enchanted by a twenty-three-year-old Polish man named Ladislas Wisniewski. He was a recent freedom fighter who possessed a feisty spirit that both Jo March and Louisa May Alcott would have found intriguing.

Ladislas seemed to have provided Louisa with her first enjoyable memories from the trip, and the pair quickly became infatuated with one another; Louisa gave him the pet name “Laddie.” Soon, she parted ways with her siblings, perhaps convinced by Laddie to go astray and visit places she might actually enjoy.

Until her encounter with Laddie, Louisa seemed to have only had a series of innocent crushes—on Ralph Waldo Emerson, for instance, who made several “guest appearances” in her stories as an intriguing stranger, or on Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom she admired for his sharp mind. She did not, however, do anything rash on account of these crushes, and they never caused her to behave out of character, so one might surmise that there must have been something different about Laddie. His appearance in her bleak life, for example, seems to have provided her the motivation she needed to walk away from the job that landed her in Europe in the first place.

But that is the extent of what we know about Louisa’s relationship with Laddie. Interestingly enough, her journal from that time of her life is heavily censored. The page that seems to confess to some romance is all but destroyed; Louisa scratched out the majority of what was written, and scholars are left to puzzle over the details of this love story.

As if to make the mystery more intriguing, she wrote, at the end of one page: “Couldn’t be.”

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After resigning as the companion of the disabled girl, Louisa traveled to Paris, where she met up with Laddie, with whom she toured the city, unchaperoned, for two weeks. While there’s no concrete evidence of anything that would have been deemed improper—Louisa recorded only that “the days [were] spent in seeing the sights with Laddie, the evenings in reading, writing, hearing ‘my boy’ play, or resting”—she was pushing boundaries of the time simply by being alone with him, and there might have been a touch of “impropriety” to this adventure that caused Louisa to destroy her page and write that sullen “Couldn’t be.”

After those two weeks, it seems that the spell faded; or, perhaps, she found herself wondering what she was thinking, gallivanting with a man alone. Her reputation would be in ruins, and, as the primary breadwinner for her family, Louisa could not afford to mar her reputation should the affair be discovered—even if the activities they shared were innocent.

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Hundreds of years from now, Louisa fans will continue to wonder what happened. After all, this was a woman normally set on forging her own path. So why did she convince herself that a romance with this man she admired “couldn’t be”?

Might it have been the thirteen-year age gap? This is unlikely; back then, age gaps of the sort were not as uncommon as they are now. It could, however, have been a factor: Louisa might often have felt more like his mother than like a potential life partner. In her journal, she wrote that Laddie often called her “mother.” It was an affectionate pet name, yet it must have reminded her of the years that separated them.

Later, when Louisa was back in Concord writing sequels to Little Women, Laddie seems to have tried wooing her younger sister May, who was studying art in London at the time.

The cause of Louisa’s break with Laddie, then, could have been a flaw in his character: Laddie might have displayed an immaturity that Louisa, who had seen boys broken into manhood at the military hospital, couldn’t entertain.

We will never know for certain—there does not even exist a known photo of Laddie. The only traces of him we can identify are found in the character of Laurie in Little Women.

So how true is Laurie to the real-life Laddie? While I, too, am intrigued by this question, I try not to think too much about it. Louisa made the decision not to stay with her “Polish boy”; she also made the choice to write a character who may or may not have resembled him, so as both an author and a reader, I’ll honor Louisa May Alcott’s wishes and simply enjoy the book. She left us with a timeless classic and owes us no explanations of her love life (or lack thereof).

Yet the character of Laurie will remain immortal in the pages of Little Women. If Louisa wished for Laddie to disappear, I’m happy to let him go. Instead of picking apart the sentences in her diary, I’ll grab the published book and lose myself in the comforting world of the Marches.