An Alcott biography that reads like a novel

One of the most refreshing aspects of this book is its length. In an era when biographers seem compelled to compile cultural surveys, genealogical treatises, medical minutiae, and discussions of every conversation, book, or battle into weighty tomes, Cheever packs an entire life into fewer than 300 pages.

And quite a life it was: from Alcott’s childhood poverty in Boston and Concord and her father’s idealistic experiments with progressive schools and communes to her scramble to make a living as a teacher and hack writer and the devastating six weeks she spent as a nurse in the Civil War, where she gained immeasurable understanding of the world but lost her health; to the blockbuster success of “Little Women,’’ which she reluctantly wrote at the suggestion of a publisher who wanted a book for girls; to the last two decades of her life, when she finally had the money and fame she had always desired but suffered the loss of family members and terrible health.

Cheever identifies with the generations of girls and women who, she argues, have found in “Little Women’’ an escape from the dominant models of femininity that Alcott herself managed to escape, as a single woman writer who supported her family in an age when girls were simply expected to marry well. Tracing Alcott’s rebellious and moody nature, along with her intellectual and economic independence, is one of the book’s central threads.

Another thread is Concord. Alcott’s childhood haven and the idealized home of the March sisters of “Little Women,’’ Concord was also, according to Cheever, a provincial, self-righteous community that Alcott found increasingly claustrophobic as she grew older. Cheever’s book “American Bloomsbury’’ untangled the social, romantic, and intellectual relationships of Concord’s Transcendentalists, and here she situates Alcott within her family’s close connections to Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne.