I may have been all of ten or eleven when my mother suggested I read Little Women. It had been a much-loved novel read in her own childhood and it quickly became a part of my identity as well. The cover of my cheap paperback copy was atrocious (some stock photo, glossy, and irrelevant) and I was daunted by the number of pages, but the story grabbed and held on. Jo March stood out, joining a short list of the admired (I was demanding of my heroines). Then my mum suggested Alcott's Eight Cousins, Little Men, Rose In Bloom. After a few more reading years, I came to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Has there ever been a more fascinating heroine than Hester Prynne? Hawthorne joined my pantheon of literary greats then and there.

Also, the thinking behind those novels seemed familiar. New England thinking, perhaps, of a certain kind. My parents, so East Coast in their philosophy and approach to life (not Puritan, mind you, but, as I've come to discover as an adult, Thoreau and Emerson influenced). Some of these ideas seemed a backdrop to reality when I was growing up, and informs my life even now. Even Mr. Inkslinger carries a copy of Walden with him wherever he travels. Perhaps that's why he seemed so familiar the first time we met those many years ago.

The Concord thinkers had pervaded my intellectual universe from the very start.

So I came at Susan Cheever's verbosely titled American Bloomsbury. Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work with much enthusiasm. I can't say it lived up to my expectations, but I wasn't bitterly disappointed either. I liked her informal, personal approach. It's popular history, I told myself, one can't expect even an attempt at objectivity. The attention to natural detail seemed fitting. The insertion of the authorial 'I' was not off-putting. And the enthusiasm for her subject was contagious. I was annoyed from time to time by the haphazard approach to chronology. Dates and times confused rather than clarified as she went from one figure to another, overlapping incidents and approaching the notion of cause and effect with abandon. And I have heard some mention of her inaccuracies (including details related to the Civil War in America which, one would think, are readily available for editorial fact-checking). Do I know enough about the details of these lives to be able to ferret out all the inaccuracies? Not really. I did notice she made quite a few assumptions without backing them up with factual detail when it came to motivation and emotion on the part of people long dead.

That all having been said, I can't say I did anything other than enjoy this journey to writerly Concord in the 1800s. And it has encouraged me to return to these writers. And perhaps revisit Concord, Massachusetts.