Louisa
May Alcott’s Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts, “The
Home of Little Women,” is deeply saddened to announce the passing
of pre-eminent Alcott scholar
Madeleine
B. Stern
on
Saturday, August 18, 2007 at her home in Manhattan after a brief illness.
Miss Stern was 95 years old and surrounded by a caring circle
of friends -- Katharine Houghton; Richard, Terry, and Lewis Koch; Loven
Lavia; Paulette Rose; Jan Turnquist; Liliane Wilcox -- her cousin,
Zelda Mack; and her beloved dog, Laurie. A Memorial Service was held
on August 21, 2007 at Frank E. Campbell Memorial Chapel in Manhattan;
burial was in Queens, New York.
As
Executive Director of Orchard House, Jan Turnquist was privileged to
know Madeleine Stern
for over fifteen years. Their collegial relationship
developed into a mentorship and finally, a very special friendship.
She was honored to be with Miss Stern as she left this world with
dignity and grace.
Miss
Stern’s contribution to Alcott scholarship
cannot be overstated. She truly had no peer, save her friend
of 60 years, Leona Rostenberg.
Miss Stern’s wish was that memorial gifts be made to Orchard
House (P.O. Box 343, Concord, MA 01742-0343, or on-line at www.louisamayalcott.org),
a place she and Leona held dear.
As
wonderful as her professional contributions were, Miss Stern’s
generous spirit, devoted friendship, and noble character leave
an even greater legacy. There is now a deep void, not only in
the world of Alcott
scholarship, but also in the hearts of all those who knew, respected,
and loved her.
Prefatory
Remarks
In
the old and rare we have made connections; connections between past
and present, between our books and ourselves. When the
younger generation tells us we are
legendary figures, we sometimes think they really mean has-beens. It is
true that they study our catalogues, buy our rare books, consult
us from time to time,
read and collect our co-authored publications. They search our eyes for
a legacy.
Our
lives are our legacy. … [and] we look to the future
-- to our next find, to our next book, to our next adventure.
~Madeleine
Stern & Leona Rostenberg, 1997
No
brief space could ever contain even the bare facts about Miss Stern’s
life, let alone the impact of her work on the fields of literature and literary
criticism, antiquarian book-dealing, and even women’s rights. The following
information has therefore been adapted to provide a highly abbreviated look
at the incredible life of an incredible person. Sources used include an article
by Margalit Fox published on August 25, 2007 in The New York Times; Miss
Stern’s
death notice, which appeared in The New York Times on August 21, 2007; and
research and recollections by the Staff of Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard
House, with whom Miss Stern had connections for over fifty years.
Miss
Stern was enormously proud of the fact that she and her dear friend,
business partner,
and companion “literary sleuth,” Leona Rostenberg, helped
bring to light Louisa May Alcott’s unknown tales of intrigue, murder,
adultery, suicide -- and as Miss Stern put it, “thuggism, feminism,
hashish, and transvestitism” to boot. (Truly “Plots and Counterplots,” as
Louisa May Alcott entitled one of these stories!)
“One
of our greatest thrills,” Miss Stern wrote in 1997, “was
our discovery of the double literary life of America's best-loved writer
of juvenile
fiction. The revelation that the author of Little Women was also the
author of clandestine sensational shockers was our blood-and-thunder
story.” (from
Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths and Their Shared
Passion,
1997). The
community-at-large recognized the importance of their discovery as
well. Revered Brigham Young University librarian A. Dean Larsen (1930-2002),
a
dear friend to Miss Stern, wrote to her in the 1980s that, “When
you meet Louisa May Alcott in the next life, she is going to embrace
you and say, ‘Madeleine,
you, more than any other person ever to live, have furthered my literary
reputation.’”
Early
Life and Achievements
 Madeleine
Bettina Stern was born to Lillie Mack and Moses R. Stern, “probably
on the kitchen table,” as she surmised, in her family’s
Harlem apartment on July 1, 1912 (photo at left: Madeleine Stern
at age 3, 1915). She graduated
Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature
from Barnard College in 1932, and received a Master’s from
Columbia University in 1934.
Miss
Stern’s first book was, interestingly
enough, quite like Little Women -- a largely autobiographical novel
entitled We Are Taken, published in 1935
by The Galleon Press. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1943,
Miss Stern authored, co-authored, edited, or co-edited over forty
books, among them the
seminal biography, Louisa May Alcott, published in 1950 by University
of Oklahoma Press and re-issued by Northeastern University Press
in 1999. Miss Stern’s
other noted biographies include: The Life of Margaret Fuller (E.
P. Dutton & Company,
1942); Purple Passage: The Life of Mrs. Frank Leslie (University
of Oklahoma, 1953), whose husband was publisher of many of Miss Alcott’s
early provocative works; So Much in a Lifetime: The Life of
Dr. Isabel Barrows (Messner, 1964);
The Pantarch: A Biography of Stephen Pearl Andrews (University of
Texas, 1968); and Heads & Headliners: The Phrenological Fowlers (University of Oklahoma, 1971).
“The
Misses Stern and Rostenberg”
Miss
Stern and Miss Rostenberg first met in 1929, when both worked as teachers
at the Sabbath School
of Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan.
When the
women became re-acquainted as Columbia University graduate students, a
warm friendship
blossomed from their mutual interests and intense intellectual
curiosity. They resided
in New York City with their many books and beloved dogs, always
eager and
ready to assist fledgling Alcott scholars and rare book collectors.
In
1942, doggedly investigating rather unusual and elusive references
in Louisa May Alcott’s correspondence and journals, Miss
Stern and Miss Rostenberg found evidence at Houghton Library
in Harvard University that Alcott -- best
known for her treasured children’s classic, Little
Women (1868) -- had also written racy potboilers, or “blood-and-thunder
tales.” Published
in popular periodicals anonymously or under the mysterious
pseudonym of “A.
M. Barnard,” these stories dealt with seamier aspects
of life and love that excited the reading public and, more
importantly, provided Miss Alcott
with badly needed money to help support her family.
Miss
Stern oversaw the publication of these risqué stories in
several anthologies beginning in the 1970s -- Behind
a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of
Louisa May Alcott (Morrow, 1975); Plots and Counterplots:
More Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott (Morrow, 1976);
A Double Life: Newly Discovered Thrillers
of Louisa May Alcott (Little, Brown & Company, 1988);
Louisa May Alcott Unmasked: Collected Thrillers (Northeastern
University, 1995); and The Feminist Alcott:
Stories of a Woman’s Power (Northeastern University
Press, 1996). With Professors Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy,
Miss Stern co-edited Miss Alcott’s
journals, letters, and selected fiction in the 1990s.
Old
Books and The Magic Touch
Through
the years, in tandem with their shared fascination about Alcott went
an affinity for rare
books. After Columbia
University
rejected
Miss Rostenberg’s
doctoral dissertation in 1939, effectively, she thought,
putting an end to her scholarly pursuits, Miss Rostenberg
began to apprentice with a rare book-dealer
in New York. By Christmas of 1943, Miss Stern hoped
to encourage her friend to set up a business of her
own
by giving her gifts of stationery she had engraved
with “Leona Rostenberg ~ Rare Books.” With
a $1,000 loan from Miss Stern, Miss Rostenberg opened
her business the
next year; Miss Stern joined
her in the venture in 1945.
As
partners in Rostenberg & Stern
Rare Books for over fifty years, these two women
became legendary in the world
of antiquarian book-dealing, and highly
respected for their willingness to search the ends
of the Earth for treasures. The pair was so gifted in their ability
to almost
instantly sense the significance
of a rare book that the German term Finger-Spitzengefuhl
-- loosely translated as a seemingly electrical energy that emanates
from a treasured book, recognizable
by only a gifted few -- was often used to describe
them.
Miss
Stern and Miss Rostenberg were among the only women at the inaugural
meeting of the Antiquarian
Booksellers Association
of America (ABAA)
in 1949, and were
invited to dinner at “The Old Book Table” social
group of The Grolier Club, which had a “Men
Only” policy
for decades. Miss Stern also founded the New York
Antiquarian Book Fair,
held annually since 1960. In the
recent past, Miss Stern and Miss Rostenberg were
honored by The Small Press Center in New York City
for their
groundbreaking
Alcott scholarship, and in
2006, Miss
Stern was feted by The Grolier Club for her pioneering
efforts in gaining acceptance of women in the world
of antiquarian
books.
Had
that dissertation been accepted … one
of us would have been stranded in some small Midwestern
college teaching names of kings and dates of battles;
the other would have continued unhappily explaining
Ivanhoe and Silas Marner
to uninterested high school students. There is no
doubt that we both owe a debt of gratitude to [Prof. Thorndike]
who … unwittingly --
and magically -- changed our lives forever.
~Madeleine
Stern & Leona Rostenberg, 1997
Bookends
With
Miss Rostenberg, Miss Stern wrote several memoirs revealing elements
of not only their six-decade
personal friendship,
but also their professional
tenacity in the face of widespread prejudice
toward single women in business for themselves
during the mid-20th Century -- Old & Rare:
Thirty Years in the Book Business (A. Schram,
1974), Old Books, Rare Friends:
Two Literary Sleuths and Their
Shared Passion (Doubleday, 1997), and Bookends:
Two Women, One Enduring Friendship (The
Free Press, 2001).
Coincidentally,
a well-reviewed musical version of Bookends -- written by actress
Katharine Houghton
(“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and
niece of Katharine Hepburn), directed by her
husband, actor Ken Jenkins (“Scrubs”),
with music by Dianne Adams and James McDowell
-- is playing through Sunday, August 26, 2007
at the New Jersey Repertory
Company in Long Branch. Miss
Stern leaves no direct descendants, but was the beloved cousin
of Zelda Mack and had
an abiding
affection
for many
relations of
Miss Rostenberg,
who died in 2005 at the age of 96.
If
memory of the past enriches us, security in the present strengthens
us,
and together they prepare us for the future.
~Madeleine
Stern & Leona
Rostenberg, 2001
From left to right: Leona Rostenberg, “Louisa May Alcott” (portrayed
by Orchard House
Executive Director Jan Turnquist), and Madeleine Stern in 1999
Louisa
May Alcott’s Orchard House
This
treasured historic site, which long held a warm place in Miss
Stern’s heart, is
a non-profit organization dedicated to public education about
the legacies of Louisa May Alcott and her
family in the fields of literature, social justice, the arts, and
education, and preservation of the significant historic structures
on the property -- Orchard House, (circa 1690) and The Concord
School of Philosophy (1879). Detailed information is available
at www.louisamayalcott.org. Gifts in memory of Miss Stern may be
sent to Orchard House, P. O. Box 343, Concord, MA, 01742-0343,
or made securely on-line at https://secure.gis.net/hosts/lmama/appealonline.html.
To
read Miss Stern’s Death Notice in The New York Times (8/21/07),
click
here
To read an article by Margalit Fox in The New York Times (8/25/07),
click here
To read an article by Stephen Miller in The New York Sun (8/23/07),
click here
To download and print the .pdf of this Life Story, click here
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