A relevant work as we try to find light in these challenging times, famed author of Little Women (1868) Louisa May Alcott wrote this collection of fairy tales for her childhood friend, Ellen Emerson. Flower Fables was, in fact, her very first publication.

“To Ellen Emerson, 

For whom they were fancied,

these flower fables 

Are inscribed, 

By her friend,                                                                             

the author.” (Louisa May Alcott, Boston, Dec. 9, 1854)

These lush tales, featuring fairies, elves, and sprites in the form of wildflowers interacting with the natural elements, emphasize the need for kindness and love in our connections with one another and reflect Alcott’s reverence for nature.

Eckhart Tolle has suggested that flowers could be viewed as the enlightenment of plants: “Without our fully realizing it, flowers would become for us an expression in form of that which is most high, most sacred, and ultimately formless within ourselves. Flowers, more fleeting, more ethereal, and more delicate than the plants out of which they emerged, would become like messengers from another realm, like a bridge between the world of physical forms and the formless.”

Certainly, and tragically, the creature in the 1931 film version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus sees flower and child as one and is heartbroken when he accidentally kills the child. Would that all monsters had such lovely souls. 

Echoes of The Stolen Child by Yeats. Perhaps the fairies took her:

“Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand.

For the world’s more full of weeping

Than you can understand.”

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Sophie Lyons was a “thief from the cradle”, as one Chief of Police said; at the early age of six years she had already been trained by her stepmother to be a pickpocket and a shoplifter. A beautiful child with engaging manners, she was sent out every day into the stores and among the crowds of shoppers, and was soundly whipped if she came out of a shop with less than three pocketbooks. “I did not know it was wrong to steal; nobody ever taught me that,” Sophie Lyons writes. “What I was told was wrong and what I was punished for was when I came home with only one pocketbook instead of many.”

As the child grew into womanhood she was conspicuously beautiful, and she soon became known as “Pretty Sophie”. Then romance entered her life and she married Ned Lyons, the famous bank burglar. Her husband was a member of the great gang of expert safe-blowers who were the terror of the police and the big banks of some years ago.

For 25 years Sophie Lyons was “The Queen of the Bank Burglars”, the active leader of many expeditions in various parts of the world, and with her were associated about all of the great criminals of Europe and America. It has been said that she has been arrested in nearly every large city in America, and in every country in Europe except Turkey. She has served sentences in several prisons, and, on one occasion, her husband, Ned Lyons, was in Sing Sing while she herself was confined in the women’s wing of the prison across the road. Ned Lyons managed to make his escape and very soon drove up to the women’s prison and effected the escape of his wife, Sophie Lyons.

The actual happenings in her career have been more extraordinary than the imagination of any novelist has dreamed; more surprising than any scene on the stage.

Yet nearly every one of those whose exploits she has recounted here is now an outcast, has served a good share of life in prison, is in poverty, or has died poor. Surely, as she has asserted again and again – and hopes to abundantly prove – Crime Does Not Pay.

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In this story, we hear Adam trying to work out what the “new creature with long hair” is all about. She names things, much to Adam’s annoyance. She follows him around. Then suddenly, there’s another creature, which eventually Adam decides is his son Cain. It’s all about confusion and curiosity, and finally, love for Eve.

The innocent lark of the first story was joined in 1905 with a more wistful tale, “Eve’s Diary”. Twain’s personal life had been turned upside down by Livy’s death in 1904. While the humor of the first Adam story comes through, the Eve tale is, at its heart, a sweet eulogy from an aching heart, exemplified by the Eve story’s closing line, “Wherever she was, there was Eden.”

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Educated in Amherst, Massachusetts, Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe (1819-1906) accompanied her physician-husband to California in 1849. The Shirley Letters (1922) is the book edition of a series of letters written by Mrs. Clappe to her sister in 1851 and 1852. They were first published under the pseudonym of Dame Shirley in the Pioneer magazine, 1854-55. In these letters, Louise Clappe writes of life in San Francisco and the Feather River mining communities of Rich Bar and Indian Bar. She focuses on the experiences of women and children, the perils of miners’ work, crime and punishment, and relations with native Hispanic residents and Native Americans.

Bret Harte is said to have based two of his stories on the letters (from The Library of Congress).

“Of all the writers drawn to California between 1845 and the mid-1860s, [Clappe] speaks with the most original voice. Her only real competition, in my view, is Mark Twain.” (James D. Houston, author, Californians: Searching for the Golden State)

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