Eight Cousins, Or, The Aunt-Hill

Eight Cousins, or The Aunt Hill is Louisa May Alcott’s 1875 novel, often grouped with her better known Little Women but distinct in setting, character, and tone. The story follows Rose Campbell, a thirteen year old orphan who has come to live with her many aunts and uncles in a family compound on the Massachusetts coast. Rose is shy, fragile, and treated like an invalid by the elderly aunts who initially have charge of her. Her seven boy cousins, who have grown up together with the run of the property, are loud, healthy, and not at all sure what to do with their newly arrived girl cousin.

When Rose’s official guardian, her bachelor uncle Doctor Alec Campbell, returns from a long sea voyage to take over her upbringing, the novel really begins. Doctor Alec has firm ideas about what is good for a young girl, almost all of which run counter to the conventional wisdom of the era. He gets Rose outside, puts her in sensible clothes, feeds her properly, and arranges for her to spend time with her cousins on equal terms. The novel is essentially a year in the life of Rose’s slow recovery from a sheltered upbringing and her growing into herself as a confident young woman with strong opinions.

Alcott was writing in the era of muscular Christianity and progressive education, and Doctor Alec’s program for Rose is a fictionalized version of the kinds of reforms Alcott herself believed in. Eight Cousins is in some ways more pointedly didactic than Little Women, with Doctor Alec sometimes sounding like a lecture rather than a character, but the novel is also funnier and more affectionate than its didactic moments suggest. The seven boy cousins are individually drawn, and Rose’s friendship with the youngest of them, the disabled Mac, is one of the more touching threads.

The sequel Rose in Bloom continues the story into Rose’s adulthood. For young readers and adult readers who love nineteenth century children’s literature, Eight Cousins remains a delightful read.