More memorable material from Dion Fortune's occult novels

This is yet another article in the series inspired by Dion Fortune's occult novels. It contains a few more of her thought-provoking propositions.

Three essential qualities
The Demon Lover contains what might be called a person specification for advanced occult work:

“Dr Latimer had brains and kindness, but no strength; the hard-faced man had brains and strength, but no kindness; the newcomer had all three, and Veronica knew by this that he was a far greater man in every way than either of the others was ever likely to be.” 

Each of these qualities needs to be developed to a far greater than average degree. Finding people who meet two of the requirements must be difficult enough; good luck with finding someone who meets all three! Such people may exist in fiction, but how many are to be found in real life? 

Balancing the qualities
Assuming that kindness includes mercy and that strength includes justice, this further extract from The Demon Lover is of interest because it reminds me of of a very similar statement in a very different novel:

“...although unbalanced mercy is but weakness, unbalanced justice is cruelty and oppression.”

When I first saw this, I immediately thought of some words from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre that support the above proposition:

“Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.”

Feeling that is not balanced with rationality may well be not much good to anyone on the receiving end, and judgement that is not balanced with compassion may indeed be too harsh for most people to digest.

Two incidents at the equinox

The article about depression at the autumn equinox describes how Charlotte Brontë suffered badly for a month to six weeks at this time of year. 

I have been feeing under the weather for around two weeks myself. It is worse than it has been in recent years, but nothing like as bad as it got in the distant past. 

While it helps to know that certain unseen influences may be at work, this doesn't stop the feelings of malaise, stagnation, despondency and being unprotected; it doesn't stop approaches from strangers who make me feel uncomfortable either. 

I experienced two such incidents when I went out shopping recently.

The first one happened when I visited a shopping centre some way from where I live. I have been there many times in the past, but I felt confused when I came out of the station. I made a false start or two, then set off down what I soon realised was the wrong road. As I walked past some tables outside a café, a rather weird and witchy older woman with straggly grey hair who was sitting there called out loudly, eagerly and triumphantly, “Hello darling” as if she knew me! 

I am wondering whether I fell into her psychic trap or answered her call and was drawn to that place because my defences were low at the time. The shopping expedition was not a success: the store I planned to visit had closed down and I came home with nothing.

The second incident happened when I was standing in a queue at a big supermarket. Someone just behind me started to comment in an over-friendly manner on the items I had selected; I looked round cautiously and saw that it was a rather weird and witchy older woman with straggly grey hair! The woman on the till was very slow and there were several people waiting in front of me, so I was a captive audience. I just smiled vaguely while she kept talking.  She also said loudly, “Hello darling” to the woman on the till! It was definitely not the same person though.

I am wondering what drew her to my queue and not one of the others. 

Marianne and the nightmare scenario

Stella Benson and Charlotte Brontë are not the only people whose descriptions of nightmare scenarios have inspired some articles.

The Marianne Trilogy by Sheri S. Tepper gives an example of someone who, just like Lucy Snowe in Villette, gets into the exact nightmare situation that she dreads the most.

In the article about the Marianne books I mentioned a laundry world. This alien dream world appears in Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods, the second book in the trilogy. The city that Marianne has been banished to by the evil witch Madame Delubovoska has a very strange attribute: it changes its name and rearranges itself every day around midnight, so the inhabitants need a new map for each day.

The rules are very strict; maps must be bought on the previous day, and it is a both a crime and extremely dangerous not to have one. Being without a map is something to be avoided at all costs.

Marianne runs a public laundry in the city. Her worst fear comes upon her one day when she forgets to buy her map for the next day. Despite increasingly desperate efforts in dangerous surroundings, she fails to get a new map.  This puts her into even more danger, and there is a good chance of permanent homelessness and destitution.

It all ends with a safe return to the laundry, but not before she has gone through a terrible ordeal which she has had to cope with entirely on her own.

Charlotte Brontë and the nightmare scenario

Stella Benson’s fantasy novella Living Alone (1919) ends with the arrival in New York of her autobiographical character Sarah Brown, who is ill, alone and penniless.

This scene in the book is my idea of a nightmare scenario.

Stella Benson put something of her own experience into the New York episode. She travelled by ship to America in July 1917. She had more in the way of resources than Sarah Brown did, but it was still an ordeal. Approaching New York Harbour, she was:

“...sick with excitement and fright at such an unknown day before me.”

She wrote in her diary on the evening of her first day in New York:

“I never wish for a more wretched thirty hours than this last.”

She was so overcome by loneliness, confusion and the great heat that she started to cry. She awoke the next morning from dreams of death and despair.

The Living Alone scenario and others from Stella Benson’s life sound familiar; they remind me of other writers’ accounts of permutations of isolation, desperation, dangerous situations, going into the unknown, lack of resources and dreadful inner states.

The many common elements make me wonder whether these scenarios are engineered, perhaps subconsciously or perhaps by sinister unseen influences.

Some of Charlotte Brontë’s writings are of particular interest here; they say to me that she knew the terrible feelings well and had experienced a few nightmare scenarios of her own.

Stella Benson’s imagination

Stella Benson had a powerful and vivid imagination, and from an early age she used it to enhance her life.

There are many factors in her life that help to explain why she should have turned to fantasy friends and an inner world for consolation and compensation, including a difficult family background, a critical and unsympathetic mother, feeling different from other girls, increasing deafness and, above all, very poor health that often kept her bedridden and hospitalised and entailed some horrible and excruciatingly painful medical treatments.

Such factors can be found in the lives of many other fiction writers. Mary Webb, who has been featured on here, also suffered from poor health and had a critical mother for example.

Great potential on the inside may be activated and employed when there is a hostile environment on the outside.

Am I the only one?

Stella Benson wrote this when she was 15 years old:

“I don’t know whether other people are the same as me in having an imaginary world filled with imaginary people to whom at every spare moment of the day one’s thoughts return. I daresay it is childish, but it has grown absolutely indispensable to me.”

The majority of people are not the same as her. For most people, the real world is all there is; they have little contact with an inner world or other dimensions.

Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel: wanting and getting

A further article or two about Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel has been outstanding for a long time now.

Angel has inspired three previous articles. I have described her imagination, her life and personality and her resemblance to various witches. So what more can there be to say about this strange and impossible woman?

There are some more familiar features and scenarios in her story to be described, and more details to come about the way she wants and gets things.

Wants and obsessions

Angel is an all-or-nothing person; she wants what she wants, how and when she wants it, on her own terms.

People like Angel are so single-minded in the pursuit of what they want that they may behave like addicts desperate for their next fix. They want nothing and no one except whatever they are currently obsessed with; if they are offered anything else they behave as if they have been given a stone when they wanted bread.

I have already mentioned Angel’s visit to her publisher in which she ignores his wife. Angel mostly ignores her aunt, except when she hears her say something interesting about life in the big house, something that she can use in her fantasies.

As a schoolgirl, Angel spends as much time as possible in her imagination, dreaming about living a life of luxury as a member of the family that owns the local big house. She surprises her aunt by actually asking her some questions after hearing her say something that catches her interest and provides food for her imagination. I have seen this behaviour in real life; it is not a good sign. The perpetrator blocks someone completely, then suddenly pounces on them if there is a chance of getting something they want from them.

Charlotte Brontë’s St. John Rivers: Cult Leader

The inspiration for the title of this article came from the names of some recent mash-up novels such as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and the article itself was inspired by the sudden realisation that St. John Rivers, a character in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, has some of the typical characteristics of a cult leader.  

It was reading about people such as Bronson Alcott to get material for forum posts about cults that stirred up memories of this fictional character. I went back to Jane Eyre to refresh my memory and look at St. John Rivers in the light of what I now know about charismatic cult leaders. 

The first few times I read Jane Eyre, I passed quickly over the chapters where he appears as he seemed an unsympathetic, not very exciting character; I much preferred Mr Rochester and other parts of the book. This time around, St. John Rivers was the main person of interest and his conversations with Jane the main scenes of interest. 

Re-reading the chapters in which he appears has confirmed my idea that he has some attributes in common with cult leaders. There is also his resemblance to Bronson Alcott: St. John Rivers too is tall and handsome with fair hair and blue eyes. He says himself that he has a hard, cold personality. He is a fanatic with a burning ambition to make his mark on the world.

In support of my case, here are some examples of the familiar attributes I found.

Unlimited ambition and a mission
St. John Rivers had a compulsion to change the world - or even save the world. His mission was to convert the Hindus to Christianity. 

In St. John Rivers’ own words:

“Reason, and not feeling, is my guide; my ambition is unlimited: my desire to rise higher, to do more than others, insatiable.  I honour endurance, perseverance, industry, talent; because these are the means by which men achieve great ends and mount to lofty eminence.“

This may have been spoken by a fictional character, but it is uncannily familiar: it sounds rather like something that Benjamin Disraeli might have said. 

Benjamin Disraeli: reaching the dizzy heights in politics

Benjamin Disraeli reached the supreme summit of his ambitions when he entered the House of Commons as Prime Minister in February 1868.

The politician who became affectionately known as ‘Dizzy’ had first entered Parliament in 1837. He was jeered and shouted down when, as MP for Maidstone, he made his maiden speech. He sat down in defeat, saying, “I sit down now, but the time will come when you will hear me.”

His prophecy came true.

Lord Melbourne, who had condescendingly explained to Disraeli in 1834 why the likes of him could never become Prime Minister, said in 1848 after hearing that Disraeli had become Leader of the Opposition, “By God! The fellow will do it yet.”

He was right. Unfortunately, Melbourne didn’t live long enough to see his words come true.

What might be called The Politician’s Progress had been an uphill battle.

Disraeli spent around three quarters of his political career in opposition, some of it between terms as Prime Minister. He would have needed preternatural amounts of ambition, endurance, patience, persistence and determination, not to mention patronage by prominent people and emotional support, to recover from all the disappointments, setbacks, opposition and criticism, overcome all his handicaps, stay the course and reach his goal.

Was it all worth it?

Only Disraeli himself could tell us whether the game was worth the candle; all we can do is speculate.

I have seen what happens to some people when they concentrate obsessively on getting something, often to the exclusion of everything else.

Some of them attract forces that stop them getting it.

Some end up with what seems like a fifth-rate travesty of what they really wanted. In other cases, everything backfires and they get the exact opposite of what they had hoped for, perhaps losing what they already had.

None of this was for Benjamin Disraeli: he got exactly what he wanted. He became very powerful politically and all the top people knew who he was. He moved in the highest circles in the land. Queen Victoria became his friend.

Rudyard Kipling and the House of Desolation: Part III

Part I describes the abandonment of Rudyard Kipling and his younger sister by their parents. Part II continues the story and ends with his release from what seemed to him like a prison sentence with torture thrown in.

There are still a few questions outstanding and points to be made.

Did Kipling lie about or exaggerate his suffering?

I remember reading somewhere that when Kipling's parents first read the account of his time in Southsea, they tried to get his sister Trix to say that it hadn't been as bad as he said it was. This is what happens in many such cases; people said the same thing to Charlotte Brontë, when actually she had toned down her account of life at the dreadful school.

There is a lot that could be and has been said on this subject. Writers certainly use their imagination to create good stories. For many, what happens in their imagination seems real to them, more real even than what really happened. Some use what happened in real life as just the starting point for building a whole edifice of fiction. Some present occasional incidents as happening frequently and such things as minor criticisms as vicious attacks. This may seem like lying and exaggeration to some people.

However, it is not only a case of what actually happened, but the kind of person it happened to and what the effects were. Some collective-minded, grounded people might be resilient and recover quickly; they might let it all go, put it behind them, forgive and forget and get on with their lives. Others, perhaps more imaginative and sensitive and wide open to subtle energies, may have little insulation or resistance and be permanently affected in the core of their beings. Some people feel everything on an archetypal level; some get bad feelings in overwhelming and concentrated doses, enough for one hundred normal people.

I believe that Rudyard Kipling told the truth about what happened and did not exaggerate the effect it had on him. I also believe that a very different type of boy might have been much less affected and even been treated better. Jane Eyre said much the same thing about herself.

Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel: witches and writers

Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel has inspired two previous articles:

Angel’s Imagination covers the ways in which a very strong, active imagination can be a liability in everyday life.

Angel’s Life and Personality describes Angel and her life mainly in modern-day, this-world terms.

Much of Angel is familiar not only because I have read the biographies of Ouida and Marie Corelli that were the source of some of the material in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel, but also because it reminds me of what I have read, and sometimes written, about other people of interest.

Angel Deverell has many characteristics and events in her life in common with both fictional witches and real-life creative writers.

Angel and some fictional witches

I had read only a few pages of the book when Diana Wynne Jones’s young witch Gwendolen Chant came to mind. They have selfishness, an abrupt manner and single-mindedness in common. Gwendolen wants to rule the world; Angel wants to dominate the world.

There is a scene in Angel where she visits her publisher at his home; she ignores his wife. This reminds me of something I quoted about C. S. Lewis’s witch Jadis in the article about Gwendolen Chant: 

“In Charn she [Jadis] had taken no notice of Polly (till the very end) because Digory was the one she wanted to make use of. Now that she had Uncle Andrew, she took no notice of Digory. I expect most witches are like that. They are not interested in things or people unless they can use them; they are terribly practical." 
From The Magician’s Nephew

Both Gwendolen and Angel are quick to take offence and become furious when thwarted. Both hate to see others in possession of things they want for themselves. Both are outraged when they don’t get the recognition they think they deserve.

Neither girl is interested in academic achievement; they just concentrate on their one obsession to the exclusion of everything else, with Angel exercising her imagination and Gwendolen her magical powers.

Defence Against the Dark Arts Part VII: Charlotte Brontë’s Martin Yorke

Of all the characters in all the Brontë sisters’ novels, Martin Yorke, who appears in Charlotte Brontë’s socio-historical novel Shirley, is my favourite.

Shirley (1849) is set in rural Yorkshire in 1811/12 against a background of industrial unrest, of violent opposition to the introduction of machinery in the local textile industry. 

Charlotte Brontë intended Shirley to be a counterpoint to her first novel, Jane Eyre, which was considered to be melodramatic and unrealistic. Shirley was to be political, significant, true to life and, in her own words, “real, cool and solid, as unromantic as a Monday morning.” 

Similarly, Martin Yorke is far from being a dominant, dangerous, glamorous, smouldering, rugged romantic hero like the demonic duo of Heathcliff and Mr Rochester. Martin is nobody’s fantasy ideal man: he is a funny, greedy, clever, mischievous schoolboy who in my opinion is worth more than both those bad Byronic boyos put together. 

Martin Yorke is only a minor character in Shirley, but the scenes I most enjoy in the book are the ones that he appears in. His antics and sayings remind me not only of Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky, but also of people I have known in real life. Charlotte Brontë modelled him on the brother of a close friend of hers.

Angela Brazil, her brother, and the child prodigy pianist

Reading about J. M. Barrie and his infiltration of the Llewelyn Davies family has reminded me of a chilling little story that I read in The Schoolgirl Ethic: Life and Work of Angela Brazil by Gillian Freeman. 

The victim in the case was a boy called Gilbert Morris; the villains were the schoolgirls’ fiction writer Angela Brazil and her brother Walter.  Angela appears to have been the main driving force, decision maker and giver of orders in this affair; it is likely that Walter just followed her lead and went along with her wishes.

Gilbert Allan Morris was a child prodigy, a professional pianist who made his first public appearance at the age of six. He was born in 1901 and came to the attention of the Brazils when he was 12 years old; Angela was in her 45th year at the time and Walter in his 52nd.

The Brazils took Gilbert up, railroaded him towards a career that they believed would bathe them in reflected glory, raised his hopes then pulled the rug out from under him. They gave with one hand and took with the other; they made plans and arrangements on his behalf without informing him. He became enmeshed in the tentacles of their household and was driven by their pressure to the edge of destruction.

Ouida and the death of her Italian nobleman: curse or coincidence?

Deaths, illnesses and misfortunes that seem to be natural, accidental, unavoidable or just coincidences – after all, stuff happens and such things are part of life – may seem less innocent when other, similar incidents are taken into account and patterns start to emerge. 

Reading about the convenient (for J. M. Barrie) death of the Llewelyn Davies boys’ father has reminded me of another death, which I learned about from biographies of the Victorian novelist Ouida. 

Thinking about the curse that Biddy Iremonger put on the man she hoped to marry when he chose someone else and the Kathleen Raine/Gavin Maxwell affair, not to mention the Brontë family’s misfortunes and the jilted woman in Patrick Brontë’s past, makes me wonder whether Ouida could have been indirectly responsible for the death of an Italian nobleman, someone she was infatuated with and hoped to marry.

The Brontë family misfortunes: curse or coincidence?

I have written elsewhere about the witch Biddy Iremonger, a major character in Wilkins’ Tooth aka Witch’s Business by Diana Wynne Jones. She deliberately puts a curse on the man she had intended to marry when he chooses someone else. This curse hits him and his family very hard: his wife has to go into a home for mentally ill people, and his pale, shabby, neglected children are considered peculiar, old fashioned and strange looking. 

Reading about the effects of her curse makes me feel very uncomfortable: it all reminds me very much of what happened to and in my own family after my step-mother left in a fury because of disappointed hopes.

It also reminds me of another family: that of Charlotte Brontë. 

The strange, old-fashioned appearance of the children, the unsuitable housing, the dreadful school, the suffering, the ill health, the blighted lives, the terrible state that Branwell Brontë was reduced to, the ‘too little too late’ successes and the untimely deaths have all been recorded in family letters and described by many biographers. Some of it is very familiar: once again my own family comes to mind.

The Biddy Iremonger story left me wondering whether there was someone who could have put a curse on the Brontë family. 

I refreshed my memory by re-reading some biographical material, and found a person of interest.

Unseen influences: seasonal depression and the autumn equinox

Depression at this time of year is common. I think that there is more to it than the feeling that autumn is here, winter is on the horizon and another year of our lives will soon be gone forever.

The occultist Dion Fortune said that one is on or off one’s contacts: they all break automatically at the equinoxes. That would explain a lot. I think of it in different terms - I would say that one’s personal firewall drops at this time of year and in the spring - but the symptoms are the same.

Charlotte Brontë had a lifelong sensibility to equinoctial changes. She wrote in a letter to Mrs Gaskell that the effects lasted approximately one month to six weeks around both equinoxes; sometimes she got severe headaches, sometimes she had to endure the feeling of being ground down to the dust with deep dejection of spirits.

Feeling tearful and empty and pessimistic about the future is to be expected. The best way to deal with it is to be prepared and ride it out.  Autumn especially is a time for staying in and reading or watching DVDs: children’s fantasy fiction and films are very suitable for this purpose. This is what I do, and it does help.

We may not feel like going out, but I have found that going on expeditions to see the beautiful autumn leaves helps to improve my mood. Sitting quietly near trees and water raises my spirits too. 

The painful feelings will recede – until another equinox comes round again.

Unseen Influences: evil operates by the rulebook

Evil is said to operate according to certain rules. For example, anyone who has watched vampire films will know that they can’t come in unless you invite them. Dracula lurks outside the window trying to hypnotise someone into opening it for him. I vaguely remember a horror film with a black magician who tricks someone into inviting him in and offering him a drink of water – this gives him some kind of power over the household. 

The message here is that if you know the rules they operate by, you can defend yourself against and perhaps even defeat the dark forces. 

One of these rules seems very strange:  it says that victims must consent in advance to whatever evil is worked upon them. This seems very unlikely: who would agree to this? No one would knowingly consent to being taken away and tortured. No one would agree to be exploited and destroyed. 

The answer is that naïve and gullible people can be tricked and unprotected and vulnerable people who cannot look after their own interests and have no one to do it for them can be taken advantage of. 

Evil people load the dice against their intended victims and cheat them. They manipulate, manoeuvre and confuse people into doing things that they would never consider if they were in their right minds and a healthy state or had someone suitable to protect and advise them. Evil people – or forces - engineer situations that close off all avenues except the one they want their victims to take.

Unseen Influencers: The Women in Black by Madeleine St. John

I remember reading a review of this book when it was first published, which was in 1993. The review was in a free magazine that was given away at many stations; I used to take a copy if it was handed to me, but it never had much content that I thought worth reading. 

I read the book section in one issue, and saw a review of The Women in Black. The book’s outline did not sound very promising - sales assistants in the dress department of a Sydney department store in the 1950s are not what I would normally want to read about - but my radar picked something up. I had learned to respect these inner promptings so I bought the book.

My radar chose well. On one level the book makes a passable light read; on another level it acts as a teaching guide by providing examples of unseen influences of a positive kind. I did not immediately realise this: the insights came to me gradually in the following years.

The most significant character in The Women in Black is called Magda. She has a very beneficial influence on her fellow workers and their lives and families; deliberately or unconsciously she arranges their affairs so that they all get their heart’s desire. She is a wonderful example of someone who is the exact opposite of an energy vampire and a saboteur; she is a giver and a facilitator and everyone around her benefits from knowing her. The ripple effect spreads throughout her sphere of influence.

Be very careful what you dwell on: getting caught in one's own traps

I have had some more ideas about Charlotte Brontë, and I want to pass on my interpretation of certain significant events in her life. I think that some of them can be attributed to what I think of as psychological black magic.

Charlotte Brontë and her siblings were obsessed with the Duke of Wellington, England’s hero of the time. He starred in many of the wonderful, Byronic stories that they created from their imaginations. Both Charlotte and Emily Brontë created dark, romantic heroes; it is likely that they thought of the Duke, whose real name was Arthur Wellesley, as dark and romantic too.

Charlotte eventually married a dark man whose first name was Arthur. Was this just a coincidence, or a case of ‘Be very careful what you wish for ...’? He annoyed her when he hung around and dogged her footsteps through the village, but perhaps he was drawn in and caught in a psychic trap.

Her letters show that she was a great daydreamer: she had an almost lifelong habit of ‘making out’ as it was then called. This helped her to escape from her surroundings and painful memories, and provided some compensation for an unsatisfactory life. 

Some of her imaginings were so intensely vivid that they were almost hallucinations. She went in for two types of daydreaming: one where it was similar to watching TV and she did not know what would happen next, and the other where she mentally choreographed the events and invested a lot of energy in them, living them as if they were real. Some of the results went into her books.

Aryan supremacy: blond hair and blue eyes versus black hair and brown eyes

The idea that people from the Nordic race are superior to those from other races was of enormous importance to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. They propagated that the best kinds of human beings were Northwestern Europeans, white-skinned people with blue eyes and blond hair; this meant that races such as the Negroid, Slavic and Mediterranean and people with black hair and brown eyes were considered to be inferior. 

Similar ideas affected people whose lives are of interest to me. 

When I first read a biography of Louisa May Alcott, I learned that her father was what we would now call an Aryan supremacist. Bronson Alcott was tall, and he had blond hair and blue eyes. He said that such people were superior to dark-haired people with black hair and brown eyes. Louisa resembled her mother, who could have passed for Spanish or Italian.

Bronson Alcott thought that his colouring indicated associations with the light and good, angelic forces; this implied that Louisa and her mother were not only inferior, but also dark, evil and demonic. When Louisa brought home a young man with fair colouring, Bronson said, “Sir, you are a child of light”. Why was this issue so important to him? What effect did his views have on Louisa and her mother?

Is it just a coincidence that Louisa was born in Germantown, Philadelphia? This reminds me of the connection between the Mitford family, Unity Valkyrie and her Aryan supremacist grandfather Bertie Mitford in particular, and Swastika, Ontario.

Alcotts and Brontës and psychic crime

When I first read some biographies of the Brontë and the Alcott families, I immediately noticed some connections and common patterns. Some of these features are also present in and relevant to my own family. There are large numbers of scholarly, well researched and comprehensive books and articles about these families of interest and many analyses of their literary works, but they do not cover the aspects that I am most interested in. 

I always look out for possible examples of psychic crime or psychological black magic when researching the lives and works of people whose experiences and outlook on life have much in common with my own. I also look out for coincidences; for example, both Louisa May Alcott's father Bronson and Charlotte Brontë's father Patrick as young men slightly changed their last names to make them more 'up-market'. 

Louisa May Alcott was born on the same day as her father; she died a few days after he did, which could indicate some kind of psychic stranglehold. 

There was a lot of elevated and progressive ideology in the family, and Louisa bought the idea that the Alcotts were a breed apart. Her father frequently opted out of supporting the family, and Louisa was the sacrificial victim who was made to feel responsible for earning enough to support the lot of them. 

She disapproved when her older sister Anna married a very ordinary man called John Pratt, who died ten years later - shortly before the joint birthday.  

If marrying into the elite Alcott family was not acceptable, neither was escaping. Her youngest sister May travelled around Europe, then wrote to say that she had married and would not be coming back to the US. Her letters described the luxuries that she now had. She died some months later in Paris. 

The deaths of May and Anna's husband seem suspicious to me.