Louisa May Alcott
Anyone who has read Little Women
(1868) knows at least the outline of the life of
Louisa May Alcott, thinly disguised in the character
of Jo March, the second of four daughters born to
a famous transcendentalist. Alcott grew up in a
large, loving family in Concord, Massachusetts.
She was the daughter of Amos Bronson and Abba May
Alcott and the neighbor of many of the leading authors
of America: Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Margaret
Fuller.
As readers of Little Women
know, Alcott began writing in her teens to supplement
her family's income. Her father, a radically idealistic
philosopher, became best known for founding the
commune Fruitlands, a noble-minded but wildly impractical
gathering of important intellectuals. Bronson Alcott's
family was almost always in financial trouble. What
readers did not know until recently is that Louisa
May 
Alcott
actually published many of the Gothic thrillers
that her character Jo March is described as writing.
Using a pseudonym or no name at all, Alcott brought
in a good income in the 1850s and 1860s with stories
of evil villains, willful young heroines, and dashing
but darkly brooding love interests. The novella
A Whisper in the Dark was one of these, published
in the same year (1863) as the first book to bear
Alcott's real name, Hospital Sketches, a
collection of letters that Alcott wrote to her family
while serving as a nurse in Washington, D.C., during
the Civil War.
While Alcott wrote other novels for
adults-the first of which, Moods, was published
in 1864-the genre for which she earned enduring
fame was juvenile fiction, beginning with Little
Women, based on her own family. The saga of
the four March sisters was followed by two sequels,
Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886).
Little Women became a classic and the model
for a kind of "girls' fiction" that continues to
be almost as popular a century later.
Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, Alcott's
stories, reviews, and poems appeared in major periodicals,
and she sometimes spoke out on the issue of women's
suffrage and other liberal social reforms ranging
from women's dress to child labor. For most of her
life, however, she preferred the private world of
her own family, and the values of the home were
always prominently displayed in her officially acknowledged
"domestic" fiction. The Gothic tales and other sensationalist
romances seem to come from a very different place,
and yet they, too, deal with women who often have
conflicting needs for both security and independence.
Works such as A Whisper in the Dark, "Behind
a Mask," "A Marble Woman," and "Taming a Tartar"
involve male/female power struggles, often rife
with easily discernible sexual tension.
In 1877, tired of writing "moral pap
for the young," as she put it, Alcott brought out,
though anonymously, a Faustian thriller titled A
Modern Mephistopheles and appended to it the
thriller A Whisper in the Dark. In her novel
Work (1873), she combined material from her
own life and elements of the Gothic-insanity and
drug addiction, two pervasive themes of her thrillers.
Alcott's death at the age of 52, in 1888, cut short
a career that was still evolving, and the proven
assignment of her authorship of the Gothic tales
in the last two decades has caused biographical
treatments of Alcott to evolve in new directions.
Once known exclusively for the sweetness and light
of her "little women," she has now been reassessed
as a very complex author who understood many of
the shadows in women's lives and depicted them in
very divergent fictional forms. -Lucinda H. MacKethan
