Little Women - Madeleine B. Stern (essay date 1943)
Madeleine B. Stern (essay date 1943)
SOURCE: "The Witch's Cauldron to the Family Hearth: Louisa M. Alcott's Literary Development, 1848-1868," More Books: The Bulletin of the Boston Public Library, Vol. XVIII, No. 8, October, 1943, pp. 363-80.
[In the following article, Stern provides the biographical and literary context behind Alcott's creation of Little Women.]
When Louisa Alcott first began to write in the Hillside attic, she dipped her pen into the romantic, melodramatic ink that has ever been the property of sixteen-year-old authors. Wandering through a stormy world where noblemen unsheathed their daggers and stamped their boots, Louisa and her sister Anna produced a series of "lurid" plays aptly termed by the latter Comic Tragedies.1
"Norna; or, The Witch's Curse" and "The Captive of Castile; or, The Moorish Maiden's Vow" were produced in the barn with the aid of red curtains, ancient shawls, and faded...
[The entire page is 7901 words long]
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