Short Story Criticism | Alcott, Louisa May - Judith Fetterley (essay date 1983)

Judith Fetterley (essay date 1983)

SOURCE: "Impersonating 'Little Women': the Radicalism of Alcott's Behind a Mask," in Women's Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1983, pp. 1-14.

[In the following essay, Fetterley argues that " 'Behind a Mask' is Alcott's most radical text."]

Every student of 19th century American literature owes Madeleine Stern an incalculable debt for having recovered and reprinted the sensational fiction of Louisa May Alcott [in Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott, 1975]. Not only are these texts significant themselves; equally significant is the context they create for thinking about the career of one of our major 19th century women writers. That Alcott's "true style," discovered in the act of writing Little Women, was a mask which increasingly encased her, displacing finally all other personas and all other possibilities of self, is implicit in the text of Little Women. Indeed,...

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