Alcott, Louisa May | Madeleine Stern (essay date 1995)
Madeleine Stern (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: "Introduction," in Louisa May Alcott Unmasked, edited by Madeleine Stern, Northeastern University Press, 1995, pp. xi-xxix.
[In the following excerpt, Stern discusses characterizations, themes, and literary sources for Alcotts sensation stories.]
What was the nature of the stories written in secret by the author of Flower Fables, Hospital Sketches, and The Rose Family, and published anonymously or pseudonymously in the weeklies of the 1860s? Their backgrounds and some of their characters reflect perhaps more of her imagining than of her observation. Alcott reveled in foreign backgrounds and set many of her narratives overseas. A haunted English abbey boasted, besides the "Abbot's Ghost" of the title, a thick-walled gallery and an arched stone roof, armored figures and screaming peacocks. An altogether different backdrop was painted for "Pauline's Passion and Punishment," the sequence of...
[The entire page is 5705 words long]
Navigate
