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 brocades. The young actresses tossed roses from balconies, gathered herbs in dark forests, and boldly encountered those accommodating witches who brew magic potions in their cauldrons.² Nobles in green doublets were pursued by peasant girls disguised as pages. Suicide was a convenient panacea.³ Strange grottos and death phials, forged letters and lovers' rings appeared at proper intervals for the delight of the Concord neighbors.

A Shakespearean twist was given to the plot now and then, when Rodolpho hired Hugo to murder Louis,⁴ or when Ione was disguised as her own living statue.⁵ Occasionally, the playwright took a suggestion from Milton, making Ion exclaim, "Thou mayst chain my limbs, thou canst not bind my freeborn soul!"⁶ Even childhood fairy tales were grist for a mill that could grind out any number of counts and lords with appropriate destinies and costumes for each.

For the benefit of her neighbor, young Ellen Emerson, Louisa left the dark domain of melodrama to spin her Flower Fables.⁷ In this sweeter, though no less marvelous fairyland, the only villains are droning bees; glow-worms and dew-elves ply a peaceful way; cakes of flower-dust with cream from the yellow milkweed provide a suitable diet for Concord fairies. Dr. Dewdrop, the Water Cure physician, ministers to the village elves.⁸ The love of the tender Violet conquers the Frost King;⁹ thorny Thistledown is redeemed;¹⁰ Ripple, the Water-Spirit, restores the life of a child with flame from the Fire Spirits,¹¹ and, between the gray marbled covers of notebooks tied with pink ribbons, all is for the best in this best of all impossible worlds. Merely substituting Guido and Madeline for her flower heroes, Louisa Alcott continued in this fairytale vein, receiving five dollars from the Rev. Mr. Thomas F. Norris of the Olive Branch for her first published story, "The Rival Painters. A Tale of Rome."

All was for the best even when the author turned her attention to the more possible, though no less marvelous world that delighted Mr. W. W. Clapp, Jr., editor of the Saturday Evening Gazette. Though Louisa Alcott abandoned her fairies for human beings, she clung to the realm of cloying sweetness and cloudless light in order to increase her worldly stores by six or ten dollars. Having decided to make her fortune, "L. M. A." donned rose-colored glasses and followed the example of the Dickens of Dombey and Son and The Old Curiosity Shop¹² to see the benign influence that little children can exert upon an unyielding grandfather or upon an actress and her perfidious lover.¹³ Alice's magic brings "A New Year's Blessing" into a cheerless home, and Little Genevieve, even in her death, ends a tearful, sentimental tale with the atonement of her erring parents. In a world where "white doves softly cooed" and "a cloudless morning sky arched overhead," Bertha¹⁴ persisted in her loyalty to her music teacher until both character and author found virtue rewarded. Bertha herself won the love of Ernest Lennartson, and the author not only pocketed her ten dollars, but saw great yellow placards posted to announce the tale. In the course of the year 1856, while Louisa Alcott sewed cambric neckties and pillow-cases, she planned her stories and scribbled them down on Sundays, with the result that one tale after another covered the first page of the Gazette. "Mabel's May Day"¹⁵ followed "Bertha" and again all was right with the world, for pride was conquered in the spirit of the wilful heroine. The year's output was concluded with the appearance of "Ruth's Secret,"¹⁶ a tedious narrative in which an industrious young housekeeper takes care of her mother, "a poor lost creature," and for her virtues is blessed with the love of her employer's brother. Even the cloud of the "Magdalen" theme, later to reappear in Work, had a silver lining when the author was reaching a sentimental public that delighted in virtuous heroines who, after tearful trials, earned their well-merited rewards.

Thus far Louisa Alcott's literary effusions gave almost no hint of her future powers. Any talented youngster with an eye for the spotlights might have turned a barn into the haunt of villainous counts and witches; any imaginative girl might have given flowers a language or gazed through rose-colored glasses on a too cheerful world. As one would expect from a youthful writer in the mid-century, it was, for the most part, the unreal, the magical, the supernatural that seized her attention. She wrote not of the real flowers that brightened the winding lanes along the Concord River, but of petals that harbored the folk of elfland; she saw no destinies at work among the neighboring farmers of the quiet village, but only such fates as lured to their doom the darkly unreal shadows of her dreams. If she viewed the world of reality at all, it was through a roseate haze that cloaked each story with a happy ending. To embellish the trappings of her imagination, she needed merely to draw down a copy of Mr. Emerson's Shakespeare or a volume of Dickens and borrow a touch here and there. This eclectic world of marvels has started many a writer along his path, and has brightened the lives of youthful dreamers who dropped their pens even before they dropped their dreams. Up to this point, then, Louisa Alcott differed not a whit from many another such dreamer. She might still have laid down her pen for a needle, if she wished, or locked up her scripts for a new broom.

Louisa Alcott, however, needed money, and she enjoyed the "lurid," melodramatic tales that had turned the Hillside barn into a haunt of witches. The penny dreadfuls would pay as much as two or three dollars a column for a sensation story to lift a reader from the humdrum world where the flow of gossip had ebbed. What was simpler, then, than to turn the dark-browed villains and the unloved wives to work and earn a carpet for the floor or a few new gowns to fit up the girls?

Little more than a year before Louisa was rewriting a fairy tale about the reformation of three little roses¹⁷ for James Redpath, she was scribbling away at top speed on a "lurid" sensation story for Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. And this seems as good a place as any to interpose the thought that it is well nigh impossible to categorize and neatly label certain years of Louisa Alcott's—or indeed of any author's—life as the period in which certain works were exclusively produced. One phase leads gradually, almost imperceptibly, to another in every writer who is approaching maturity, and Louisa Alcott was no exception. There is no set date on which she stopped writing sentimental tales, for example, to start sensation stories at two dollars or so the column. Nor, indeed, is there any marked day on which one can record in red letters that now by the calendar Louisa Alcott stopped writing sensation stories and took up the more realistic domestic tales that were to make her fortune. These threads are all interwoven in more or less complex fashion in an author's life. With the pointer of analysis they may be marked out until the gradually changing warp and woof of the author's loom are lucidly traced.

An astute observer who had read Miss Alcott's first contribution to The Atlantic Monthly might have seen in "Love and Self-Love"¹⁸ many of the elements that were to appear in later sensational stories. The relations between Little Effie and Basil Ventnor, the elderly gentleman who marries the child to provide her with a home, happen to be knit together with a respectable and happy ending, but the themes of incompatibility and attempted suicide were to appear subsequently in pseudonymous works that might bring perhaps better payment, but, if their authorship were recognized, a less savory reputation.

Miss Alcott was ever loath to append her signature to the stories that she wrote for Frank Leslie or James Elliott,¹⁹ but there is little doubt that she enjoyed inventing strange names for her heroes, or providing them with a "savage element," or endowing her heroines with "indignant bosoms" and a spirit of revenge. Though her own critical instinct, never too well developed, rebelled against attaching her name to tales of murder and infidelity, she herself seems to have been fascinated by the details she wove into her sensational plots. Though the stories appeared before the public cloaked either in anonymity or pseudonymity, they did appear with striking regularity, for Miss Alcott enjoyed not merely the writing, but the fifty or one hundred dollar rewards that they brought.

It was, therefore, to a "lady of Massachusetts" that the first prize of one hundred dollars was awarded by Frank Leslie for "Pauline's Passion and Punishment,"²⁰ a story in which Pauline Valary's revenge for Gilbert Redmond's infidelity is interwoven, against a Cuban background, with details of forgery and brutality, capped with a fitting murder. The repartee of the protagonists consists of such remarks as, "Traitor! Shall I kill him?" to which the retort is, "There are fates more terrible than death." Even for Frank Leslie, however, the "moral tendency" must be considered, and so with the murder—"with that moment of impotent horror, remorse, and woe, Pauline's long punishment began,"—but the story itself ended.

James Elliott might not enrich his publications with such "appropriate illustrations" as characterized Frank Leslie's newspaper, but his prices were almost as high. For the firm of Elliott, Thomes, and Talbot, Miss Alcott, under the pseudonym of A. M. Barnard,²¹ created her most incredible thriller. "V. V.: or, Plots and Counterplots"²² is, as the title indicates, a long and involved story that boasts for its heroine Virginie Varens, a danseuse on whose white flesh "two dark letters"—V. V.—have been tattooed above a lover's knot. The yarn contains several disguises or impersonations, a mysterious iron ring, drugged coffee, and four violent deaths, one of which is perpetrated by a villain who falls upon his prey "with the bound of a wounded tiger." In a tale in which a viscount parades as a deaf and dumb Indian servant named Jitomar, in which poison vies with pistols or daggers for "the short road to … revenge," and a murdered man has as his champion a cousin who looks like his twin, Miss Alcott reached the heights—or depths—to which a writer of sensational thrillers could possibly aspire. Suffice it to say she outdid even herself, and the stories that followed "V. V." must appear as anticlimaxes after this flight into the darkly impossible.

"A Marble Woman,"²³ "Behind a Mask," "The Abbot's Ghost" appeared with appropriate subtitles over the signature of the mysterious A. M. Barnard in The Flag of Our Union, but it was Louisa Alcott who collected the fifty or sixty-five dollars in payment for such effusions. The stories written for The Flag differ little in substance from "Pauline's Passion" except perhaps that they are more sensational. "A Marble Woman" has been modeled from the mold of "Love and Self-Love," but to the basic theme of marital incompatibility has been added a dramatis personae including an ex-convict, a hero appropriately styled Bazil Yorke who moves in an aura of sorrow and mystery, and a benighted heroine who eats opium in her spare moments.

It is a credit to the ingenuity of Louisa Alcott that she could with impunity interpolate a sensational story into so respectable a narrative as Work.²⁴ Yet the chapter entitled "Companion" differs not at all from the tales that were flung across the pages of the penny dreadfuls. Insanity, suicide, and thwarted love provide the destinies that pursue such characters as "a mad Carrol" and a lad who frequents the "gambling tables and the hells where souls like his are lost." It is the companion herself, the sympathetic observer, who integrates the chapter with the rest of the book and contrives to make of it a fairly respectable interlude. Miss Alcott had not been long in discovering that the narrative powers she was gaining from scribbling her tales of horror could be combined with other themes and put to good use against other backgrounds.

The sensation stories carried by the penny dreadfuls, with their vitriolic burden of murder and vengeance, might be even more enticing to the public if they were timely. The Civil War was bearing in its wake the great tide of long-oppressed slaves, the flotsam and jetsam of a weakening South, humanity turned fugitive, "contraband." Here was a theme at hand, so malleable that it could be integrated with a sensation plot and a reader would scarcely know when he had escaped from the real world of the Rebellion to the nightmarish domain of melodrama. Even before the Civil War, the South could provide the mulatto, a type becoming more and more familiar to the North, as a character for a tale. The slave owners would brand his hand with mysterious initials that might lead to a weird and sinister plot. The technique of the sensation yarn would suggest a white woman to love the mulatto, and Louisa Alcott could despatch to a prospective publisher "M. L.,"²⁵ a story that was at once antislavery and melodramatic.

Even the ambitious Atlantic would not refuse a tale in which the tempestuous story of a stolen wife and a vengeful plan for murder was carefully worked round such characters as the contraband Bob and his white brother Ned, a wounded Reb. By placing the brothers in the same hospital room and introducing a nurse who could evoke from Bob the sad story of his past, Louisa Alcott created a plot with its roots in abolition and its branches in the realms of blood-and-thunder. Forgetting the latter, no doubt, and concentrating on the virtues of the former, Fields paid fifty dollars for "My Contraband"²⁶ and published it in November, 1863 for his Brahmin public.

The technique was simple, the rewards tempting. Louisa Alcott, recalling possibly the life of Fanny Kemble on her husband's plantation, wove another yarn about an island where the slaves plotted a sanguinary escape for liberty, and Gabriel, the righteous convictions of the North within him, freed them all, wrenched away "the rattle of fetters," baptized them with his own repentant tears. For "An Hour,"²⁷ compounded thus of the abolitionist doctrine and the stormy passions of a Dismal Swamp, Louisa Alcott reached the readers of The Commonwealth and received thirty-five dollars to pay the family debts.

Such stories could be manufactured easily once the pattern had been established. A little variety might be introduced by a slight change of character so that, for example, a Reb would lie next to a Northerner in a hospital ward. Poison could take the place of attempted strangulation. The result would be "The Blue and the Gray"²⁸ instead of "My Contraband." The elements of the story were violence, jealousy, and the will to murder—elements that Louisa Alcott had offered, and was still offering to the editors of the penny dreadfuls, but they were stirred now in a new crucible in which contrabands and mulattoes were heroes and abolition the loud, staunch war-cry. And so Louisa Alcott could serve the Union cause at the same time as she fulfilled her longings for the "lurid" and the sensational. The rewards of such patriotism were two-fold, for the author found she could reach a more respectable public and still place a fifty-dollar bill into the ever gaping family coffers.

The step from stories in which the Civil War theme was combined with a sensational plot to stories from which melodrama was eliminated and simple scenes of the Rebellion delineated in a straight and forthright manner, was one of the most significant in Louisa Alcott's career. She herself perhaps did not realize how important to her future was the laying aside of murder, poison, and jealousy for the depiction of "A Hospital Christmas"²⁹ in which a meagre dinner, the arrival of a holiday box, the news of a child's birth, and the death (from natural causes) of a patient formed the sole elements of a simple, moving narrative. Surely the day on which Louisa Alcott turned thus to a realistic portrayal of an everyday war scene was as significant for her as the day, some four years later, when she sat down to write a girls' story for Thomas Niles. For, having once discarded the wild, tumultuous impossibilities that had peopled her imagination, she was left with little or no plot, and hence with the necessity of expanding her characters. This change from the alloy to the simple, from the "lurid" to the true, carrying with it an emphasis upon character instead of narrative, may—if one can mark any climacteric in a writer's life—be called the turning point of Louisa Alcott's career. She was developing now as the literary world was developing, from the strange to the natural, from the romantic to the realistic. She was paving the way for her future triumphs. She was beginning at last to write stories of a more lasting nature.

It would, no doubt, be convenient if Louisa Alcott had in every instance followed her sensational war stories with the more realistic variety. Dates, however, are not so important as themes. Even if the two types had appeared simultaneously, still the flow of truthful and simple war scenes from her pen would have marked her out for growth and indicated that she was approaching maturity. As it is, a few months did intervene between "My Contraband" and "A Hospital Christmas," months during which Louisa Alcott had been able to pay for May's drawing lessons, had turned assiduously to her Dickens, and had realized, no doubt, that if the public could enjoy his more realistic characterizations it might also be ready for "straight" war stories without benefit of terror, mad passion, and strangulation.

The whining grumbler on the hospital cot, the kind attendant,³⁰ the mental courage of a wounded man awaiting death,³¹ the heroism of two loyal brothers,³² the embittered Massachusetts volunteer too early old³³—these enlisted her attention now, and though "A Hospital Christmas," for example, brought only eighteen dollars from The Commonwealth in contrast to the fifty dollars Louisa Alcott had received for "My Contraband," she gained more than she lost by this turn from the heavy-booted villains of old to the living men who moved about her. Now, if she wished, she could turn the key on her murderous counts and scarred mulattoes, and open the door through which a host of human beings, simple, kindly, and real, would walk as they did in life.

She herself had seen them—the willing nurse with her bandages and lint, her brown soap and sponge, the withered old Irishman on a cot, "overpowered by the honor of having a lady wash him," the tall New Hampshire man with his memories of his fallen mate, the doctor who regarded a dilapidated body as a damaged garment and set to work on it "with the enthusiasm of an accomplished surgical seamstress." At the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, during six long weeks, Louisa Alcott had received enough impressions of human beings to carry her through a lifetime of story writing without the necessity of manufacturing such heroes as were never seen on land or sea. After she returned home, she brushed up her Hospital Sketches,³⁴ taking the details from the letters she had written to Concord, and laid the foundations of an art that would lead her to fame and fortune. Once again she washed feverish faces and smoothed tumbled beds, went the rounds with the doctors, observed the watchman's crooked legs and the tears of a twelve-year-old drummer boy, heard again the direful stories of Fredericksburg, and wrote what she had witnessed. No need now to invent a clash of arms between a darkrobed scoundrel and a noble lord. These men had met on the battlefield and had come to her for succor. War was as much a story of basins and lint, bandages and spoons, as of daggers and shields and gunpowder. All this she had experienced and put on paper. Romance was evicted and in its stead a crowd of living people thronged the page. Louisa Alcott had risen from her dreams and gazed on Truth, the never-failing source for story-tellers.

The source might have risen in a Georgetown hospital, but the author would not be long in discovering that there was a fountainhead of Truth bubbling freely in her home at Concord. Even before the Civil War she had begun to sip of it, evolving in Mark Field³⁵ a realistic character who finds himself after struggle and sacrifice and arrives at success through humanitarianism and humility. Closer home there had been the lives of four sisters compelled to earn their living in the ways best suited to their talents. Without romanticizing too much, Louisa Alcott had been able to sketch in "The Sisters' Trial"³⁶ one year in the careers of the actress Agnes, the writer Nora, the artist Amy, and the governess Ella. Four "little women" had found their way into print long before they had made the author's fortune. When Anna Alcott fell in love with John Pratt, her sister had once again found grist for her mill, seeing in their wholesome romance ample foundation for "A Modern Cinderella."³⁷ A pundit might very well declare that the early date of this significant story, 1860, sets askew any attempt to trace Louisa Alcott's penchant for domestic life as an outgrowth of her work on realistic war scenes. Here again, therefore, let it be stated that the seeds of a writer's interests may be early planted, but they germinate slowly. Needless to say, the bulk of the stories that eventually grew about the Alcott family hearth followed the author's sojourn in Georgetown and finally accorded to her a niche in literary history. The inference is that once the author discovered the saleability of truthful war scenes, she returned to Concord ready to find in the actual figures of her daily life characters for her stories. If realism were an interesting and even profitable technique to apply to the soldiers of the Civil War, surely it could be extended to the Concord neighbors, to her sisters, to herself. Louisa Alcott was back where she had started—in the Hillside barn—but she had begun to search the minds of the youthful actors instead of the black-robed villains, to see in the easily gratified audience as wide a scope for stories as in the ghouls and spirits with which she had tried to enchant them.

In its way, "A Modern Cinderella" is as significant in Louisa Alcott's development as Hospital Sketches, for the story is, even more markedly than "The Sisters' Trial," a skeleton of Little Women. She began, as she confessed, "with Nan for the heroine and John for the hero,"³⁸ but it was impossible to write a story about Anna's romance without introducing both her sister May and herself. The emphasis may be upon the simple, wholehearted love of Anna and her John, but realism demanded that the writer incorporate into the picture a sister who looked picturesque before her easel and another who could lose herself in the delights of Wilhelm Meister but hardly knew a needle from a crowbar. Laura is clearly a preliminary sketch of Amy; Nan needs only a touch here and there to emerge as the capable eldest sister, Meg; and Di, putting her mind through "a course of sprouts … from Sue to Swedenborg," corking her inkstand to plunge "at housework as if it were a five-barred gate," drowning "her idle fancies in her washtub," but determined one day to "make herself one great blot"³⁹ when the divine afflatus chose to descend upon her—surely Di is a Jo March in miniature. The course of Nan's love, despite the proverb, did run smooth, and Louisa Alcott was forced once again to resort to expanding her characters since her "plot" consisted of nothing more involved than a hardware clerk's wooing of her own sister.

In her own way, Louisa Alcott also traveled widely in Concord, finding in her neighbors and her family the groundwork for her tales. Gradually she began to inject into her simple stories of domestic life the humor that played about the corners of her mind. Her experience in acting in the "tavern" comedies⁴⁰ of the day was useful, teaching her to heighten an amusing situation or introduce a bit of homely and humorous dialogue.

As she had seen the wounded men of Georgetown, she had observed the tyro-gymnasts who made up "in starch and studs what they lost in color," the old ladies who "tossed beanbags till their caps were awry,"⁴¹ the masquerades where little Bo-Peep was more interesting than the best-draped villain of the theatre, for her scarlet overdress concealed a being of flesh and blood. "The King of Clubs," worked out of such details as these, has more than a passing interest, for just as Di is Jo March in outline, so August Bopp, the new leader of the class in gymnastics, may well have been an adumbration of Professor Bhaer. Like his successor, Mr. Bopp was a German who had come to America to earn a home for himself and his dependent. His "eminent nose" and blonde beard, his crop of "bonnie brown hair" were to appear later adorning the face of Professor Bhaer, and his gentle strength, his patient courage would shine once again reflected in the life of the better known professor of Plumfield.

The little white village of Concord harbored many such characters, gave material for many such tales. Simple, wholesome Debby, "the young crusader against established absurdities," lived not too far from the Lexington Road, and her affected Aunt Pen, who lost a set of teeth in the water, could not dwell much farther than Boston.⁴² Surely Mrs. Podgers lived and moved and had her being in one of the neighboring farms; surely her teapot graced a tidy table of actuality, and the generosity of Mr. Jerusalem Turner was not untraceable.⁴³ Nelly's little hospital for the spiders and mice of the fields, modeled after that of the United States Sanitary Commission, might well have been planned by one of the Concord children.⁴⁴

If the neighbors suggested so many lively character sketches, Louisa Alcott could find in her own life the material for a long and truthful story. Her travels both in America and Europe were already providing the source for many an amusing sketch.⁴⁵ Finally, in Work, on which she scribbled on and off for several years, she produced the sort of autobiographical novel with which most young authors today begin their careers. With her, however, it was not a beginning but an end, for after many forays into the dark forest of dreams the author had at last returned to that family hearth which was to brighten her days forever. Here she could sketch her own experiences in private theatricals, glorify somewhat her career in domestic service, enlarge upon her trials as a seamstress and a nurse, add to the humdrum lot of a girl who sought a living, a touch of romance, and unearth among the episodes of her life her own character, strong and unflinching before the world. The actual technique embarked upon in Work was to become a mannerism, a stereotype later on. Louisa Alcott would never forget that she had been apprenticed as a writer of short stories. Her full-length novels consist almost always of a series of episodes more or less related, a scrap-bag of stories tied together with the knot of character. From Work to Little Women the bridge is short. Louisa Alcott needed only to reduce the tragedies of mature life to the more sentimental tears of youth; her form of humor, inducing a chuckle at a homely phrase, would stand her in good stead when she wrote for children. If Work had centered upon her own trials and tribulations abroad in the world, she must simply return for a second look at her place in the family circle before taking up her pen to write the story for girls that was to establish her fame.

There is one exception always that proves the rule. Before she undertook Little Women, there was another novel in which Louisa Alcott took a fling at the world of dark, if not "lurid" passion. In the early edition of Moods⁴⁶ Sylvia discovers a solution to her romantic problems only in death, that ever convenient ending for melodramatic heroines who find themselves at odds with convention. Death, sleep-walking, shipwreck—the details of plot remind one of the violent deeds in Comic Tragedies. The author had matured, however, for she took space to interweave among the glaring threads of Sylvia's turbulent loves many a verbose remark on goodness and godliness, books and nature, dreams and visions, marriage and death. These deviations mark her growth. Passion and violence were not so all-sufficing that they could not be interrupted by a little essay on wisdom or a rambling account of intellectual love. Moods, meagre enough in worth, is yet better knit together than most of the episodic novels that were to follow. And within the account of stormy passion and death is imbedded a chapter that recalls the substance of "A Modern Cinderella" and points forward to Little Women. The golden wedding,⁴⁷ where Sylvia, Adam, and Geoffrey find themselves as uninvited guests, is an episode in which the melodramatic is forgotten and the simple delights of country songs and dances, hearty goodwill and honest generosity take the stage. And so the exception does actually prove the rule. The stormy Moods were to be exorcised and in their place would come the songs and dances of Concord, for Louisa Alcott was once again back at the family hearth from which no bearded villains or witches' wands would lure her away for long.

Though Moods sold rapidly at first, it would be but a short time before the author discovered that stories from her own roof-tree would sell far more rapidly. The fantastic would be buried; the realistic resurrected. Healthful romance would displace exotic passion, hygienic clothing would be recommended to the exclusion of flowing draperies and tightfitting boots, mischievous boys and grouchy aunts would take a stage deserted by Spanish nobles, and all such themes would be exalted on the altar of domesticity.⁴⁸ When Thomas Niles asked her for a girls' story,⁴⁹ Louisa Alcott would know to which girls she must turn for her characters, and would be ready to draw from the circle at home enough tales to satisfy her admirers. The fire in the family hearth was to send out a glow that would warm and comfort the author to the end of her days.

Notes

¹Comic Tragedies Written by "Jo" and "Meg" and acted by the "Little Women." (Boston: Roberts, 1893). The plays were written and acted at Hillside principally in 1848.

² Louisa Alcott did not lose her interest in melodramatic plays. Years later, she dramatized her own story, "The Rival Prima Donnas," issued under the pseudonym of Flora Fairfield in the Saturday Evening Gazette (November 11, 1854). The dramatized version, the MS of which is in Orchard House, was never produced.

³ See "The Mysterious Page or Woman's Love," MS in Orchard House. The plot strongly resembles that of Twelfth Night.

⁴ "Norna, or, the Witch's Curse," Comic Tragedies, p. 34 ff. Cf. Macbeth.

⁵ "The Greek Slave," Ibid., pp. 197 and 203 ff. Cf. A Winter's Tale.

⁶ "Ion," Ibid., p. 229.

⁷ Louisa May Alcott, Flower Fables (Boston: George W. Briggs, 1855). It brought the author $32. Though the book was not published until 1855, it was written "for Ellen E. [merson] when I was sixteen." See Ednah D. Cheney, editor, Louisa May Alcott Her Life, Letters, and Journals (Boston: Roberts, 1889), p. 79.

⁸ "The Fairie Dell," MS in Concord Public Library.

⁹ "The Frost-King; or, The Power of Love," Flower Fables.

¹⁰ "Lily-Bell and Thistledown," Ibid.

¹¹ "Ripple, the Water-Spirit," Ibid.

¹² For the more specific influence of Dombey and Son upon Louisa Alcott, see "Little Paul," Saturday Evening Gazette 16 (April 19, 1856), a poem patterned by Louisa upon the life of Paul Dombey. One of the author's favorite rôles in private theatricals was that of Mrs. Jarley, of The Old Curiosity Shop. In her childhood Louisa had organized "The Pickwick Club" with her sisters and produced "The Olive Leaf," scattered copies of which are extant.

¹³ See "A New Year's Blessing," Saturday Evening Gazette 1 (January 5, 1856) and "Little Genevieve," Ibid. 13 (March 29, 1856).

¹⁴ "Bertha," Ibid. 16 and 17 (April 19 and 26, 1856).

¹⁵ "Mabel's May Day," Ibid. 21 (May 24, 1856).

¹⁶ "Ruth's Secret," Ibid. 49 (December 6, 1856).

¹⁷The Rose Family. A Fairy Tale. (Boston: James Redpath, 1864). In a diary entry for December 1863, Louisa Alcott writes: "Rewrote the fairy tales, one of which was published; but … it was late for the holidays, … so the poor 'Rose Family' fared badly." Cheney, p. 155. The story was reprinted in Morning-Glories, and Other Stories.

¹⁸ "Love and Self-Love," The Atlantic Monthly V:XXIX (March, 1860). The story appeared anonymously, but is identified by a letter from A. B. Alcott to Sister Betsey, Concord, June 5, 1860, MS in Family Letters V, Concord Public Library. Reference to this letter is made through the courtesy of Mr. F. W. Pratt of Concord, Mass.

¹⁹ There are some exceptions to this statement. "Enigmas" appeared under the signature of Miss L. M. Alcott in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper XVIII: 450 and 451 (May 14 and May 21, 1864). This story is a mildly exciting mystery about Italian refugees who are spied upon by a gentleman who finally falls in love with a woman disguised as a man. The element of mystery supersedes that of sensationalism here, and the absence of those incredible details that accompanied Miss Alcott's thrillers probably induced her to allow the story to appear under her own name.

"A Whisper in the Dark" was appended to a later edition of A Modern Mephistopheles (Boston: Roberts, 1889), but though Miss Alcott considered it "rather a lurid tale," (Cheney, p. 379) and though it does contain the theme of a marriage offer from an elderly man to a young girl, with a plot complicated by the clauses of a will, this story bears almost no comparison, in respect to shocking details, with the blood-and-thunder narratives issued anonymously or pseudonymously.

The same is true of "The Baron's Gloves," which Miss Alcott allowed to be reprinted in Proverb Stories (Boston: Roberts, 1882). The statement in the preface explains her point of view: "As many girls have asked to see what sort of tales Jo March wrote at the beginning of her career, I have added 'The Baron's Gloves,' as a sample of the romantic rubbish which paid so well once upon a time. If it shows them what not to write it will not have been rescued from oblivion in vain." It must be noted, however, that "The Baron's Gloves" centers about the romantic pursuit of a man with the initials S.P., and contains none of the horrifying themes in the tales that Miss Alcott declined to rescue "from oblivion." Incidentally, the background is that of a Europe that Louisa had come to know in her travels, rather than that of an exotic, untraveled Spain or Cuba. The story contains many actual details of Miss Alcott's life in Europe in 1865, even to the extent of the encounter with Ladislas Wisinewski—here appearing as Sidney Power, wounded in the Polish war, and afflicted with an interesting cough. Incredibly enough, the outlines of Amy's Laurie may be found in the hero of "The Baron's Gloves."

"The Skeleton in the Closet" (In Perley Parker, The Foundling. Boston: Elliott, Thomes and Talbot, [1867]) is another mildly exciting tale to which Louisa Alcott signed her name. Mme. Mathilde Arnheim, the heroine, has an idiot husband to whom the title refers, and to whom she is "bound by a tie which death alone can sever." Death finally does sever the tie and leaves the lady free, after one other trial by which the plot is complicated, to marry her beloved Gustave. Madame's steel bracelet, the symbol of her union with the imbecile, is removed, and in its place appears "a slender chain of gold." This not too shocking thriller is devoid of murder and brutality, the usual appendages of sensational stories.

The Mysterious Key, and What It Opened (Boston: Elliott, Thomes and Talbot, [1867]), published under the signature of L. M. Alcott, is a mystery of the type of "Enigmas" in which an Italianate boy spies on an English home, unlocks a casket with a silver key, and uncovers the secret of a hidden marriage. "Lurid" details have been laid aside for a stratagem which consists of nothing more exciting than a few false keys and feigned sleepwalking. The ending is anti-climactic, and the basis of the mystery sufficiently mild to allow Louisa Alcott to claim authorship. Here, too, the motif of the elderly gentleman married to a young wife reappears.

The conclusion does not seem unwarranted that Louisa Alcott did not allow the identity of the author of her most shocking thrillers to be known. All the stories whose authorship she claimed may be "romantic rubbish" indeed, but they appeared without benefit of the sensational details that accompanied her most daring flights for the penny dreadfuls. The latter, it must be repeated, remained either anonymous or pseudonymous.

²⁰ "Pauline's Passion and Punishment," Frank Leslic's Illustrated Newspaper XV: 379 and 380 (January 3 and January 10, 1863). The story appeared anonymously, but is identified by a letter from the editor of Leslie's paper, E. G. Squier, to Miss Alcott, c. December 18, 1862, MS in the Orchard House.

²¹ For the discovery and identification of Louisa Alcott's pseudonymous works, see Leona Rostenberg, "Some Anonymous and Pseudonymous Thrillers of Louisa M. Alcott," The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 37:2 (June, 1943).

²² "V. V.: or, Plots and Counterplots" appeared originally in The Flag of Our Union XX: 5, 6, 7, 8 (February 4, 11, 18, 25, 1865), and was reprinted under the pseudonym of A. M. Barnard as a ten-cent novelette by Thomes and Talbot (Boston, [1865]).

²³ "A Marble Woman: or, The Mysterious Model," The Flag of Our Union XX: 20, 21, 22, 23 (May 20, 27, June 3, 10, 1865). The other stories cannot be read now for, as Miss Rostenberg points out, the issues in which they appeared have been stored away for the duration of the War by the Library of Congress.

²⁴Work. A Story of Experience (Boston: Roberts, 1873). The story was begun as "Success" in 1862. See Cheney, p. 129.

²⁵ "M.L.," though written before February, 1860 (see Cheney, p. 120) was not published until 1863. It appeared originally in The Commonwealth I: 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 (January 24, 31, February 7, 14, 22, 1863). It was reprinted in The Journal of Negro History XIV: 4 (October, 1929).

²⁶ "My Contraband; or, The Brothers," first appearing as "The Brothers" in The Atlantic Monthly XII:LXXIII (November, 1863) was written in August, 1863 and brought $50. It was reprinted in Hospital Sketches and Camp and Fireside Stories (Boston: Roberts, 1869).

²⁷ "An Hour" was apparently rejected by Our Young Folks and sent in November, 1864 to The Commonwealth, where it was published, III: 13 and 14 (November 26 and December 3, 1864). Louisa received $35 for it. The story was reprinted in Camp and Fireside Stories.

²⁸ "The Blue and the Gray, A Hospital Sketch," first appeared in Putnam's Magazine I: VI (June, 1868) and was reprinted in Camp and Fireside Stories.

²⁹ "A Hospital Christmas" first appeared in The Commonwealth II: 19 and 20 (January 8 and 15, 1864). It brought $18, and was reprinted in Camp and Fireside Stories.

³⁰ The characters appear in "A Hospital Christmas."

³¹ See "The Hospital Lamp," The Daily Morning Drum-Beat III and IV (February 24 and 25, 1864). The story reappears as an episode in "The Romance of a Summer Day."

³² See "Love and Loyalty," begun in April, 1864 and first published in The United States Service Magazine II: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, (July, August, September, November, December, 1864). Charles B. Richardson promised $100 for the story. It was reprinted in Camp and Fireside Stories.

³³ See "On Picket Duty," On Picket Duty, and Other Tales (Boston: James Redpath, 1864).

³⁴Hospital Sketches (Boston: James Redpath, 1863). The Sketches appeared originally in The Commonwealth I: 38, 39, 41, 43 (May 22, May 29, June 12, June 26, 1863). "Night Scene in a Hospital," taken from the Sketches, was published in The Daily Morning Drum-Beat Extra Number (March 11, 1864). Louisa Alcott's interest in the soldiers was not confined to her attendance upon them in the hospital. See L.M.A., "Colored Soldiers' Letters," The Commonwealth II:44 (July 1, 1864).

³⁵ "Mark Field's Mistake" and its sequel, "Mark Field's Success," were published in the Saturday Evening Gazette XLV: 11 and 16 (March 12 and April 16, 1859).

³⁶ "The Sisters' Trial" appeared in the Saturday Evening Gazette 4 (January 26, 1856).

³⁷ "A Modern Cinderella: or, The Little Old Shoe" written in March, 1860, first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly VI:XXXVI (October, 1860), bringing $75. It was reprinted in Camp and Fireside Stories.

³⁸ Cheney, p. 120.

³⁹ The quotations are from "A Modern Cinderella," Camp and Fireside Stories, pp. 274, 286, 287, and 262 respectively.

⁴⁰ Many of the plays in which Louisa Alcott acted were set in taverns. "The Crooked Billet," a roadside inn, is the scene of The Jacobite by J. R. Planché, for example, in which Louisa Alcott played Widow Pottle in July, 1855, and on September 11, 1855.

⁴¹ The quotations are from "The King of Clubs," Camp and Fireside Stories, pp. 99-100. "The King of Clubs and the Queen of Hearts" was written in April, 1862 and brought $30 when it was first published in The Monitor (Concord, Mass.) I:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (April 19, April 26, May 3, May 10, May 17, May 24, and June 7, 1862). It was reprinted in On Picket Duty. It is interesting to note that the character of August Bopp was, in all probability, suggested by a Concord boy, Seymour Severance. See Louisa Alcott to Alfred Whitman, Concord, January 25, 1860, MS in Houghton Library.

⁴² See "Debby's Début," The Atlantic Monthly XII:LXX (August, 1863). The story is reminiscent of "The Lady and the Woman," Saturday Evening Gazette 40 (October 4, 1856) in which strong-minded Kate Loring fights against fashionable absurdities and is rewarded with the love of Mr. Windsor.

⁴³ See "Mrs. Podgers' Teapot, A Christmas Story" written in November, 1864, first published in the Saturday Evening Gazette L:52 (December 24, 1864) and reprinted in Camp and Fireside Stories.

⁴⁴ See "Nelly's Hospital," Our Young Folks I:IV (April, 1865), reprinted in Washington by the United States Sanitary Commission, 1868.

⁴⁵ See "Letters from the Mountains," The Commonwealth I:47, 48, 49, 51 (July 24, July 31, August 7, August 21, 1863), "Up the Rhine," The Independent XIX:972 (July 18, 1867), and "Life in a Pension," The Independent XIX:988 (November 7, 1867).

⁴⁶Moods was first published in Boston by Loring, 1865. The story was revised, with the ending changed, and published in Boston by Roberts in 1882. In the preface to the later edition the author comments on her changes resulting in "a wiser if less romantic fate" for the heroine than in the former edition.

⁴⁷ See also "A Golden Wedding: and What Came of It," The Commonwealth II:35 and 36 (April 29 and May 6, 1864).

⁴⁸ See Kitty's Class Day. (Boston: Loring, 1868); Aunt Kipp (Boston: Loring, 1868); and Psyche's Art (Boston: Loring, 1868).

⁴⁹Little Women was not the first manuscript submitted in response to a request. Louisa Alcott had had experience in writing to order. See, for example, "Happy Women," The New York Ledger XXIV:7 (April 11, 1868). She had also had experience in writing for specific occasions. See, for example, the Christmas story, "What the Bells Saw and Said," Saturday Evening Gazette LIII: 51 (December 21, 1867), reprinted in Proverb Stories.