SOURCE: "Introduction," in Louisa May Alcott Unmasked, edited by Madeleine Stern, Northeastern University Press, 1995, pp. xi-xxix.

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 passion and punishment being enacted in an exotic paradise, a green wilderness with tamarind and almond trees, a Cuban cafetal with a tropical orchard of plantain and palm, not to mention a mansion surrounded by brilliant shrubs and flowers.

Europe provided the author with a multitude of romantic backgrounds—with few of which she was familiar. She had driven along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice in 1865 when she served as companion to a young invalid, Anna Weld. A few years later, when Alcott sought a background for her story "Countess Varazoff," she summoned up that very promenade at the height of the season. For the most part, however, Alcott's settings stemmed from fancy bolstered by her readings and were often the result of purely imaginary voyages. Sybil Varna, the tamer of "Taming a Tartar," is taken to an estate in Volnoi, Russia. Details of Hindu background are scattered through several Alcott thrillers, "La Belle Bayadere" and especially "The Fate of the Forrests," a narrative based upon the horror of Hindu Thuggism. To the author and doubtless to her readers, exotic appurtenances and surroundings heightened the dramatic lives of fervid characters.

Those characters were drawn by a writer who could turn her imaginings and the episodes of her life into fiction. Her portrait of Kate Snow, the nurse-narrator in "A Nurse's Story," is in part a self-portrait, for Kate was "quick at reading faces" and "liked to study character, and fancied that [she] had some skill in understanding both faces and the natures of which they are the index." Alcott read faces, studied characters, understood natures, and portrayed them fairly realistically for readers of Hospital Sketches and Little Women, romantically for devourers of her thrillers. No matter how wild the plots she concocted, Alcott was more deeply concerned and more meticulous with character depiction, and her narratives were often carefully woven about problems of identity. She used broad brushstrokes to paint her dramatis personae, endowing an alluring heroine with magnificent Southern eyes, olive cheeks, and lips like pomegranate flowers, but such a heroine was usually more than a mere beauty. The luxuriant siren might combine a Spanish with a Saxon background; in her complex nature passion was coupled with conviction.

And so the gallery of femmes fatales who people so many Alcott shockers is studded with portraits of women strongwilled and imperious, experienced in sorrow, proud—women like Pauline of "Pauline's Passion and Punishment," the manipulating V.V., the three-dimensional Jean Muir of "Behind a Mask," the Sybil Varna of "Taming a Tartar."

Alcott experimented with a variety of male characters, often enigmatic, mysterious, intriguing. Paul, alias Paolo of "The Mysterious Key," shows traces of the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini as well as of the author's young friends Alf Whitman and Ladislas Wisniewski, upon whom she modeled Laurie of Little Women. His background as a hero in the Italian Revolution enriches his persona as a charming young Italianate Englishman. Like Paul, Felix Stahl of "The Fate of the Forrests" is a man of mystery, "beardless, thin lipped, sharply featured," with "eyes of the intensest black" and face "colorless as ivory." Stahl is a seeming magician who foretells dire events and swiftly engages the sometimes perplexed attention of the reader. Many of Alcott's male characters are, in varying degree, foils to her strong-minded women. The black-bearded artist Max Erdmann of "A Pair of Eyes," who paints his wife as Lady Macbeth, is mesmerized and subdued by her in the end. Often the most macho male is pinpointed for a woman's mastery, notably in the case of the hero of "Taming a Tartar." Prince Alexis, "swarthy, black-eyed, scarlet-lipped," a man of "fearful temper" and impetuous moods, a tyrant born and bred, becomes a woman's willing victim, humbled, subdued, and conquered.

In the hands of such characters the inventive author places fascinating props that propel the action onward and are integral to plots of varying complexity. A seal ring, a satin slipper, a bit of lace, a poisoned fan are deftly introduced to spin a narrative of murder or revenge, to heighten and sustain suspense. Yet increasingly, as she gained experience and professionalism, Alcott painted and endowed with flesh and blood characters who dominated even her most intricate and outlandish plots.

In her narratives Alcott used a succession of themes that are frequently far more beguiling than any of her plots. For her immediate readership they provided titillation, excitement, escape. For a twentieth-century public those themes have often raised eyebrows. Some may be traced to the author's own experience, some to her reading, still others to her inner convictions. An analysis of the themes in this omnibus of thrillers helps to unmask the complex Alcott identity.

An abiding passion throughout Alcott's life was the theater. From the age of ten, when she assumed the post of author-director of the "Louy Alcott troupe," until late in life, when she dramatized Michael Strogoff and attended a performance of Emma Nevada, Alcott was stagestruck. In her teens she co-authored with her older sister Anna a succession of wild melodramas whose props would reappear in her blood-and-thunder stories. In drawing-room charades, in the Amateur Dramatic Company of Walpole and the Concord Dramatic Union, in charitable performances, she was an enthusiastic participant. In 1860 her farce, Nat Bachelor's Pleasure Trip, was staged in Boston's Howard Athenaeum. Her rendition of the Dickensian Mrs. Jarley of the famous Waxworks was memorable. She was familiar, as her character V.V. was, with disguises, "artifices of costume, cosmetics, and consummate acting."

This familiarity is reflected in the Alcott thrillers. Jean Muir, wielder of a woman's power, is indeed a consummate actress who hides her true character "behind a mask." The stage and the nature of the actor recur as themes in several of the sensation stories. "A Double Tragedy" is, as its subtitle indicates, "An Actor's Story." Macbeth pervades much of "A Pair of Eyes," a tale that opens in the theater during a performance of the tragedy. The Tempest is interwoven in "Ariel. A Legend of the Light-house," which is set on an enchanted island. As for "Taming a Tartar," that narrative is an overt reversal of The Taming of the Shrew. The plays that Alcott attended, the performances she herself gave, her absorption in Shakespeare, her addiction to private theatricals—all are threaded through the narratives she dispatched to popular story papers.

Another of Alcott's favorite themes also had its source in her own life. Vicariously, through the career of her younger sister May, the artist's life occupied the writer almost as much as the performer's. May, an enthusiastic art student, studied at the Boston School of Design, taught drawing in Syracuse, New York, and took anatomical drawing lessons under the distinguished Dr. William Rimmer. Later in life she would go abroad to continue her art studies, and after her premature death at age thirty-nine, her box of paintings would be sent home to Concord. Sister Louisa was deeply involved in May's pursuit of art and often helped to subsidize it. The results of that involvement punctuate several of the Alcott sensation stories.

The serial "Ariel. A Legend of the Lighthouse" reflects the author's preoccupation not only with the stage but with the art world. In it the poet-artist Philip Southesk sketches the nymph Ariel, producing a "likeness perfect with a happy stroke or two." The brushwork is far more detailed in "A Pair of Eyes." There Max Erdmann, artist incarnate, is utterly consumed by his devotion to a muse that was to him "wife, child, friend, food and fire." His portrait of Lady Macbeth, for which his wife serves as model, is described in minute detail—"the ghostly figure with wan face framed in hair, that streamed shadowy and long against white draperies," and it is that portrait that sets the sinister tone of the tale.

In an intriguing variation of the art motif, Alcott borrows a hint from the technique of the sculptor and shapes a Pygmalion-Galatea relationship between her characters. In "The Freak of a Genius" the relationship develops between two men as the forty-year-old Kent seeks to mold the nature of a young Apollo, the twenty-year-old St. George. The most overt example of Alcott's use of the Pygmalion-Galatea theme appears in "A Marble Woman: or, The Mysterious Model." In that shocker, the genius sculptor Bazil Yorke confuses flesh and blood with clay and attempts to metamorphose young Cecilia (called Cecil) into a marble goddess in an experiment that almost succeeds.

Alcott saw the Pygmalion-Galatea relationship as a form of mind control—a theme to which she would often return. The manifest vagaries of the human mind continued to fascinate her, and she used such knowledge of them as she had to intensify and explain her characters and enrich her plots. Insanity was especially interesting to her, and she seems to have had some actual experience with it.

Alcott's first biographer, Ednah Dow Cheney, states without elucidation or elaboration that during the summer of 1860 Alcott took care of a young friend suffering from a temporary fit of insanity. Such an experience must indeed have been both devastating and illuminating for an impressionable writer beginning her career. A few years later, during a trip abroad, Alcott served as companion to the young invalid Anna Weld, who from all indications suffered from some nervous disorder. She described her charge as "a very hard case to manage & needs the patience & wisdom of an angel." In addition to these personal experiences, Alcott, as confidante of her sisters May and Anna, certainly heard reports of their work at Dr. Hervey B. Wilbur's Asylum in Syracuse, New York. Insanity was no stranger to Louisa Alcott.

When she came to use the subject as a theme in her thrillers, she did so with variations. Attempts to manipulate insanity in an elaborate plot to madden a heroine and the curse of inherited insanity became threads for the fabric of her stories. "A Whisper in the Dark," published in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in 1863, describes an attempt on the part of a guardian to unhinge the mind of his eighteen-year-old ward, Sybil, so that her inheritance will be denied her. The horrors he manufactures provide fodder for a complex plot and introduce the reader to the disorders of the mind.

In "The Skeleton in the Closet," Reinhold Arnheim, suffering from a weakened brain, embodies the wreck of manhood. He is the victim of a "fearful malady," "a hereditary curse," and he affords the reader a case history in mental derangement. Hereditary madness is also pursued in "A Nurse's Story," wherein Elinor Carruth's "frantic paroxysms" are its manifestations. Like her creator, Elinor's nurse, Kate Snow, has had "some experience in the care of the insane" and knows "the power of a sane eye over a mad one." The "surest way of calming maniacs," she believes, is "to appear unconscious of their madness." The popular "solitude" treatment for insanity she shuns. The Carruth mother's insistence upon hiding the family curse from the world moves a heavy plot forward.

Elinor Carruth's frenzy yields only to powerful opiates. The evil guardian of "A Whisper in the Dark" uses the device of drugged sleep to aid him in his malevolent purpose. Drug addiction and experimentation are pivotal in many Alcott sensation stories and, like insanity, the nature of drugs was not unfamiliar to the writer.

The short period of Alcott's service as a Civil War nurse from December 1862 to January 1863 had long-term effects. During those few weeks at the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, D.C., when she was "doing painful duties all day long, . . . surrounded by 3 or 4 hundred men in all stages of suffering, disease & death," she was stricken with a severe illness labeled typhoid-pneumonia and was forced to return home. There is little doubt that at some stage of her illness she was administered the derivative of the opium poppy known as tincture of opium or laudanum. Laudanum was part of the nineteenth-century physician's pharmacopoeia. As for Cannabis sativa, the source of hashish and marijuana, that was one of the oldest drugs known, and hashish was available at six cents a stick.

Louisa Alcott was familiar with such "comfits" and joygivers.

In "A Marble Woman," published in the Flag of Our Union in 1865, the ruthless sculptor Bazil Yorke gives young Cecil a bitter, dark liquid to induce a deep and dreamless sleep. Following their unconsummated marriage, Cecil develops strange symptoms and appears "dreamy, yet intense, blissfully calm, yet full of a mysterious brightness." Unnatural excitement is followed by "unconquerable drowsiness," until "restless sleep" turns into "death-like immobility." A physician recognizes that Cecil has taken an overdose of laudanum and has survived the overdose because she is addicted. As he puts it to Yorke: "Your wife eats opium, I suspect." The role of the "dangerous comforter" is focal to the plot of "A Marble Woman."

The opium habit is skillfully applied in that narrative. But in a shorter and later sensation story, hashish experimentation is the plot. "Perilous Play," carried in 1869 in Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner, is a dramatic shocker. The narrative is simple enough. To while away a long afternoon for the sensuous heroine, Rose St. Just, and the rest of the party, Dr. Meredith produces a "little box of tortoiseshell and gold" containing the "Indian stuff which brings one fantastic visions." The doctor describes his own experiments with hashish and its effects: "A heavenly dreaminess comes over one, in which they move as if on air." When the trance comes on, the "pulse will rise, heart beat quickly, eyes darken and dilate, and an uplifted sensation will pervade you generally. Then these symptoms change, and the bliss begins." As for an overdose, that may result in "phantoms, frenzies, and a touch of nightmare, which seems to last a thousand years." Rose St. Just and her lover, Mark Done, experiment with the "taste of Elysium" and are caught up simultaneously in a storm at sea and the storm produced by Cannabis sativa. "Every nerve was overstrained, every pulse beating like a triphammer, and everything . . . was intensified and exaggerated with awful power. The thundershower seemed a wild hurricane." The author ingeniously gives the hashish experiment a happy ending with the protagonists exclaiming, "Heaven bless hashish, if its dreams end like this!" Alcott earned $75 for her four-part serial "A Marble Woman," and $25 for the short shocker "Perilous Play," welcome compensation for turning her knowledge of opiates into a narrative device.

One result of drug experimentation was described sometimes as "cerebral excitation." But it was not drugs alone that induced such an effect. There were many means of influencing or controlling the human mind, and Louisa Alcott was interested in all of them. As late as 1875, on a visit to New York, she would submit to a phrenological examination in the Cabinet of Fowler and Wells, and toward the end of her life she would try a treatment known as mind cure to rid herself of various ills. She described her sensations after that treatment in a report to the Woman's Journal: "No effect was felt except sleepiness for the first few times; then mesmeric sensations occasionally came, sunshine in the head, a sense of walking on the air, and slight trances, when it was impossible to stir for a few moments." Alcott seems to have been as familiar with "mesmeric sensations" as with the effects of hashish.

The eighteenth-century Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer had developed a theory of hypnotism based upon the activity of a magnetic force or fluid that permeated the universe and was called animal magnetism. When his theory reached Boston it roused a furor, and a stream of practitioners—clairvoyants, etherologists, psychometrists, and mesmerists—enjoyed a profitable practice. Alcott's venerated Concord neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of mesmerism that it "broke into the inmost shrines, attempted the explanation of miracle and prophecy. .. . It was human, it was genial, it affirmed unity and connection between remote points." As for Hawthorne, he sensed that the penetrating intrusions of mesmerism might violate a human soul. To Alcott such views were productive when she adapted the theme of mesmerism to sensational narrative.

In one thriller especially she displayed her knowledge of mesmerism and her awareness that it could become an exercise in power. "A Pair of Eyes," published in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in 1863, is aptly titled, for the eyes—"two dark wells"—are the eyes of the mesmerist-heroine Agatha Eure. Her first exercise in mesmerism is practiced upon the artist Max Erdmann, and it is practiced without his knowledge or acquiescence. Thus it is indeed the violation of a human soul. The writer describes its effects almost clinically, as she would describe her own reactions to mind cure. Max Erdmann reports: "My eyelids began to be weighed down by a delicious drowsiness. . . . Everything grew misty. . . . A sensation of wonderful airiness came over me, and I felt as if I could float away like a thistledown. Presently every sense seemed to fall asleep. .. . I drifted away into a sea of blissful repose."

As for the practitioner Agatha Eure, who continues to mesmerize Max Erdmann, she is caught by Alcott in a striking pose: "she sat erect and motionless as an inanimate figure of intense thought; her eyes were fixed, face colorless, with an expression of iron determination, as if every energy of mind and body were wrought up to the achievement of a single purpose." Soon that "single purpose" becomes clear to the reader. Agatha practices mesmerism upon her artist-husband, Max Erdmann, solely to conquer his will. If this results in the exploitation of a human soul, Hawthorne's unpardonable sin, so be it. The heroine must control Max Erdmann's mind to achieve the power she seeks—power of persona, power of gender.

Whether the exercise in mind control is practiced by a Pygmalion, as in "A Marble Woman," or by a mesmerist, as in "A Pair of Eyes," its goal is manifest: dominance in the sexual struggle for power. This struggle is a theme that runs consistently through most of the Alcott thrillers. Her fascination with the theme stems from both autobiographical and societal roots. Alcott's seven-week humiliation in Dedham, Massachusetts, when at age nineteen she served as a domestic for the Hon. James Richardson, was a contributory episode. She found Richardson's maudlin attentions intolerable, and her family found her $4 reward for service outrageous. The love-hate relationship between the young Louisa and her philosopher father Bronson Alcott may also have played a part in drawing her to the power struggle theme. In addition to her experiences, there was her own character. In her very genes resided the obligation to rebel against injustice: both her mother and her father were strong supporters of the anti-slavery movement and of the rights of women. The climate of the mid-nineteenth century gave her cause enough for revolt against the sexual inequality that flourished in the economic, political, and legal worlds as well as in marriage and domestic life.

In her thrillers Alcott's feminism took the form of a power struggle between the sexes. The conflict between master and slave, she found, could be applied productively and lucratively to sensation fiction. Upon some occasions she assigned the role of master to her male protagonist, but in her most effective stories the hero is reduced to submission by a woman's power. In her variations on the theme, she created a succession of colorful heroines who run the gamut from the thwarted and abused young woman to the triumphant female conqueror.

A child bride could be the perfect target for a Bazil Yorke, the Pygmalion sculptor of "A Marble Woman." "Be what I would have you," he enjoins her, seeking for power to mold her to his desires. Yorke, however, does not succeed in transforming young Cecil into a snow image; instead, she takes to drugs, and there is no victory either for would-be master or for slave.

Even Alcott's extensive gallery of manipulating women contains portraits of ultimate failures in the power struggle. Pauline Valary of the prize story, "Pauline's Passion and Punishment," is a femme fatale with a mysterious past and an electrifying present. Having lost both love and fortune, she is left with fury and a desire for revenge, ingredients stirred in a suspenseful plot. But in that "tournament so often held between man and woman," Pauline resorts to machinations that fail in the end. The result is the same in a later story, "Mrs. Vane's Charade." Celeste Vane engages in an unsuccessful power struggle with her former lover, Douglas, pretending submission when she feels none. "Ah, the art of the woman!" Alcott comments, "appealing to the love of power sure to be strong in such a man, . . . offering him a tender bond-slave in the woman who had ruled him like a queen." In their seesaw conflict Douglas is not fooled, and another manipulating heroine is unable to assert mastery.

In three major thrillers of the mid-1860s, however, Alcott portrayed feminist heroines who achieve complete mastery in the sexual power struggle. Nurse Kate Snow, the narrator of "A Nurse's Story," engages in a sparring match with the "fiery," masterful Robert Steele, who condescendingly informs her: "I'm not used to giving up my own will, but I admire your courage so much, that I am tempted to yield for the sake of enjoying a novel experience." To Steele's announcement "I am master in this house," independent, clear-eyed Kate Snow retorts, "Not my master," and when he declares, "I never permit myself to be conquered," she neatly replies, "except by a woman."

The ultimate in woman's mastery is reached in "Taming a Tartar," and in that serial the power struggle is most explicit. It is engaged in between a Tartar tyrant and an English teacher; the entire plot revolves about their contest; in the end there is no doubt about who is victorious. As Sybil Varna puts it, "Once conquer his will, . . . and I had gained a power possessed by no other person." Her desire to see her "haughty lover thoroughly subdued" is achieved; the Tartar eventually humbles himself; the heroine promises "to love, honor, and—Not obey" him. Having conquered her tyrannical Tartar, Sybil Varna achieves the ultimate in the power struggle between the sexes.

While less explicit than "Taming a Tartar,""Behind a Mask: or, A Woman's Power" is perhaps even more interesting since it offers a subtler approach to a similar theme. Like Pauline Valary, Jean Muir is bent upon revenge; like Celeste Vane, she resorts to subterfuges; and like Kate Snow and Sybil Varna, there is no mistaking her feminism. She is also an actress who assumes the role of a young governess at an ancestral English estate, and she proceeds to conquer every male member of the household until, in the end, she wins the head of the house of Coventry, a title, and the estate.

The spinster from Concord, Massachusetts, who would captivate the reading world with her domestic novel Little Women, delved into her impressions and her observations to find her themes. When she wrote her melodramatic serials they served her well: the theater and the art world, inherited insanity and drug addiction, mesmerism and mind control, feminist fury and the power struggle between the sexes. In 1869, after the success of Little Women was assured, she all but abandoned the secret writing of sensational narratives. Once or twice, however, she returned to the genre, no longer because she needed the money but because she found in that so-called subliterature a psychological outlet and a professional satisfaction.

There is no doubt that when, in 1877, tired of providing "moral pap for the young," she wrote her anonymous and experimental novel, A Modern Mephistopheles, for Roberts Brothers' No Name Series, she thought back to a serial she had contributed to Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper some ten years before. In both stories a Faustian pact is pivotal to the plot, and in both cases the pact is made by a young man ambitious for literary fame who yields up his liberty to an older man. St. George of "The Freak of a Genius" was an understudy for Felix Canaris of A Modern Mephistopheles, and the interest of both narratives is heightened by the sexual entanglements of what has been called a "psychologic quadrilateral." Along with Goethe's Faust itself, and an as yet unpublished Alcott novel entitled "A Modern Mephistopheles or The Fatal Love Chase," "The Freak of a Genius" was a rich source for Alcott's anonymous novel of 1877.

Even more interesting was the use that Alcott made of yet another of her sensation stories. Between 1861 and 1873, when it was finally published, Alcott worked intermittently upon her autobiographical fiction, Work. Its chapters are patently based upon episodes of the author's life: "Servant," "Actress," "Governess," "Companion," "Seamstress." It is the chapter "Companion" that clearly recalls the thriller "A Nurse's Story" and suggests to the critic that perhaps a good part of that tale was less fictional than factual. In Work, the heroine Christie Devon follows the path of Kate Snow of "A Nurse's Story," becoming "companion to an invalid girl" who is afflicted with inherited insanity. There is every reason to believe that Alcott shaped both the chapter "Companion" and the tale "A Nurse's Story" around the nucleus of an actual experience. It is obvious, too, that the thriller adumbrated the chapter in Work.

Although she claimed to disdain her plunge into sensational literature and cloaked it in secrecy, she remembered it, and, to serve her professional purpose, she returned to the genre and recast it. The scholarly world first learned of her sensational output in 1943 but it was not until 1975 that the first volume of Alcott thrillers was made available to the public. Readers in search of page-turners were enthralled by the swift sequences of plot, the array of proud and powerful characters, the exotic backdrops. Scholars were enthralled by something else: the revelation of a new Louisa May Alcott. As one critic succinctly put it, "Never again will you have quite the same image of this particular 'little woman.'"

The image projected in the first full-length biography that followed the appearance of the first volume of thrillers (Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott) was arresting but in some respects devastating. Martha Saxton, in her Louisa May: A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott (1977), characterized the writer as a "depressed and sullen . . . withdrawn, hostile introvert" who alternated between "resentment" and "self-inflicted spite," whose "sexuality remained a mystery" to her and whose "devils of guilt" vied with her "deep fear of men." The biographer confessed that she had "chosen to present only those facts that seemed important in shaping Louisa's emotional and intellectual life." Most of those "facts" seem to have been culled from the sensation stories. Saxton concluded that Alcott "identified with Pauline [of "Pauline's Passion and Punishment"] and believed that passionate, sexual women like herself were wicked and grotesque members of her sex." Her "modern biography" of Alcott derived substantially—perhaps too substantially—from the thrillers Alcott had written and the characters she had imagined.

Some critics warmly welcomed the Saxton interpretation. Ann Douglas, writing in 1978 under the heading "Mysteries of Louisa May Alcott" in the New York Review of Books, stated that Saxton's modern biography was "a major step in the process of reassessment. Her book follows logically upon Madeleine Stern's critical . . . republication of Alcott's lost thrillers.' . . . Saxton offers a psychological and cultural study of Alcott and her milieu, emphasizing the darker sides of her life and career . . . [and] has powerfully delineated what has too long been ignored: the compulsions and fears that both inspired and limited the 'children's friend.'" Most interestingly, Douglas, seeking connections, noted that "the little girls of Alcott's later work have something in common with the femmes fatales of her early books: they too undergo metamorphosis, not growth. In a sense, murder pervades the worlds of both."

There is no doubt that publication of the anonymous and pseudonymous thrillers, with their strong feminist heroines, triggered a battery of revisionist criticism. That criticism has been applied not only to the Alcott persona but to the entire Alcott oeuvre, which is now viewed in light of the newly discovered narratives.

Judith Fetterley, in "Little Women: Alcott's Civil War," affirmed that "the work of Stern in .. . recovering Alcott's sensation fiction provides an important context for the reading of Little Women" The "sensation fiction," she continued, "provides an important gloss on the sexual politics involved in Jo's renunciation of the writing of such fiction and on the sexual politics of Jo's relation with Professor Bhaer under whose influence she gives it up." The feminist critic Sarah Elbert perceives the themes of Alcott's sensation fiction in much of her nonsensation work, writing that "Murder, divorce, child abandonment, nervous disorders degenerating into madness—all these figure in Louisa's novels, and even creep into the Little Women trilogy. . . . Without a rational, sexually egalitarian society, Alcott felt these abuses would invade daylight reality as well as midnight fantasies."

Both Alcott's "daylight reality" and her "midnight fantasies" have engaged close attention as the reappraisals have continued. In one of the most recent, "Whispers in the Dark": The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott (1994), Elizabeth Lennox Keyser clearly states that "the current interest in Alcott, especially among feminist scholars . . . has been kindled largely by the discovery of Alcott's anonymous and pseudonymous sensation fiction." The author of that fiction, she concludes, was "not simply versatile but complex"; "Beneath the placid surface [of the domestic fiction] . . . the passions, antagonisms, and power struggles that complicate gender relations in the sensation fiction continue unabated."

Publication of Alcott's sensation fiction has revealed the hitherto unsuspected dimensions of her work. It has also enriched Alcott's stature as a writer in the American Renaissance. Since the mid-1970s, The Children's Friend has been the subject not only of biographical re-viewing and critical re-evaluation but of a variety of scholarly investigations that would not have been pursued had her sensation stories never been recovered. Little Women has been compared with Pride and Prejudice; Alcott's connections with Henry James have been traced; the "Transatlantic Translations" of Alcott and Charlotte Brontë have been studied; "'Gorgeous Fancies': Louisa May Alcott, the Female Gothic, and Nineteenth-Century Women Readers" is the title of a thesis.

Alcott is now recognized as a many-faceted professional writer who had significant things to say and said them with the same power and passion that characterized her sensational heroines. Thanks to this recognition, the sources of her life and work have been made available in scholarly editions, and this too is a by-product of the unearthing of her thrillers. Under the aegis of a trio of scholars, The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott appeared in 1987, followed in 1989 by The Journals of Louisa May Alcott. At the end of each year of The Journals were added those telling "Notes and Memoranda" from Alcott's ledger that provided clues to the identity of many of her anonymous blood-and-thunder stories. Anthologies of Alcott's work must now perforce include one or more of those thrillers. In the cleverly entitled Alternative Alcott compiled by Elaine Showalter, for example, "Behind a Mask" is reprinted as an example of Alcott's expertise in the sensational genre.

The critics are rewriting Louisa Alcott. Some of that rewriting may result in distortion, but much of it is perceptive and valid. The author of "Behind a Mask," Hospital Sketches, Moods, Little Women, Work, and A Modern Mephistopheles is now viewed as a creative artist adept at the sensational and the sentimental, the realistic, the gothic, the domestic. She was not only a complex human being but a more adventurous writer than had once been supposed. Basically, she was both a professional and an experimenter in literary genres that took her from fairy tales to war sketches, from thrillers to a domestic saga.

The critical revision of Alcott is clearly due to the discovery and subsequent reprinting of her sensation tales. From behind her mask she has emerged as a rich and varied writer whose works are susceptible of productive analysis. Her image has been altered, her reputation extended, her stature increased. The springboard for this metamorphosis lies in the corpus of sensation stories that remained hidden for more than a century.