ABSTRACT
Scholars such as Elaine Showalter have linked Louisa May Alcott's American brand of sensation fiction to recycled portrayals of powerful, ambitious heroines from Charlotte Bront's Jane Eyre to Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Wilkie Collins's Armadale. Although Alcott's celebrated Little Women and its sequels were circulated in Britain, her earlier sensation stories remained anonymous and were only in print in the United States. If Bront's fiction offers an obvious source text for Alcott's sensation fiction, Alcott's 'A Pair of Eyes' has surprising ties to 'The Lifted Veil', the only sensation story written by George Eliot. Alcott's interest in animal magnetism or mesmerism is explicit in 'A Pair of Eyes', a story with evident resemblance to and crucial differences from 'The Lifted Veil'. These two tales have first-person male narrators, both artists drawn to mysterious women who are magnetic operators.
