ABSTRACT
For a century, American middle-class girls read all of Louisa May Alcott’s books for children simply as a part of being young, and of growing up: Little Women (1868), An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), and Eight Cousins (1875) in particular, but also minor works like Aunt Jo’s Scrap-bag (1872), Under the Lilacs (1878), Jack and Jill (1880), and half a dozen others. Most of these books, the hack work of a professional, have passed out of circulation. Alcott interests us today in good part because we have learned that she led a double literary life. Madeleine Stern has recently discovered and republished Alcott’s “sensational” tales, or “thrillers”: stormy, sometimes brilliant narratives of feminine power, unhappiness and revenge. Alcott wrote and published them under the pseudonym “A. M. Barnard” in the years before Little Women made her famous, and revealed in their pages a divided, baffling, passionate woman quite different from “the children’s friend” she was officially to become. Alcott valued most highly her three works of what she called “lurid” fiction, Moods (1865), Work (1873), and A Modern Mephistopheles (1879), all more similar to her early thrillers than to the juvenile literature that brought her fortune. In Jo’s Boys (1882), she publicly dismissed the children’s stories as “moral pap for the young.”
