The Lost Stories of Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May AlcottPublished1995
Pages166
Formatpaperback
PublisherCitadel Press
Synopsis
Louisa May Alcott, like her beloved character Jo March, supported herself and her family by writing anonymous stories for popular magazines. This book includes nine newly discovered stories, which were uncovered by tireless literary detective work. Alcott's papers were scrutinized for clues to the author's anonymous and pseudonymous tales. Cryptic notations in the margins of Alcott's account books led to a periodical that had never before been associated with her, "Frank Leslie's Lady's Magazine," which published a number of Alcott stories anonymously between 1868 and 1870. Written while she was completing "Little Women," the stories that Alcott scribbled in her Boston attic were drawn from her experiences, from her reading, and even from her dreams. Her thrillers are spiced with deceptions and betrayals, drugs and suicides, exotic props and European royalty.
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About Louisa May Alcott
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Louisa May Alcott
1832–1888
Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 29, 1832. She and her three sisters, Anna, Elizabeth, and May, were educated by their father, philosopher and teacher Bronson Alcott, and raised on the practical Christianity of their mother, Abigail May. Louisa spent her childhood in Boston and in Concord, Massachusetts, where her days were enlightened by visits to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s library, excursions into nature with Henry David Thoreau, and theatricals in the barn at "Hillside". Like her character, "Jo March" in Little Women, young Louisa was a tomboy. "No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race," she claimed, "and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences ..." For Louisa, writing was an early passion. She had a rich imagination and often her stories became melodramas that she and her sisters would act out for friends. Louisa preferred to play the "lurid" parts in these plays --"the villains, ghosts, bandits, and disdainful queens." At age 15, troubled by the poverty that plagued her family, she vowed: "I will do something by and by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write -- anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!"
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