Volume 25, Number 14 · September 28, 1978
Mysteries of Louisa May Alcott
By Ann Douglas
Louisa May: A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott
by Martha Saxton
Houghton Mifflin, 428 pp., $14.95
Work: A Story of Experience
by Louisa May Alcott, edited with an introduction by Sarah Elbert
Schocken, 443 pp., $5.95 (paper)
When she published the phenomenally popular Little Women in 1868, and began her career as America's best-loved author for the young, Louisa May Alcott was thirty-five years old. An intensely private person, she disliked the lion-hunters who soon came in frightening numbers to the Alcott's Concord home. She could not always avoid them, however, and the ensuing encounters were usually painful to her, and sometimes to her visitors. She recorded how a little girl wept violently and could not be comforted that this sharp-featured, grim, middle-aged woman was the author of Little Women. The anecdote is not so predictable and slight as it at first seems. Most of Alcott's critics have been less perceptive or less open than the little girl who so frankly registered her shock at the discrepancy between the literary persona and the reality of Louisa May Alcott.
Review, 4570 words
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