A Whisper in the Dark


A Whisper in the Dark

Twelve Thrilling Tales

Louisa May Alcott


Edited by

Stefan Dziemianowicz

Introduction by

Susie Mee


Introduction copyright © 1996 by Susie Mee

Copyright © 1996 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher.

This edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

1996 Barnes & Noble Books

ISBN 0-7607-9835-4



Contents


Foreword
Introduction
A Modern Mephistopheles
Marion Earle; or, Only an Actress!
La Jeune; or, Actress and Woman
A Pair of Eyes; or, Modern Magic
The Abbot's Ghost: or, Maurice Treherne's Temptation
Perilous Play
Love and Self-Love
Ariel: A Legend of the Lighthouse
A Whisper in the Dark
V. V.; or, Plots and Counterplots
Enigmas
A Laugh and a Look


Foreword

The secret is out: Louisa May Alcott led a double literary life! During the same years in which she carved a niche for herself in American letters with publication of her short stories in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly and her children's classic Little Women, she also wrote nearly three dozen thrillers steeped in violent emotion and cliff-hanging suspense. This may shock readers who know her solely as the celebrant of domestic virtues incarnated in the characters of Little Women, but it should come as no surprise to anyone who ever wondered how much autobiography she poured into her chronicle of the March family. Like the Marches, the Alcotts were in a constant state of financial need, and like the industrious Jo, whom she modeled on herself, Louisa undertook to supplement her family's income through the sale of "sensation stories."

It's not difficult to understand why Louisa May Alcott devoted so much energy to writing sensational stories in which virtue undergoes trial by ordeal and women are wronged and revenged: the stories paid well, and the demand for them was constant. More important, she had an obvious talent for this type of writing. An omnivorous reader in her youth, she was no doubt familiar with the Gothic romances that had entertained readers for a century through their personifications of good and evil, brooding atmospheric settings, and chilling supernaturalism. In her hands, the basic materials of these stories--the diabolical villain, the imperiled innocent, the conflict of the heart--became tools for shaping character studies as vibrant as those in her non-thrillers. Hints of her interest in this type of writing appear in her fiction as early as 1854 and recur throughout her work thereafter.

Nevertheless, Louisa felt ambivalent toward her thrillers and refused to allow them to appear under her own name, even when publishers interested in exploiting her reputation offered her more money to do so. Several appeared bylined "L. M. Alcott" or attributed cryptically to "A Well-Known Author," but the majority were published anonymously or under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. Their steady output continued until 1870, by which time the runaway success of Little Women ensured that she would never have to write another such story unless she chose to--which she did in 1877, when a publisher encouraged her to follow through on an idea that had been simmering in her imagination for more than a decade: her Gothic opus, A Modern Mephistopheles. Louisa planned to own up to her authorship of this novel and her earlier thriller, "A Whisper in the Dark," when the two were reprinted in a single volume in 1889, but she died shortly before the book's publication.

Louisa May Alcott's reticence to acknowledge her thrillers in her lifetime is understandable from her standpoint as a professional, but unfortunate as far as her literary legacy is concerned. Although she dismissed these efforts as mere commercial necessities--a verdict she also rendered for her children's books, indicating that she may not have been the best judge of how posterity would see her--any embarrassment she felt toward them is wholly unjustified. The literary quality that distinguished these stories from others of their kind is still evident today.

The earliest of this volume's selections, "Marion Earle; or, Only an Actress!" was first published in 1858, and the latest, A Modern Mephistopheles, nearly two decades later. This period coincides with her most fruitful years as a writer, and all of the work she produced during that time reflects her growth and maturation into the writer who is today a recognized figure in America's literary pantheon. It is hard to believe that someone as committed to her art as Louisa May Alcott was would devote the care and attention she clearly lavished on her thrillers if she thought of them only as anomalous creations undeserving of preservation. If, as Alcott scholar Madeleine Stern has written, the unmarried Louisa took "her pen as her bridegroom," then we must consider all of her stories her progeny and her thrillers her prodigal children. It is time to welcome them back into the family after their long exile.

--Stefan Dziemianowicz
New York City, 1996


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Introduction
Louisa May Alcott
The "Spinning Spider"

Louisa May Alcott is known to most readers as the woman who penned one of the most warm-hearted and eloquent tributes ever paid to the American family. What middle-class American girl has reached the throes of puberty without having immersed herself, at least once, in the tribulations and victories of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy in Little Women? It's a novel that both extols and subverts the value of domesticity; that triumphantly portrays the courage of nineteenth-century women at the same time that it notes the barriers inhibiting them; that reveals the conflicts between love and career, home and the workplace, individual freedom and familial commitment--conflicts that still exist today. In fact, it has been said that "few other books in American literary history . . . have had so enormous an impact on the imagination of [women]." The atmosphere within the March household, with loving Marmee in charge during the father's absence, is benign enough to keep at bay all the demons--except death--that lurk outside, which perhaps accounts for the book's continuing ability to inspire and soothe.

Yet sooner or later demons must be reckoned with if we (meaning men and women) are to experience moral growth--at least this seems to be the theme of the majority of Alcott's stories in the present volume. Alcott wrote these works both before and after Little Women as she persisted in widening her imaginative landscape and testing her literary wings. There are echoes here of Poe, Hawthorne, and the English gothic writers, but the voice itself, no matter what the guise, is unremittingly Alcott's: graceful, emotionally heightened, teetering on the brink of sentimentality but never quite allowing herself to plunge into it.

A Modern Mephistopheles is the longest and perhaps the most ambitious tale. Essentially it's a rewriting of Goethe's Faust--there is even a Walpurgis Night--but with fascinating differences.