Alcott, Louisa May - SSC 14
Behind a Mask
Unknown
Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott
Contents
Introduction
BY MADELEINE STERN
BEHIND A MASK OR A WOMAN'S POWER
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
PAULINE'S PASSION and PUNISHMENT
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
THE MYSTERIOUS KEY and WHAT IT OPENED
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
THE ABBOT'S GHOST
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
I
intend to illuminate the Ledger with a blood & thunder tale as they are
easy to “compoze” & are better paid than moral & elaborate works of
Shakespeare so don’t be shocked if I send you a paper containing a picture of
Indians, pirates, wolves, bears & distressed damsels in a grand tableau
over a title like this “The Maniac Bride” or The Bath of Blood A Thrilling Tale
of Passion.
The
quotation is not by a writer associated with the gore of Gothic romance but by
the future author of a domestic novel known to all the
world as Little Women. On June 22, 1862, Louisa May Alcott wrote those lines to a
young man named Alf Whitman, whose charms she would one day incorporate into
the fictional character of Laurie.1
The
statement itself evinces her powers, for within the briefest compass it touches
upon her facility in composition, her ostensible motive, and the type of
periodical or audience at which she aimed. The fact that Louisa May Alcott—“The
Childrens Friend”—let down her literary hair and wrote blood-and-thunder
thrillers in secret is in itself a disconcerting if titillating shock to
readers in search of consistency. Like Dr. Johnsons dog that stood upon its hind
legs, it is per se remarkable. Equally remarkable is the story of their
discovery, an intriguing byway in literary detection. Most remarkable of all
perhaps is the fact that those gory, gruesome novelettes—written anonymously or
pseudonymously, for the most part—were and still are extremely good: well paced,
suspenseful, skillfully executed, and peopled with characters of flesh and
blood.
Now,
for the first time, after more than a century, they are reprinted—a belated
though well-deserved tribute to a multifaceted genius who hailed from Concord, Massachusetts. They merit not only the avid attention of the general reader, whose
appetite will grow with what it feeds on, but closer study by the astonished
yet delighted critic, who may wonder precisely why and when, how and for whom
these colorful forays into an exotic world were written. The analysis will
disclose not only the nature of the creation but the nature of the creator, for
Louisa May Alcott brought to this genre of escapist literature both an economic
and a psychological need.
There
is no doubt the economic need was there. The four “little women” whose name was
not March but Alcott—Anna, Louisa, Abby, and Elizabeth—grew up not only in the climate of love but
in the colder climate of poverty. Their father, Amos Bronson Alcott, the Concord seer, who was sometimes regarded as a
seer-sucker, had many gifts but none for making money. As Louisa put it in a
letter to a publisher: “I too am sure that ‘he who giveth to the poor lendeth
to the Lord’ & on that principle devote time & earnings to the care of
my father & mother, for one possesses no gift for money making & the
other is now too old to work any longer for those who are happy & able to
work for her.”
The
cost of coal, the price of shoes, discussions of ways and means, all the
essentials of living formed an obbligato to Louisa’s early years, a background
as basic to her life as romps with the neighboring Emerson children, berrying
excursions with Henry David Thoreau, glimpses of a mysterious Hawthorne
hovering in the Old Manse, and echoes of her fathers lofty discourses on
universal love and Pythagorean diet. Returned from a lecture tour in the West,
Bronson Alcott was asked, “Well, did people pay you?” He opened his pocketbook,
flourished a single dollar bill, and replied, “Only that! My overcoat was
stolen, and I had to buy a shawl. Many promises were not kept, and travelling
is costly; but I have opened the way, and another year shall do better.” He was
the recipient of gifts from his wife’s distinguished relatives, the Mays or
Sewalls, or from his friend and neighbor the illustrious Ralph Waldo Emerson,
who would place a bill under a book or behind a candlestick “when he thinks
Father wants a little money, and no one will help him earn.”
To solve the mundane question of
ways and means, to pay the family debts and end the necessity for a charitable
Alcott Sinking Fund, Louisa May Alcott was prepared to do any kind of work that
offered, menial or mental. “Though an Alcott”—and Louisa underlined not the
condition but the name—she would prove she could support herself. “I will make
a battering-ram of my head,,, she wrote in her
journal, “and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world.”
She
tried what was available, and what was not she tried to make available:
teaching, working as a seamstress or as second girl, doing the wash at two
dollars a week. At midcentury the family poverty had never been more extreme.
At this juncture Louisa went out to service and garnered from her experience no
money but a villain for her tales and a consuming inner fury to explode.
The
full story of what might be entitled “The Humiliation at Dedham” has never been told, although Louisa
herself years later wrote a bowdlerized account of it in “How I Went Out to Service.”
Since it was grist for the mill of a writer of thrillers, it merits recounting.
At the difficult midcentury the Alcotts lived for a
time in Boston, for it was better to be earning a living
in a city than to be starving in a country paradise. Mrs. Alcott, the Marmee of
the as yet unwritten Little Women, worked as a city missionary and opened an
intelligence office. When an ancient gentleman from Dedham applied for a companion for his sister,
Louisa decided to take the position herself. The gentleman—now for the first
time identified as the Honorable James Richardson, Dedham lawyer, president of
a local fire-insurance company, author of several orations, and devotee of the
Muses—seemed to her tall, ministerial, refined. Waving black-gloved hands about,
he assured her that his home was graced by books and pictures, flowers, a
piano, the best of society. She would be one of the family,
required to help only in the lighter work.
Fortified
by those assurances, Louisa in 1851, age nineteen, went out to service. The Richardson home was not precisely as it had been
represented. The light housework included not only bed making but the kindling
of fires and the destruction of cobwebs. What was more,
Louisa was expected to play audience to Hon. James Richardson, who invited her
into his study for oral readings or metaphysical discussions. The aged Richardson's attentions soon became maudlin. He plied
her with poems while she washed the dishes and he left reproachful little notes
under her door. Stranded on an island of water in a sea of soapsuds, Louisa
finally delivered an ultimatum: she had come to serve as companion to Hon.
James Richardson’s sister, not to him.
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