As a result of her display of independence, all the household work was assigned to her: digging paths through the snow, fetching water from the well, splitting the kindling, and sifting the ashes. The final degradation was the command to polish the master’s muddy boots with the blacking hose, at which the young domestic balked. After seven weeks of drudgery she announced her intention of leaving. Richardson shut himself up in sulky retirement while his sister tucked a sixpenny pocketbook into Louisa’s chilblained hands. The pocketbook contained four dollars, which the outraged Alcotts returned to Dedham. Although Louisa subsequently made light of this experience in “How I Went Out to Service,” there can be no doubt that from her humiliation an anger was born that would express itself both obliquely and directly when she sat down to write her blood-and-thunder tales.

            Another devastating experience a few years later could also be caught in a net of words, provided the author remained anonymous. Frustrated in her attempts to find work—teaching Alice Lovering, sewing for Mrs. Reed or Mrs. Sargent—Louisa found that her courage had all but failed. As she looked at the waters of the Mill Dam she was tempted to find the solution of her problems in their oblivion. Though her immediate problem was resolved, surely that “Temptation at the Mill Dam,” however fleeting, became, along with the “Humiliation at Dedham,” part of the psychological equipment of a young woman who would shortly take her pen as her bridegroom.

            There was much else in Louisa’s life in Concord or Boston that formed part of that equipment. There were characters not merely in books but in life-like Hawthorne, whose dark figure had glided through the entry of a somber Manse, a fitting shadow to inhabit a house of shadows. There were fugitive slaves who passed through the village, a stop on the Underground Railway. There were the ghost stories with which Louisa thrilled the boys of Frank Sanborn’s school as apples and ginger cakes rounded out an Alcott Monday Evening. Surely the report of Professor Webster’s hanging for the murder of George Parkman at Harvard provided her with a store of bloodcurdling detail. Louisa’s short but indelible service as a nurse in the Civil War brought her a harvest of characters along with a shattering illness in which delirium alternated with unconsciousness, aspects of disease most adaptable to the blood-and-thunder variety of fiction. As companion to a sickly young woman, Louisa went abroad in 1865. Europe yielded her dramatis personae ranging from a Russian baron to an English colonel, from a mysterious lady resembling Marie Antoinette to a charming Polish boy. There too she saw Mazzini, pallid, diaphanous, wearing deep mourning for his country, the perfect hero for a dramatic destiny in a sensational story. For a Louisa Alcott who never stopped taking notes, Europe provided also a panorama of backgrounds—exotic, colorful, romantic. As her father wrote to her: “Your visit to Chillon and description of . . . the Prison, is as good for the romancer as for the poet, and this with the legend the best matereal [sic] for a story by the former.”

            Bronson Alcott called his scribbling daughter “an arsenal of powers.” In that arsenal was stored still another personal source for stories. All her life the redoubtable Louisa May Alcott had gone barnstorming and all her life she had dreamed of the ten dramatic passions. The “Louy Alcott troupe,” of which Louisa May, age ten, was author- director, gave way to family tableaux and dramatic performances in the Hillside barn. At fifteen Louisa dipped her pen into gaudy ink as, with her sister Anna, she wrote the scripts of a succession of melodramas whose titles and subtitles foreshadow those of the thrillers that were to come: “Norna; or, The Witch’s Curse”; “The Captive of Castile; or, The Moorish Maidens Vow.” The props and appurtenances, the backgrounds and characters of these early plays staged for the Concord neighbors are familiar to readers of blood-and-thunder tales: ghosts and stolen scrolls, duels and magic potions, dungeon cells and gloomy woods, murder and suicide.

            Throughout her life Louisa carried the theater with her wherever she went. She took the roles of director, author, and actress in drawingroom charades or plays in the Boston kitchen. With lightning changes of costume she ranged from a prince in silver armor to a murderer in chains, until she confided to her journal that she would be a Siddons if she could. From her later work in the Amateur Dramatic Company of Walpole and the Concord Dramatic Upion, Louisa gained a certain professionalism in her attitude toward the theater. In 1860 her farce, Nat Bachelors Pleasure Trip, was actually staged at the Howard Athenaeum, Boston, and the playwright received a bouquet as she viewed the performance from a private parlor box. Louisa received more than a bouquet from her experience in theatricals and her romance with greasepaint. She developed a skill in lively dialogue, in suspenseful plotting, and in broad-stroke character delineation, skills she would one day apply to her blood-and-thunder tales.