“I fancy ‘lurid’ things,” she wrote in her 1850 journal, “if true and strong also”—a fancy she would gratify a decade later. Like many of the episodes of her life, Louisa’s addiction to the theater provided both a source and a training ground for what would follow.

            So too did her reading. Dickens she devoured, reading aloud with her sister Anna the dialogue of Sairey Gamp and Betsey Prig, thrilling to the tale of Reuben Haredale’s murder, reinaugurating the Pickwick Club in Concord. Books from Emersons study could be borrowed: Dante and Shakespeare, Carlyle and Goethe. “R.W.E. gave me ‘Wilhelm Meister,’” she noted, “and from that day Goethe has been my chief idol.” (Her chief idol, it needs no reminding, had delved into matters alchemical and antiquarian, and his Faust had made a world- famous pact with the devil.) The Heir of Redclyffe was a favorite of Louisa’s and so too was Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. Indeed, she was so enthralled by novels that in one lofty moment she “made a resolution to read fewer novels, and those only of the best.”

            There can be no doubt at all that the fiction addict Louisa Alcott dipped from time to time into the gore of the Gothic novel. In America that type of romance was so enthusiastically received that as early as 1797 both “dairymaid and hired hand” amused themselves “into an agreeable terror with the haunted houses and hobgoblins of Mrs. Radcliffe.” By the time she had become an omnivorous reader a host of Gothic novels was available to her in English or in English translation. In their pages Louisa could envision settings, mouth language, and cogitate themes. She could wander from ruined abbey to frowning castle, from haunted gallery and feudal hall to pathless forest and chilly catacomb. She could savor romantic words—repasts, casements, chambers. She could revel in unholy themes—deals with the devil and the raising of the dead, secret sects and supernatural agencies. Horace Walpole’s marvelous machinery, Mrs. Ann Rad- cliffe’s ghosts, Monk Lewis’s horrors, William Beckford’s Oriental terror, Ludwig Tieck’s vampires were all available to her. So too, of course, were the strange stories of Washington Irving, the haunting stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the subtle tales of Poe the master, whose horrors were the unknown horrors of the mind.

            Probably Louisa Alcott had been moved to write as soon as she had learned to read. The compulsion was hers early to combine threads of her own experience with the threads of the books she had read and interweave them into a fabric of her own creating. Her first published work was a poem, entitled “Sunlight,” that appeared in the September, 1851, issue of Petersons Magazine. Interestingly, it was pseudonymous, for it was signed “Flora Fairfield.” The poem was followed in May, 1852, by Louisa’s first published prose narrative, “The Rival Painters: A Tale of Rome,” for which the author received five dollars along with the delight of seeing her initials in print.

            Despite a devastating rebuke from the publisher James T. Fields, who advised her, “Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can’t write,” Louisa persisted. In 1854 “Flora Fairfield” adorned the Saturday Evening Gazette with “The Rival Prima Donnas,” a tale of vengeance in which one singer crushed her competitor to death by means of an iron ring placed upon her head. In the garret with her papers around her and a pile of apples nearby, the twenty-two-year-old spinner of tales evolved plots about strong-minded women and poor lost creatures until she became the mainstay of the Gazette.

            At the same time, in 1855, her full name appeared as the author of her first published book, Flower Fables, “legends of faery land” she had devised for Emerson’s daughter Ellen. The book netted her thirty- two dollars. In the sky parlor of a Boston boardinghouse Louisa continued to write when she was not teaching or sewing. “Love and Self-Love,” the story of an attempted suicide woven from her own temptation at the Mill Dam, was accepted by James Russell Lowell, editor of The Atlantic Monthly. “M. L.,” a story of slavery and abolition, was rejected. The author went on consuming piles of paper. She had caught the writing fever and boasted to Alf Whitman, “My ‘works of art’ are in such demand that I shall be one great blot soon.” She worked on two novels: Moods, a medley of death, sleepwalking, and shipwreck; and Success (later changed to Work), an autobiographical romance in which she would one day insert a chapter on insanity, suicide, and thwarted love. After her brief service as a Civil War nurse, Louisa converted her experience into a realistic narrative, Hospital Sketches, first serialized in The Commonwealth and subsequently published in book form.

            Seated at her desk, an old green-and-red party wrap draped around her as a “glory cloak,” Louisa pondered in groves of manuscripts. In 1855 her earnings included fifty dollars from teaching, fifty dollars from sewing, and twenty dollars from stories. Yet she not only preferred pen and ink to birch and book—or needle—she was committed.