Her pen was never and would never be idle. She lived in her inkstand. Some years later, when she supplied The New York Ledger with an article on “Happy Women,” she would include a sketch of herself as the scribbling spinster.

            The scribbling spinster had already had a variety of writing experience. From flower fables to realistic hospital sketches, from tales of virtue rewarded to tales of violence, she had tried her ink-stained hand. Now, in her early thirties, she would attempt still another experiment. The letter to Alf Whitman revealed the plan: “I intend to illuminate the Ledger with a blood & thunder tale as they are easy to compoze’ & are better paid than moral . . . works.” For Louisa May Alcott they were indeed easy to compose. She could stir in her witch's caldron a brew concocted from her own experience, her observations and needs, as well as from the books she had read, for, like Washington Irving, she had “read somewhat, heard and seen more, and dreamt more than all.” Louisa's blood-and-thunder tales would be not only “necessity stories” produced for money—from fifty to seventy-five dollars each— but a psychological catharsis. What is more, although their author never publicly acknowledged them, these experiments would stand the test of time. The future author of Little Women added much of her own to the genre. Indeed, had she persisted in the writing of thrillers, the name of Louisa May Alcott may well have conjured up the rites of a Walpurgis Night instead of the wholesome domesticities of a loving family.

            In 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, Frank Leslies Illustrated Newspaper, a popular New York weekly devoted to alluring pictures, gossip, and murder trials, offered a one-hundred-dollar prize for a story. To pay the family debts and at the same time to give vent to the pent-up emotions of her thirty years, Louisa Alcott wrote the first of her blood-and-thunder tales. Though it would be published anonymously, “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” bore the stamp of its author, who immediately developed her own technique and outlined a theme to which she would often return. While her plots were violent enough and her backdrops remote enough to merit classification in the Gothic genre, Louisa was principally concerned with character. Of all the characters she adumbrated in these narratives the one who came most completely to life and who obviously was as intriguing to her author as to readers was the passionate, richly sexual femme fatale who had a mysterious past, an electrifying present, and a revengeful future. In such a heroine—so different from the submissive heroine of the Gothic formula—Louisa May Alcott could distill her passion for dramatics and her feminist anger at a world of James Richardsons. At the same time she could win a sorely needed hundred dollars.

            In “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” as in all the Alcott thrillers, the reader is immediately introduced to problems of character rather than of plot. The suspense lies less in what the heroine will do than in what the heroine is, although both considerations become entwined as the character develops and the plot advances. In a fascinating opening, the anonymous author places onstage her Pauline, a proud and passionate woman who has lost all—fortune and, as a result of one man’s perfidy, love. She is left with her fury and her desire for revenge, emotions which become the motivating forces in an ironic plot.

            Against the background of an exotic paradise, a green wilderness where the tamarind vies with the almond tree, the spotlight falls upon Pauline Valary, pacing “to and fro, like a wild creature in its cage,” a “handsome woman, with bent head, locked hands, and restless steps.” She is a woman scorned by her lover, Gilbert Redmond, who has abandoned her for a moneyed bride. In swift course she arouses the devotion of the sensitive, young, southern romantic Manuel, who, attracted by her implicit sexuality, becomes not only her husband but her accomplice in the intended destruction of Gilbert Redmond. She does not plan Gilbert’s murder but some more subtle revenge. “There are fates more terrible than death, weapons more keen than poniards, more noiseless than pistols. . . . Leave Gilbert to remorse—and me.” And so, on page 1 of her thriller, the already skillful author has sketched in her characters, spotlighted her heroine, set her scene, and suggested a suspenseful plot.

            The suspense mounts in the search for Gilbert and the dramatic encounter with him and his bride. The character is embroidered as Pauline’s “woman’s tongue” avenges her and “with feminine skill” she “mutely conveys the rebuke she would not trust herself to utter, by stripping the glove from the hand he had touched, and dropping it disdainfully.” The meeting of Gilbert and Pauline is the meeting of man and woman, a meeting in which Pauline silently accepts Gilbert’s challenge to the “tournament so often held between man and woman —a tournament where the keen tongue is the lance, pride the shield, passion the fiery steed, and the hardest heart the winner of the prize, which seldom fails to prove a barren honor, ending in remorse.” And so faint alarms and excursions subtly suggest without overtly revealing the denouement.

            Pauline’s inexorable anger intensifies until she is possessed by a devil—not one with a cloven hoof but a subtle psychological force for evil. Her little stage performance and “drama of deceit”—all Louisa’s heroines are actresses on the stage or off—her machinations to bankrupt Gilbert “in love, honor, liberty, and hope” fail utterly in the end.

            The winner of Frank Leslie’s one-hundred-dollar prize adopted the pseudonym of A. M. Barnard for a tale she submitted to another flamboyant weekly, The Flag of Our Union.