Despite her preoccupation with passionate and angry heroines, Louisa was already too skillful a writer to repeat herself without variation. “The Abbot’s Ghost: or, Maurice Treherne’s Temptation” is set in no exotic Cuban paradise but a haunted English abbey replete with screaming peacocks, thick- walled gallery and arched stone roof, armored figures and an abbot’s ghost. A Dickensian flavor attaches to these Gothic appurtenances as, sitting round the hall fire, the dramatis personae tell tales of ghosts and coffins, skeletons and haunted houses. The star of that dramatis personae is less the hero of the title than the magnificent Edith Snowden, a strong-willed woman burdened by a heavy cross, a mysterious past, and jealousies that conflict with “contending emotions of . . . remorse and despair.” “The Abbot’s Ghost” is filled with psychological insights that illuminate the subtle relationships of the characters. The plot, revolving principally about the sudden cure of the crippled Maurice Treherne and ending with a triple wedding in the abbey, is basically a love story narrated against a strongly Gothic background. It comes to life through the brilliant depiction of a woman of passion and power whose furies are banked by her innate nobility.

            Unlike the anonymous “Pauline’s Passion” and the pseudonymous “Abbot’s Ghost,” The Mysterious Key has a male hero, a charming young Italianate Englishman, and unlike either of those narratives, The Mysterious Key was published over the name of Louisa May Alcott. The possibility suggests itself that Louisa insisted upon secrecy less for her blood-and-thunder stories in general than for her passionate and angry heroines in particular.

            The hero of The Mysterious Key combines a touch of that Polish boy who, with Alf Whitman, was to become the Laurie of Little Women, and a strong hint of the pale and ardent Italian patriot Maz- zini. Pauls appearance at the Trevlyn home in Warwickshire—an estate adequately equipped with haunted room and state chamber- touches off an elaborate plot. Well paced, it depends for its unfoldment upon a prophetic rhyme and a mysterious black-bearded visitor, a sealed letter and an ancient family volume, pretended sleepwalking, a touch of bigamy and a blind ward, Helen. The silver key that opens the Trevlyn tomb and discloses a mildewed paper proving Helen’s identity is less mysterious and less intriguing than the hero Paul who, as Paolo, had been—like Mazzini—a hero in the Italian Revolution. All loose ends—and there are many—are neatly tied as the silver key slips into the door of a grisly tomb unlocking “a tragedy of life and death.”

            Between “Pauline’s Passion,” written in 1862, and The Mysterious Key, which appeared in 1867, Louisa wrote other gaudy, gruesome, and psychologically perceptive thrillers. Sitting incognito behind her pen, she produced “V. V.: or, Plots and Counterplots,” an involved tale about a danseuse, Virginie Varens, whose flesh bore the tattooed letters V. V. above a lover’s knot. A mysterious iron ring, drugged coffee, four violent deaths, and a viscount parading as a deaf-and-dumb Indian servant were the ingredients of this heady witch’s broth. Poison vied with pistols or daggers for “the short road to . . . revenge,” garments were dyed with blood, the heroine concluded her dark bargain, and the author doubtless recalled with nostalgia the comic tragedies of her childhood. This flight into the all-but-impossible not only emblazoned the pages of a sensational newspaper but was reprinted as a ten-cent novelette.

            Like “V. V.,” “A Marble Woman: or, The Mysterious Model” was filled with a variety of plots and counterplots as well as a colorful cast of characters that included a sculptor, Bazil Yorke, and an opiumeating heroine. The plight of Mme. Mathilde Arnheim was pursued by the indefatigable writer in The Skeleton in the Closet, the narrative of a woman married to an idiot husband and bound to him by a tie which death alone could sever.

            Of all the blood-and-thunder tales conceived by Louisa May Alcott when her hair was down and her dander up, the most extraordinary—in this critic’s opinion at least—is the one that gives this book its title. “Behind a Mask: or, A Woman’s Power” is not only per se a suspenseful story recounted in a masterly manner; it fuses in its crucible many of the elements that had gone into the life of its author.

            It engrosses the reader while it makes use of and reflects the experiences and emotions of its creator. “Behind a Mask” is therefore a Gothic roman a clef, a fast-moving narrative whose episodes unlock the past not only of the heroine Jean Muir but of the writer Louisa Alcott. Behind this mask, perhaps, the future author of Little Women sits for a dark but revealing portrait.

            Jean Muir is many things: a woman bent, like Pauline Valary, upon revenge; a woman who, to achieve her ends, resorts to all sorts of coquetries and subterfuges including the feigning of an attempted suicide; a woman filled with anger directed principally against the male lords of creation.