Alcott, Louisa May - SSC 14 Read Free

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. 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