Plots And Counterplots: More Unknown Thrillers Of Louisa May Alcott
by Louisa May Alcott
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Mind control, violence, madness, incest, manipulation, and drug addiction and experimentation are dealt with in six tales with such titles as A Marble Woman and Periilous Play. Bibliogs.Tags
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Alcott, like Jo March, published "sensationalist" stories and potboilers in various popular magazines, particularly Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, under pseudonyms, often using A.M. Bernard. Here are collected two novellas, (V.V.: or, Plots and Counterplots and A Marble Woman), two short stories ( The Skeleton in the Closet and A Whisper in the Dark) and a very short story—"Perilous Play". There are also letters from her publisher to Alcott, reproducing a 19th C penmanship that is very difficult to read. I'm assuming these prove her authorship. Drug addiction seems a prevalent theme: the last line of the book reads, "Heaven bless hashish, if its dreams end like this!"
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473+ Works 109,172 Members
Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1832. Two years later, she moved with her family to Boston and in 1840 to Concord, which was to remain her family home for the rest of her life. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a transcendentalist and friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Alcott early realized that her show more father could not be counted on as sole support of his family, and so she sacrificed much of her own pleasure to earn money by sewing, teaching, and churning out potboilers. Her reputation was established with Hospital Sketches (1863), which was an account of her work as a volunteer nurse in Washington, D.C. Alcott's first works were written for children, including her best-known Little Women (1868--69) and Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boys (1871). Moods (1864), a "passionate conflict," was written for adults. Alcott's writing eventually became the family's main source of income. Throughout her life, Alcott continued to produce highly popular and idealistic literature for children. An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Eight Cousins (1875), Rose in Bloom (1876), Under the Lilacs (1878), and Jack and Jill (1881) enjoyed wide popularity. At the same time, her adult fiction, such as the autobiographical novel Work: A Story of Experience (1873) and A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), a story based on the Faust legend, shows her deeper concern with such social issues as education, prison reform, and women's suffrage. She realistically depicts the problems of adolescents and working women, the difficulties of relationships between men and women, and the values of the single woman's life. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Canonical title
- Plots And Counterplots: More Unknown Thrillers Of Louisa May Alcott
- Original publication date
- 1976
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- 1
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- (3.57)
- Languages
- English
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- Paper
- ISBNs
- 3
