Louisa May Alcott: New Texts and Contexts

Louisa May Alcott in the twentieth century may remind one of the Energizer bunny: she keeps going and going—and going. Spurred on by the collections of Alcott's sensation fiction uncovered and published under the direction of Madeleine Stern beginning in 1975 (a new "omnibus" volume containing all the recently uncovered short stories, Louisa May Alcott Unmasked, was published by Northeastern University Press in 1995), interest in what else the author of Little Women wrote continues more than a hundred years after her death in 1888. Two adult novels, Work and Moods, were reprinted in 1977 and 1991, respectively, after being out of print for decades. Volumes of Alcott's letters and journals more complete than Ednah Dow Cheney's Life, Letters, and Journals (1889) had included appeared in 1987 and 1989. Neither popular nor scholarly interest in Alcott's work shows any signs of abating; although Little Women remains Alcott's one true masterpiece for most scholars, several newly available works demonstrate anew her considerable talent and her wide-ranging interests, providing ever more glosses on her classic novel and her phenomenal career.

Considering the newest publications first demonstrates just how many ways there are of looking at Louisa May Alcott. The New York Public Library uses An Intimate Anthology to showcase some of its fascinating collection of photographs, illustrations, and manuscripts featuring Alcott, her work, and her Concord home. The volume reprints some generally available materials, such as Hospital Sketches, "Transcendental Wild Oats," letters, journal entries, and two sensation stories, but also some much less accessible materials, including five poems and several recollections of Alcott from around the turn of the century. The many photographs, manuscripts, and illustrations in this handsome volume tantalize enough to make one consider a trip to New York to view the collection in person.

Sarah Elbert's intriguing Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery draws together four of Alcott's Civil War stories and an 1864 article from the Commonwealth in which Alcott discusses letters from "several members of one of the colored regiments" (41) who had been taught rudimentary literacy by female volunteers while they were encamped at Readville. She frames the letters with her own commentary on the soldiers' courage and more particularly on their eagerness for education: she praises their courage in entering "the double battle they must fight against treason and ignorance" (44). The volume concludes with a chapter from the United States Sanitary Commission report, also published in 1864, delineating conditions among the freed men and women in what were essentially Civil War refugee camps. As Elbert demonstrates, Alcott drew liberally from such reports for her own Civil War stories. That the collection includes a children's story, "Nelly's Hospital," testifies to the fact that critics increasingly are looking at the larger context of Alcott's whole career and the interconnections between her works in several genres for several audiences—a concept for which Elizabeth Keyser's Whispers in the Dark (1993) must be acknowledged as a groundbreaking model.

Because two of the stories, "M. L." and "My Contraband," have been reprinted elsewhere recently, the most important value of this particular collection lies in Elbert's provocative but well-grounded introduction. Issues of "race, sex, and slavery" come together most forcefully around considerations of miscegenation or "amalgamation"; Elbert convincingly demonstrates the threat that public fear of sexually mixing the races posed to the abolitionist movement and how that fear was used against abolitionists. Her application of the "gendered bodies" work of critics such as Lora Romero and Nancy Bentley to the stories in the collection (several...