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  Behind a Mask

  Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott

  Contents

  Introduction

  BY MADELEINE STERN

  BEHIND A MASK OR A WOMAN'S POWER

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  PAULINE'S PASSION and PUNISHMENT

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  THE MYSTERIOUS KEY and WHAT IT OPENED

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  THE ABBOT'S GHOST

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Introduction

  BY MADELEINE STERN

  I intend to illuminate the Ledger with a blood & thunder tale as they are easy to “compoze” & are better paid than moral & elaborate works of Shakespeare so don’t be shocked if I send you a paper containing a picture of Indians, pirates, wolves, bears & distressed damsels in a grand tableau over a title like this “The Maniac Bride” or The Bath of Blood A Thrilling Tale of Passion.

  The quotation is not by a writer associated with the gore of Gothic romance but by the future author of a domestic novel known to all the world as Little Women. On June 22, 1862, Louisa May Alcott wrote those lines to a young man named Alf Whitman, whose charms she would one day incorporate into the fictional character of Laurie.1

  The statement itself evinces her powers, for within the briefest compass it touches upon her facility in composition, her ostensible motive, and the type of periodical or audience at which she aimed. The fact that Louisa May Alcott—“The Childrens Friend”—let down her literary hair and wrote blood-and-thunder thrillers in secret is in itself a disconcerting if titillating shock to readers in search of consistency. Like Dr. Johnsons dog that stood upon its hind legs, it is per se remarkable. Equally remarkable is the story of their discovery, an intriguing byway in literary detection. Most remarkable of all perhaps is the fact that those gory, gruesome novelettes—written anonymously or pseudonymously, for the most part—were and still are extremely good: well paced, suspenseful, skillfully executed, and peopled with characters of flesh and blood.

  Now, for the first time, after more than a century, they are reprinted—a belated though well-deserved tribute to a multifaceted genius who hailed from Concord, Massachusetts. They merit not only the avid attention of the general reader, whose appetite will grow with what it feeds on, but closer study by the astonished yet delighted critic, who may wonder precisely why and when, how and for whom these colorful forays into an exotic world were written. The analysis will disclose not only the nature of the creation but the nature of the creator, for Louisa May Alcott brought to this genre of escapist literature both an economic and a psychological need.

  There is no doubt the economic need was there. The four “little women” whose name was not March but Alcott—Anna, Louisa, Abby, and Elizabeth—grew up not only in the climate of love but in the colder climate of poverty. Their father, Amos Bronson Alcott, the Concord seer, who was sometimes regarded as a seer-sucker, had many gifts but none for making money. As Louisa put it in a letter to a publisher: “I too am sure that ‘he who giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord’ & on that principle devote time & earnings to the care of my father & mother, for one possesses no gift for money making & the other is now too old to work any longer for those who are happy & able to work for her.”

  The cost of coal, the price of shoes, discussions of ways and means, all the essentials of living formed an obbligato to Louisa’s early years, a background as basic to her life as romps with the neighboring Emerson children, berrying excursions with Henry David Thoreau, glimpses of a mysterious Hawthorne hovering in the Old Manse, and echoes of her fathers lofty discourses on universal love and Pythagorean diet. Returned from a lecture tour in the West, Bronson Alcott was asked, “Well, did people pay you?” He opened his pocketbook, flourished a single dollar bill, and replied, “Only that! My overcoat was stolen, and I had to buy a shawl. Many promises were not kept, and travelling is costly; but I have opened the way, and another year shall do better.” He was the recipient of gifts from his wife’s distinguished relatives, the Mays or Sewalls, or from his friend and neighbor the illustrious Ralph Waldo Emerson, who would place a bill under a book or behind a candlestick “when he thinks Father wants a little money, and no one will help him earn.”

  To solve the mundane question of ways and means, to pay the family debts and end the necessity for a charitable Alcott Sinking Fund, Louisa May Alcott was prepared to do any kind of work that offered, menial or mental. “Though an Alcott”—and Louisa underlined not the condition but the name—she would prove she could support herself. “I will make a battering-ram of my head,,, she wrote in her journal, “and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world.”

  She tried what was available, and what was not she tried to make available: teaching, working as a seamstress or as second girl, doing the wash at two dollars a week. At midcentury the family poverty had never been more extreme. At this juncture Louisa went out to service and garnered from her experience no money but a villain for her tales and a consuming inner fury to explode.

  The full story of what might be entitled “The Humiliation at Dedham” has never been told, although Louisa herself years later wrote a bowdlerized account of it in “How I Went Out to Service.” Since it was grist for the mill of a writer of thrillers, it merits recounting. At the difficult midcentury the Alcotts lived for a time in Boston, for it was better to be earning a living in a city than to be starving in a country paradise. Mrs. Alcott, the Marmee of the as yet unwritten Little Women, worked as a city missionary and opened an intelligence office. When an ancient gentleman from Dedham applied for a companion for his sister, Louisa decided to take the position herself. The gentleman—now for the first time identified as the Honorable James Richardson, Dedham lawyer, president of a local fire-insurance company, author of several orations, and devotee of the Muses—seemed to her tall, ministerial, refined. Waving black-gloved hands about, he assured her that his home was graced by books and pictures, flowers, a piano, the best of society. She would be one of the family, required to help only in the lighter work.

  Fortified by those assurances, Louisa in 1851, age nineteen, went out to service. The Richardson home was not precisely as it had been represented. The light housework included not only bed making but the kindling of fires and the destruction of cobwebs. What was more, Louisa was expected to play audience to Hon. James Richardson, who invited her into his study for oral readings or metaphysical discussions. The aged Richardson's attentions soon became maudlin. He plied her with poems while she washed the dishes and he left reproachful little notes under her door. Stranded on an island of water in a sea of soapsuds, Louisa finally delivered an ultimatum: she had come to serve as companion to Hon. James Richardson’s sister, not to him. As a result of her display of independence, all the household work was assigned to her: digging paths through the snow, fetching water from the well, splitting the kindling, and sifting the ashes. The final degradation was the command to polish the master’s muddy boots with the blacking hose, at which the young domestic balked. After seven week
s of drudgery she announced her intention of leaving. Richardson shut himself up in sulky retirement while his sister tucked a sixpenny pocketbook into Louisa’s chilblained hands. The pocketbook contained four dollars, which the outraged Alcotts returned to Dedham. Although Louisa subsequently made light of this experience in “How I Went Out to Service,” there can be no doubt that from her humiliation an anger was born that would express itself both obliquely and directly when she sat down to write her blood-and-thunder tales.

  Another devastating experience a few years later could also be caught in a net of words, provided the author remained anonymous. Frustrated in her attempts to find work—teaching Alice Lovering, sewing for Mrs. Reed or Mrs. Sargent—Louisa found that her courage had all but failed. As she looked at the waters of the Mill Dam she was tempted to find the solution of her problems in their oblivion. Though her immediate problem was resolved, surely that “Temptation at the Mill Dam,” however fleeting, became, along with the “Humiliation at Dedham,” part of the psychological equipment of a young woman who would shortly take her pen as her bridegroom.

  There was much else in Louisa’s life in Concord or Boston that formed part of that equipment. There were characters not merely in books but in life-like Hawthorne, whose dark figure had glided through the entry of a somber Manse, a fitting shadow to inhabit a house of shadows. There were fugitive slaves who passed through the village, a stop on the Underground Railway. There were the ghost stories with which Louisa thrilled the boys of Frank Sanborn’s school as apples and ginger cakes rounded out an Alcott Monday Evening. Surely the report of Professor Webster’s hanging for the murder of George Parkman at Harvard provided her with a store of bloodcurdling detail. Louisa’s short but indelible service as a nurse in the Civil War brought her a harvest of characters along with a shattering illness in which delirium alternated with unconsciousness, aspects of disease most adaptable to the blood-and-thunder variety of fiction. As companion to a sickly young woman, Louisa went abroad in 1865. Europe yielded her dramatis personae ranging from a Russian baron to an English colonel, from a mysterious lady resembling Marie Antoinette to a charming Polish boy. There too she saw Mazzini, pallid, diaphanous, wearing deep mourning for his country, the perfect hero for a dramatic destiny in a sensational story. For a Louisa Alcott who never stopped taking notes, Europe provided also a panorama of backgrounds—exotic, colorful, romantic. As her father wrote to her: “Your visit to Chillon and description of . . . the Prison, is as good for the romancer as for the poet, and this with the legend the best matereal [sic] for a story by the former.”

  Bronson Alcott called his scribbling daughter “an arsenal of powers.” In that arsenal was stored still another personal source for stories. All her life the redoubtable Louisa May Alcott had gone barnstorming and all her life she had dreamed of the ten dramatic passions. The “Louy Alcott troupe,” of which Louisa May, age ten, was author- director, gave way to family tableaux and dramatic performances in the Hillside barn. At fifteen Louisa dipped her pen into gaudy ink as, with her sister Anna, she wrote the scripts of a succession of melodramas whose titles and subtitles foreshadow those of the thrillers that were to come: “Norna; or, The Witch’s Curse”; “The Captive of Castile; or, The Moorish Maidens Vow.” The props and appurtenances, the backgrounds and characters of these early plays staged for the Concord neighbors are familiar to readers of blood-and-thunder tales: ghosts and stolen scrolls, duels and magic potions, dungeon cells and gloomy woods, murder and suicide.

  Throughout her life Louisa carried the theater with her wherever she went. She took the roles of director, author, and actress in drawingroom charades or plays in the Boston kitchen. With lightning changes of costume she ranged from a prince in silver armor to a murderer in chains, until she confided to her journal that she would be a Siddons if she could. From her later work in the Amateur Dramatic Company of Walpole and the Concord Dramatic Upion, Louisa gained a certain professionalism in her attitude toward the theater. In 1860 her farce, Nat Bachelors Pleasure Trip, was actually staged at the Howard Athenaeum, Boston, and the playwright received a bouquet as she viewed the performance from a private parlor box. Louisa received more than a bouquet from her experience in theatricals and her romance with greasepaint. She developed a skill in lively dialogue, in suspenseful plotting, and in broad-stroke character delineation, skills she would one day apply to her blood-and-thunder tales. “I fancy ‘lurid’ things,” she wrote in her 1850 journal, “if true and strong also”—a fancy she would gratify a decade later. Like many of the episodes of her life, Louisa’s addiction to the theater provided both a source and a training ground for what would follow.

  So too did her reading. Dickens she devoured, reading aloud with her sister Anna the dialogue of Sairey Gamp and Betsey Prig, thrilling to the tale of Reuben Haredale’s murder, reinaugurating the Pickwick Club in Concord. Books from Emersons study could be borrowed: Dante and Shakespeare, Carlyle and Goethe. “R.W.E. gave me ‘Wilhelm Meister,’” she noted, “and from that day Goethe has been my chief idol.” (Her chief idol, it needs no reminding, had delved into matters alchemical and antiquarian, and his Faust had made a world- famous pact with the devil.) The Heir of Redclyffe was a favorite of Louisa’s and so too was Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. Indeed, she was so enthralled by novels that in one lofty moment she “made a resolution to read fewer novels, and those only of the best.”

  There can be no doubt at all that the fiction addict Louisa Alcott dipped from time to time into the gore of the Gothic novel. In America that type of romance was so enthusiastically received that as early as 1797 both “dairymaid and hired hand” amused themselves “into an agreeable terror with the haunted houses and hobgoblins of Mrs. Radcliffe.” By the time she had become an omnivorous reader a host of Gothic novels was available to her in English or in English translation. In their pages Louisa could envision settings, mouth language, and cogitate themes. She could wander from ruined abbey to frowning castle, from haunted gallery and feudal hall to pathless forest and chilly catacomb. She could savor romantic words—repasts, casements, chambers. She could revel in unholy themes—deals with the devil and the raising of the dead, secret sects and supernatural agencies. Horace Walpole’s marvelous machinery, Mrs. Ann Rad- cliffe’s ghosts, Monk Lewis’s horrors, William Beckford’s Oriental terror, Ludwig Tieck’s vampires were all available to her. So too, of course, were the strange stories of Washington Irving, the haunting stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the subtle tales of Poe the master, whose horrors were the unknown horrors of the mind.

  Probably Louisa Alcott had been moved to write as soon as she had learned to read. The compulsion was hers early to combine threads of her own experience with the threads of the books she had read and interweave them into a fabric of her own creating. Her first published work was a poem, entitled “Sunlight,” that appeared in the September, 1851, issue of Petersons Magazine. Interestingly, it was pseudonymous, for it was signed “Flora Fairfield.” The poem was followed in May, 1852, by Louisa’s first published prose narrative, “The Rival Painters: A Tale of Rome,” for which the author received five dollars along with the delight of seeing her initials in print.

  Despite a devastating rebuke from the publisher James T. Fields, who advised her, “Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can’t write,” Louisa persisted. In 1854 “Flora Fairfield” adorned the Saturday Evening Gazette with “The Rival Prima Donnas,” a tale of vengeance in which one singer crushed her competitor to death by means of an iron ring placed upon her head. In the garret with her papers 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 t
o 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.