Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

The five stories in this collection, published in serial form in the 1860s, were recently found to have been written anonymously by Alcott. Set against florid, romantic Victorian backdrops are plots that mine popular themes of the daymesmerism, Indian cults, death vows, doomed love. Written to hold the attention of a newspaper audience, the tales move along briskly. Readers will be immediately drawn into ``A Pair of Eyes,'' about a painter spellbound by his model for Lady Macbeth. ``The Fate of the Forrests,'' which hinges on a family curse, and ``A Double Tragedy: An Actor's Story,'' a story of jealousy and revenge set in a theatrical company, although well drawn, are almost campy in their melodrama. Based on The Tempest, ``Ariel, A Legend of the Lighthouse'' has an evocative, stormy coastal setting, but a familiar plot of love lost and then refound on the brink of death. ``Taming the Tartar'' is likewise unoriginal but is saved by its lively characters and offbeat ending, where its irrepressible heroine gets the last word. Stern's introduction is shallow and offers little more than vague generalizations about Alcott's life and work. Illustrations not seen by PW. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

The rediscovery and reissuing of Louisa May Alcott's pseudonymous thrillers, which began in the mid-'70s with the publication of Madeleine Stern's Alcott anthologies Behind a Mask (CH, Nov '75), and Plots and Counterplots (CH, Oct '76), continues here as Stern returns five more Alcott sensation tales to print: "A Pair of Eyes," "The Fate of the Forrests," "A Double Tragedy," "Ariel. A Legend of the Lighthouse," and "Taming a Tartar." Alcott referred to these stories as "rubbish {{that}} keeps the pot boiling"; indeed, there is evidence of facile carelessness in the composition, and many a wildly melodramatic scene and plot turns on occult premises or on evocation of situations and settings that the author herself knew more from literature and fantasy than from observation. But "rubbish" these stories decidedly are not: the fantasies are often intensely compelling, and the literature with which these tales are most in dialogue is Shakespeare, Hawthorne, and Poe. The tales at their best spin out meditations on human pride, obsession, and power relations between the sexes that are as subtle and ambivalent as much-anthologized tales of Hawthorne. Two are especially poignant as they work out respectively the destructive and the creative potential in the power play between man and woman in love. Alcott's insistence on mutuality offers a sharp corrective not only to the dominant cultural assumptions of the day but to her own voicing of those assumptions in her popular domestic novels from Little Women on. For academic, secondary school, and public libraries. -E. S. Apthorp, San Jose State University

Booklist Review

With Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott (Booklist 72:23 S 1 75), readers were introduced to the broader range of exciting fiction written by the author of Little Women. The revelations continue with this recently discovered quintet of eerie tales, all published anonymously in newspapers and magazines during the mid-1880s. Alcott's subjects include a rumored mermaid (who turns out to be a young woman), a fierce-tempered Russian prince who falls under the spell of a stalwart young Englishwoman, and other equally pot-boiling plots. Watching Alcott's imagination, experience, and literary background at work on these tales is as exciting as the stories themselves. Editor Madeleine B. Stern provides an insightful introduction in which she discusses how the stories were discovered and mentions intriguing links between Alcott's life, her family-oriented fiction, and her atypical thrillers. DPD. [OCLC] 87-37827

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

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 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)