Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott

For decades readers accepted Louisa May Alcott's sentimental portrayal of the domestic world of women and children as evidence of wholehearted support of the conservative ideologies of Victorian America. The women's movement of the 1970s sparked a re-examination of Alcott's writings, revealing a more radical vein but failing to establish the extent to which this impulse was realized. In this study, Elizabeth Keyser examines representative works from the various genres in which Alcott wrote, uncovering self-portraits of metafictions that convey what it meant to be a Victorian woman writer.