{"id":403664,"date":"2024-01-19T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-19T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=403664"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T14:00:00","slug":"Scholar-discovers-stories-poems-possibly-written-by-Louisa-May-Alcott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/Scholar-discovers-stories-poems-possibly-written-by-Louisa-May-Alcott\/","title":{"rendered":"Scholar discovers stories, poems possibly written by Louisa May Alcott"},"content":{"rendered":"

WORCESTER, Mass.<\/strong> (AP) \u2014The author of \u201cLittle Women\u201d may have been even more productive and sensational than previously thought.<\/p>\n

Max Chapnick, a postdoctoral teaching associate at Northeastern University, believes he found about 20 stories and poems written by Louisa May Alcott under her own name as well as pseudonyms for local newspapers in Massachusetts in the late 1850s and early 1860s.<\/p>\n

One of the pseudonyms is believed to be E. H. Gould, including a story about her house in Concord, Massachusetts, and a ghost story along the lines of the Charles Dickens classic \u201cA Christmas Carol.\u201d He also found four poems written by Flora Fairfield, a known pseudonym of Alcott\u2019s. One of the stories written under her own name was about a young painter.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s saying she\u2019s really like … she\u2019s hustling, right? She\u2019s publishing a lot,\u201d Chapnick said on a visit to the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, a national research library of pre-20th century American history and culture that has some of the stories Chapnick discovered in its collection as well as a first edition of \u201cLittle Women.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alcott remains best known for \u201cLittle Women,\u201d published in two installments in 1868-69. Her classic coming-of-age novel about the four March sisters \u2014 Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy \u2014 has been adapted several times into feature films, most recently by Greta Gerwig in 2019.<\/p>\n

Chapnick discovered Alcott\u2019s other stories as part of his research into spiritualism and mesmerism. As he scrolled through digitized newspapers from the American Antiquarian Society, he found a story titled \u201cThe Phantom.\u201d After seeing the name Gould at the end of the story, he initially dismissed it as Alcott\u2019s story.<\/p>\n

But then he read the story again.<\/p>\n

Chapnick found the name Alcott in the story \u2014 a possible clue \u2014 and saw that it was written about the time she would have been publishing similar stories. The story was also in the Olive Branch, a newspaper that had previously published her work.<\/p>\n

As Chapnick searched through newspapers at the society and the Boston Public Library, he found more written by Gould \u2014 though he admits definitive proof they were written by Alcott\u2019s has proven elusive.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of circumstantial evidence to indicate that this is probably her,\u201d said Chapnick, who last year published a paper on his discoveries in J19, the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. \u201cI don\u2019t think that there\u2019s definitive evidence either way yet. I\u2019m interested in gathering more of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

When first contacted by Chapnick about the writings, Gregory Eiselein, president of the Louisa May Alcott Society, said he was curious but skeptical.<\/p>\n

\u201cOver my more than thirty-year career as a literary scholar, I\u2019ve received a variety of inquiries, emails, and manuscripts that propose the discovery of a new story by Louisa Alcott,\u201d Eiselein, also a professor at Kansas State University, said in an email interview. \u201cTypically, they turn out to be a known, though not famous, text, or a story re-printed under a new title for a different newspaper or magazine.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he has come to believe that Chapnick has found new stories, many of which shed light on Alcott\u2019s early career.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat stands out to me is the impressive range and variety of styles in Alcott\u2019s early published works,\u201d he said. \u201cShe writes sentimental poetry, thrilling supernatural stories, reform-minded non-fiction, work for children, work for adults, and more. It\u2019s also fascinating to see how Alcott uses, experiments with, and transforms the literary formulas popular in the 1850s.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another Alcott scholar at Kansas State, Anne Phillips, said she was \u201cexcited\u201d by Chapnick\u2019s scholarship and said his paper makes a \u201ccompelling case\u201d that these were her writings.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlcott scholars have had decades to compare her work in different genres, and that background is going to help us evaluate these new findings,\u201d she said in an email interview.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe reworked and reused names and situations and details and expressions, and we have a good, broad base from which to begin considering these new discoveries,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s also something distinctive about her writing voice, across genres.\u201d<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the first time that scholars have found stories written by Alcott under a pseudonym.<\/p>\n

In the 1940s, Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern found thrillers written under the name A. M. Barnard was an Alcott pseudonym. She also wrote nonfiction stories, including about the Civil War where she served as a nurse, under the pseudonym Tribulation Periwinkle.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t unusual for female writers, especially during this period, to use a pseudonym. In the case of Alcott, she may have wanted to protect her family\u2019s reputation, since her family who though poor had wealthy connections that dated back to the American Revolutionary War.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe might not have wanted them to know she was writing trashy stories about sex and ghosts and whatever,\u201d Chapnick said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think she was canny,\u201d he continued. \u201cShe had an inkling that she would be a famous writer and she was trying to experiment and she didn\u2019t want her experimentation to get in the way of her future career. So she was writing under a pseudonym to sort of like protect her future reputation.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the American Antiquarian Society, a researcher eagerly awaited the arrival of Chapnick earlier this month. For them, this find is validation that their collection of nearly 4 million books, newspapers, periodicals, manuscripts and pamphlets is a boon to researchers studying early American history. Many of their holdings are salvaged from attics, antique shops, book fairs, garage sales.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re keeping these things for a reason. We\u2019re not just keeping them to hoard them and pile them up,\u201d Elizabeth Pope, the curator of books and digitized collections at the society. \u201cWe\u2019re thrilled when people can find stories in them.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Chapnick, the collections offer the possibility of finding additional Alcott stories \u2014 including those written under other pseudonyms.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe detective work is fun. The not knowing is kind of fun. I both wish and don\u2019t wish that there would be a smoking gun, if that makes sense,\u201d he said. \u201cIt would be great to find out one way or the other, but not knowing is also very interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WORCESTER, Mass. (AP) \u2014The author of \u201cLittle Women\u201d may have been even more productive and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-403664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}