SOURCE: "Mysteries of Louisa May Alcott," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXV, No. 14, September, 28, 1978, pp. 61-3.

In the following excerpt, Douglas contrasts Alcott's sensation stories with her popular juvenile writings and concludes that "the little girls of Alcott's later work have something in common with the femmes fatales of her early books."

It is in her first novel Moods (1864) and the subsequent anonymous or pseudonymous "thrillers" she [Alcott] wrote for the popular periodical press during the 1860s, in the years immediately preceding Little Women, and now republished by Madeleine Stern, that we find some of Alcott's most powerful and revealing insights. On these [Martha] Saxton rightly bases her critical re-evaluation of Louisa May Alcott.

During this period, Alcott was following the English masters of the so-called "sensation" novel. Dickens's Great Expectations and Little Dorrit, Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne, Wilkie Collins's Woman in White, and...