SOURCE: '"Did they never see anyone angry before?': The Sexual Politics of Self-Control in Alcott's 'A Whisper in the Dark,'" in Legacy, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 31-9.

In the following essay, Carpenter studies the theme of repressed rage in "A Whisper in the Dark," commenting that "the text should be viewed as a battleground not only for its characters but for its author as well."

Anger and passion are emotions that Louisa May Alcott's biographers strongly associate with her thrillers, those lurid gothic tales she published largely pseudonymously or anonymously between 1863 and 1869 in such popular periodicals as Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, The Flag of Our Union, and the Ten Cent Novelette Series. Biographer and editor Madeleine Stern, speculating on Alcott's rare publication of one of these stories under her own name, identifies the common subject matter of the thrillers as female rage: "The possibility suggests itself...