Alcott, Louisa May
Alcott's other novels for young readers include An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Eight Cousins (1875), and Under the Lilacs (1879). They all picture family life in Victorian America with warmth and perception. She also wrote novels for adults, including Work (1873), which is grounded in Alcott's experiences as a breadwinner for her family, and the unfinished Diana and Persis, an examination of the relationship between two women artists. Another adult volume, the novel A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866), which was originally rejected by her publisher as too sensational, was discovered in manuscript in the early 1990s and finally published in 1995. In 1996 yet another manuscript was unearthed; it contained Alcott's very first novel, written for young people, entitled The Inheritance and composed in 1849 when the author was 18.
See her letters and journal, ed. by E. D. Cheney (1889, repr. 1966); Journals of Louisa May Alcott, ed. by J. Myerson et al. (1989); Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, ed. by J. Myerson et al. (1987); biographies by K. S. Anthony (1938, repr. 1977) and S. Elbert (1984); dual biography of Bronson and Louisa May Alcott by J. Matteson (2009); E. LaPlante, Marmee & Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother (2012); studies by R. L. MacDonald (1983) and C. Strickland (1985).
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