Louisa May Alcott's father(s) and "The Marble Woman"

Since 1975, scholars of Louisa May Alcott have recovered thirty-three hitherto unknown gothic "thrillers," as she called them, published anonymously in popular magazines and "story papers" such as The Flag of Our Union, from 1863-1872. Many readers who love her domestic books are probably surprised or shocked. Her subject matter is sensational: dark, dangerous men, some aggressive heroines, gloomy mansions, hashish, and even opium. She preferred these popular stories to her domestic fiction, written at the same time and which she found a bore. In writing the thrillers, she became caught up in what she called a "vortex," days of non-stop writing, little sleep, and almost nothing to eat. Cheney says she feared a "break-down" (317). In contrast, composing the domestics was drudgery, of which she complained loudly and often in her letters and journals. Ironically, though, their popularity and the demand for more fueled another obsession: to write for the money. Nevertheless, she did not abandon the thriller character types, for they appeared in what she called an "adult novel," Moods, and in a later work, A Modern Mephistopheles (1877). Rather than our simply dismissing them as interesting oddities, the thrillers appear to veil a hidden Louisa May Alcott, a side of her nature that never developed publicly. In them, she said she could express a strong element of her personality that she called "Spanish." The entire family shared the opinion that Abby, her mother, and Louisa were alike with their dark hair, olive skin, and tempestuous personalities, which they believed came from some Spanish strain in the May family. Louisa once claimed to have a dual self, labeling one the Saxon self, sweet and submissive, and the other, the Spanish self, passionate and unruly. From all the biographers' accounts, though, the sweet self seldom appeared, and Louisa's strong will and love for independence marked her out from the other sisters. Her father, Bronson, was puzzled by her "earthy self," "'violent, tumultuous and uncontrolled'-too much like her mother for his comfort" (Bedell 243). The Spanish persona, Alcott said, "mess [es] up my work" on the thrillers "in a queer but interesting way" (qtd. in Cheney 132), suggesting that she was drawn more to this persona. Perhaps Louisa's glee in writing these "blood & thunder...