Louisa May Alcott used pen names. A researcher thinks he found another

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https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/10/31/louisa-may-alcott-pen-names-new-pseudonym

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Louisa May Alcott used pen names. A researcher thinks he found another

A researcher believes he has a batch of 14 previously unattributed works written by the author of “Little Women” — under a pseudonym. Louisa May Alcott was known to publish under various names throughout her writing career, but this discovery marks the first time any new pseudonym has been linked to Alcott since the 1940s.

Dr. Max Chapnick sifted through libraries and digital archives for weeks at a time. He was searching for undiscovered works by Alcott, and he had little luck, until one day, when he found a promising short story published in an 1860 newspaper. The writing had signature traits of Alcott’s work, but there was one significant issue: the byline underneath a short story, called “The Phantom,” credited an author named E. H. Gould.

Chapnick dismissed the story as yet another unfruitful leg of his search. He went to bed, fell asleep and woke with a feeling of eureka. “At like 1 a.m. I woke up and I was like, ‘Oh, wait, what if it is? What if the story is by her and it's a pseudonym?’” Chapnick recalled.

Alcott used aliases throughout her career for varying reasons. A. M. Barnard, Flora Fairfield, Tribulation Periwinkle and simply L. M. A. are among the most notable. Like her anonymously published works, pseudonyms with first initials such as A. M. Barnard gave Alcott an opportunity to take her pen to more controversial subjects and styles. Some of these names were known during Alcott’s life and many more in 1950 when Madeline Stern published findings from her research throughout the 1940s. Her work set off a chain reaction of new attributions for decades and built to a crescendo of feminist commentary in the 1980s and 90s.

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