The passionate supporter of abolition and women's rights speaks out on the most controversial issues of the day.

PBS and HBO documentary scriptwriter Harriet Reisen reveals the extraordinary woman behind the beloved American classic as never before. Louisa May Alcott is the perfect gift for fans of Little Women and of Greta Gerwig's adaptation starring Meryl Streep, Emma Watson, and Saoirse Ronan. “At last, Louisa May Alcott has the biography that admirers of Little Women might have hoped for.” —The Wall Street Journal's 10 Best Books of the Year A fresh, modern take on the remarkable Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Reisen's vivid biography explores the author's life in the context of her works, many of which are to some extent autobiographical. Although Alcott secretly wrote pulp fiction, harbored radical abolitionist views, and served as a Civil War nurse, her novels went on to sell more copies than those of Herman Melville and Henry James. Stories and details culled from Alcott's journals, together with revealing letters to family, friends, and publishers, plus recollections of her famous contemporaries, provide the basis for this lively account of the author's classic rags-to-riches tale.

Although the publication of Little Women in 1868 earned Louisa May Alcott tremendous popularity, for a long time she was thought of as a writer of children's stories and considered—at best—a minor figure in the American literary canon. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, Alcott's vast body of work is being celebrated alongside the greatest American writers, and this collection shows why. The Portable Louisa May Alcott samples the entire spectrum of Alcott's work: her novels, novellas, children's stories, sensationalist fiction, gothic tales, essays, letters, and journals. Presenting her more daring works, such as Moods and Behind a Mask (both reprinted in their entirety), alongside the familiar heroines of Little Women, this singular collection offers readers a rich and wide-ranging portrait of this talented, prolific, and influential writer.

This collection is the first academic study of the captivating life and career of expatriate artist, writer, and activist, May Alcott Nieriker. Nieriker is known as the sister of Louisa May Alcott and model for "Amy March" in Alcott’s Little Women. As this book reveals, she was much more than "Amy"—she had a more significant impact on the Concord community than her sister and later became part of the creative expat community in Europe. There, she imbued her painting with the abolitionist activism she was exposed to in childhood and pursued an ideal of artistic genius that opposed her sister’s vision of self-sacrifice. Embarking on a career that took her across London, Paris, and Rome, Nieriker won the acclaim of John Ruskin and forged a network of expatriate female painters who changed the face of nineteenth-century art, creating opportunities for women that lasted well into the twentieth century. A "Renaissance woman," Nieriker was a travel writer, teacher, and curator. She is recovered here as a transdisciplinary subject who stands between disciplines, networks, and ideologies—stiving to recognize the dignity of others. Contributors include foundational Alcott scholar Daniel Shealy and Pulitzer Prize winner John Matteson, as well as Curators, Jan Turnquist (Orchard House) and Amanda Burdan (Brandywine River Museum of Art). In this book, readers will become acquainted with a dynamic feminist thinker who transforms our understanding of the place of women artists in the wider cultural and intellectual life of nineteenth-century Britain, France, and the United States.

"Literary Spinoffs: Rewriting the Canon Re-Imagining the Community" explores the literary strategies, theoretical dimensions, and cultural implications of contemporary rewritings of nineteenth-century classics. By hooking on to powerful literary and cultural narratives, literary spinoffs seek to interfere with the cultural imaginary and revise the ways in which the cultural community constructs itself via formative narratives. Spengler offers in-depth case studies of prominent contemporary rewritings and the cultural work they undertake, while also examining the genre s particular aesthetics and effects. Through their intensely intertextual form, spinoffs raise urgent questions about the possibilities for participation in processes of cultural meaning-making and invigorate contemporary debates about intellectual property, cultural capital, as well as high and popular culture. "

In Relative Races, Brigitte Fielder presents an alternative theory of how race is ascribed. Contrary to notions of genealogies by which race is transmitted from parents to children, the examples Fielder discusses from nineteenth-century literature, history, and popular culture show how race can follow other directions: Desdemona becomes less than fully white when she is smudged with Othello's blackface, a white woman becomes Native American when she is adopted by a Seneca family, and a mixed-race baby casts doubt on the whiteness of his mother. Fielder shows that the genealogies of race are especially visible in the racialization of white women, whose whiteness often depends on their ability to reproduce white family and white supremacy. Using black feminist and queer theories, Fielder presents readings of personal narratives, novels, plays, stories, poems, and images to illustrate how interracial kinship follows non-heteronormative, non-biological, and non-patrilineal models of inheritance in nineteenth-century literary culture.

Taken together, the fourteen essays in this collection contribute to the discourse of social conditions for literary women. The essays examine relevant social, intellectual, and professional questions about the ways in which women writers contributed to conceptions of womanhood in nineteenth and twentieth century Anglophone literary culture. Contributors to this collection describe and examine several nineteenth and twentieth century women writers’ responses to patriarchal assumptions about literary merit in genres including poetry and fiction. Womanhood in Anglophone Literary Culture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Perspectives will be of special interest to students and faculty of women’s studies and literature written in the English language.