Monday, December 28 at 9 p.m. – American Masters "Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women"
(Rochester, NY) – The author of Little Women is an almost universally recognized name. Her reputation as a morally upstanding New England spinster, reflecting the conventional propriety of late 19th-century Concord, is firmly established. However, raised among reformers, Transcendentalists and skeptics, the intellectual protégé of Emerson and Hawthorne and Thoreau, Alcott was actually a free thinker with democratic ideals and progressive values about women — a worldly careerist of sorts. Most surprising is that she led, under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, a literary double life, undiscovered until the 1940s. As Barnard, Alcott penned scandalous, sensational works with characters running the gamut from murderers and revolutionaries to cross-dressers and opium addicts — a far cry from her familiar fatherly mentors, courageous mothers and appropriately impish children. American Masters "Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women" airs Monday, December 28 at 9 p.m. on WXXI-TV (DT21.1/cable1011/cable11)
Pictured: Louisa May Alcott, the celebrated author of Little Women , was actually a free thinker who led a literary double life, undiscovered until the 1940s, as the writer of 19th-century potboilers.
Credit: ©Orchard Hous
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