A Strange Life: Selected Essays of Louisa May Alcott
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Collected together for the very first time, witty and wide-ranging essays from the celebrated author of Little Women.
Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) is, of course, best known as the author of Little Women (1868). But she was also a noted essayist who wrote on a wide range of subjects, including her father’s failed utopian commune, the benefits of an unmarried life, and her experience as a young woman sent to work in service to alleviate her family’s poverty. Her first literary success was a contemporary close-up account of the American Civil War, brilliantly depicted in Hospital Sketches, which was drawn from her own experience of serving as an army nurse near the nation’s capital. As with her famous novel, Alcott writes these essays with clear observation, unforgettable scenes, and one of the sharpest wits in American literature.
Blending gentle satire with reportage and emotive autobiography, Alcott’s exquisite essays are as exceptional as the novels she is known for. Published together for the first time, this delightful selection shows us another side to one of our most celebrated writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Editor Rosenberg (Sorrows, Scribbles, and Russet Leather Boots) assembles in this elegant anthology some of 19th-century novelist Alcott's most notable nonfiction. In "Hospital Sketches," Alcott lyrically recounts working as a nurse in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War, writing of a soldier she tended who died of his injuries: "He vanished, like a drop in that red sea upon whose shores so many women stand lamenting." Her humor and vivaciousness are on display in "How I Went Out to Service," in which she describes her brief stint as a domestic servant for a Boston family of declining fortunes when she was 15 and offers a nauseatingly vivid sketch of the priggish scion who insisted on inviting Alcott to his "charming room" so he could read Hegel to her. The standout "Transcendental Wild Oats" provides a droll account of Fruitlands, the short-lived utopian community founded by Alcott's father in the 1840s. She wryly notes that the idealistic residents walked back their ban on animal labor after a few days of "blistered hands and aching backs suggested the expediency of permitting the use of cattle" to plow fields. Filled with scintillating prose and amusing stories, this persuasively makes the case that Alcott's essays have been unjustly overlooked.
