New Louisa May Alcott Pieces: Radical Sensation in a Culture of Ambiguous Attribution

Abstract: This essay introduces a set of published but as-yet-unidentified Louisa May Alcott work including: pieces under Alcott's own name that are certainly Alcott's, pieces published anonymously or under known pseudonyms that are very likely Alcott's, and pieces published under a likely new pseudonym, I. or E. H. Gould, that are probably Alcott's. The uncertainty of authorship presented here aims to raise methodological and historicist questions about the author-function in a culture of ambiguous attribution: that writers in Alcott's time participated in author guessing-games and that today's scholarship could be more willing to engage the possibilities of not knowing. Focusing on the fiction, this essay argues that the new pieces from the 1850s produce a reassessment of Alcott's career: rather than her 1860s sensation fiction leading to the later domestic fiction, the sensation fiction of the 1860s itself emerges from years of earlier experimentation. As representative of the newly identified fiction, this essay introduces one short story under Alcott's own name and one short story under the Gould pseudonym.