Louisa May Alcott, Major Author

Gregory Eiselein goes beyond Little Women to make the case that Louisa May Alcott, 150 years after the publication of her classic novel, should be studied and taught as “a major author.” Alcott, a writer with a large and varied body of work that is both important to literary studies and artistically admirable is now a canonical author, he argues, one with a significant collection of scholarly criticism about her fiction and nonfiction. While using Little Women as the touchstone for his argument, Eiselein explores Alcott’s output in various genres and examines how her reputation has developed over the years. A significant part of his essay lies in his discussion of how Alcott learned from the novels of Charles Dickens “how to use contraries as her chief stylistic and structural principal, how to combine or yoke together apparent opposites for sentimental, comic, dramatic, or intellectual effect.”