This revelatory portrait will present the popular author as she was and as she has never been seen before. A fresh, modern take on this remarkable and prolific writer, who secretly authored pulp fiction, harbored radical abolitionist views, and completed heroic service as a Civil War nurse, Louisa May Alcott is in the end also the story of how the all-time beloved American classic Little Women came to be. This biography explores Alcott’s life in the context of her works, all of which are to some extent autobiographical. Stories and details culled from Alcott’s journals her equally rich letters to family, friends, publishers, and admiring readers and the correspondence, journals, and recollections of her family, friends, and famous contemporaries provide the basis for this lively account of the author’s classic rags-to-riches tale.Īlcott would become the equivalent of a multimillionaire in her lifetime based on the astounding sales of her books, leaving contemporaries like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James in the dust. Louisa May Alcott portrays a writer as worthy of interest in her own right as her most famous character, Jo March, and addresses all aspects of Alcott’s life: the effect of her father’s self-indulgent utopian schemes her family’s chronic economic difficulties and frequent uprootings her experience as a nurse in the Civil War the loss of her health and frequent recourse to opiates in search of relief from migraines, insomnia, and symptomatic pain. Success soon followed for Mary, but also great tragedy and misfortune.Ĭatherine Reef brings this passionate woman, brilliant writer, and forgotten feminist into crisp focus, detailing a life that was remarkable both before and after the publication of her iconic masterpiece.Ī vivid, energetic account of the life of Louisa May Alcott, whose work has delighted millions of readers It was there, during a cold and wet summer, that she first imagined her story about a mad scientist who brought a corpse back to life. Mary ran away to Lake Geneva with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was just sixteen. The story of Frankenstein’s creator is a strange, romantic, and tragic one, as deeply compelling as the novel itself.

On the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein,comes a riveting biography of its author, Mary Shelley, whose life reads like a dark gothic novel, filled with scandal, death, drama, and one of the strangest love stories in literary history. I am so embarrassed and I have absolutely no excuses.

Mary Shelley by Catherine Reef