Louisa May Alcott And Charlotte Bronte

Doyle demonstrates that Alcott kept up a running dialogue with her distinguished British counterpart, both contesting and adapting Bronts treatments of woments spiritual, social, and vocational lives so as to develop her own distinctively American talent. Elizabeth Keyser, author of Whispers in the Dark: The Fiction of Louisa May Alcott Doyle provides an illuminating discussion of the full range of Louise May Alcotts writing. Comparisons with Charlotte Bront spark keen insights into literary traditions and cultural events. General readers will enjoy this book; Alcott and Bront scholars will need it. Beverly Lyon Clark, author of Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys The work and life of British author Charlotte Bront fascinated Americas Louisa May Alcott throughout her own literary career. As a nineteenth-century writer struggling with many of the same themes and issues as Bront, Alcott was drawn toward her British counterpart, but cultural differences created a literary distance between them sometimes as wide as the Atlantic. In this comparative study, Christine Doyle explores some of the intriguing parallels and differences between the two writers backgrounds as she traces specific references to Bront and her worknot only in Alcotts childrens fiction, but also in her novels for adults and sensation fiction. Doyle compares the treatment of three themes important to both writersspirituality, interpersonal relations, and womens workshowing how Alcott translated Bronts British reserve and gender- and class-based repression into her own American optimism and progressivism. In her early career, Alcott was so fascinated by Bronts works that she patterned many of her characters on those of Bront; she later adapted these British elements into a more recognizably American form, producing independent, strong heroines. In observing differences between the writers, Doyle notes that Alcott expresses less anti-Catholic sentiment than does Bront. She also discusses the authors attitudes toward the theater, showing how for Bront drama is associated with falseness and hypocrisy, while for Alcott it is a profession that expresses possibilities of power and revelation. Throughout her insightful analysis, Doyle shows that Alcott responds as a uniquely American writer to the problems of American literature and life while never denying the powerful transatlantic influence exerted by Bront. Doyles work reflects a wide range of scholarship, solidly grounded in an understanding of the Victorian temperament, nineteenth-century British and American literature, and recent Alcott criticism and gives fuller voice to the multiple dimensions of Alcott as a nineteenth-century writer.