Louisa May Alcott is one of those authors I enjoyed much more as a child, when the more treacly moralizing elements of her most popular books flew right over my head. As an adult, I find it harder to tolerate, an opinion that Alcott evidently shared. So I'd only ever revisited one of them -- Little Women, of course -- for its dance references. But I was nonetheless quite intrigued to read last month that a newly-discovered early story fragment by Alcott, dated 1849, when she was only seventeen, and containing a masquerade ball scene, would be published in the next issue of Strand Magazine, dated February-May 2020 but being released, no doubt for pandemic-related reasons, in late June. I promptly ordered a copy, which finally turned up in the mail this week.
As noted, Aunt Nellie's Diary is only a fragment, around nine thousand words, and ending, literally, in mid-sentence: "I begged and prayed she would..." The story is set up fully, however, and the general direction is clear: the orphaned Annie and her friend Isabel come to stay with Annie's Aunt Nellie, along with the handsome Edward, who is recovering from illness. Annie is gentle and innocent; Isabel is both colder and more flirtatious. Edward is too good to be true. Isabel is interested in Edward, but he is clearly smitten by Annie. It seems obvious that they would have ended up together, while Isabel likely would have repented of her less-than-perfect ways and wound up with the fiancé she had jilted before the story began, who reappears dramatically at the masquerade ball just before the fragment ends. This is very like far too much of the other nineteenth-century women's fiction I periodically wade through looking for dance references, though even at seventeen, Alcott is a noticeably better writer than most.
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