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| AlcottWeb: Home | Connecticut Living Alcott Scholar Riding Crest of Writer's Revival Jocelyn McClurg, Courant Book Editor 05/31/96 The Hartford Courant STATEWIDE Page E1 Copyright The Hartford Courant 1996. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. Madeleine Stern, who has devoted many of her 83 years to the study of Louisa May Alcott , is no great fan of the recent film adaptation of "Little Women." The 1994 movie helped make Alcott one of the hottest literary properties around -- a century after her death. "It was a little too saccharine and a little too sweet, and Winona Ryder is too beautiful to be Jo March. And they did a little too much rewriting," Stern contends. But as for the recent Alcott revival, Stern says: "I think it's wonderful. She's a great writer who's still viable today, who deserves to be read by men as well as by women and children." Stern acknowledges that she, too, has benefited from the Alcott resurgence. Her 1950 biography of Alcott, considered a classic by scholars, was reissued this spring in paperback by Random House, with a new introduction by the author. Last year, William Morrow reprinted the 1975 book "Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott ," which Stern edited. Stern's imprint is also on several other recent Alcott reissues, including "Modern Magic" from Modern Library, a compilation of Alcott thrillers, edited and with an introduction by Stern. Stern's important contributions to Alcott scholarship will be honored during a banquet Saturday at Trinity College, along with those of Leona Rostenberg, Stern's lifelong friend and partner in a New York rare-books firm. Both women are traveling from their apartment on New York's Upper East Side to attend the dinner, which is part of a four-day academic conference at Trinity called "19th Century American Women Writers in the 21st Century." Sponsored by Trinity, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center and the Northeast 19th Century American Women Writers Group, the conference, which opened last night, has drawn nearly 300 scholars to Hartford. (It is not open to the public.) Stern and Rostenberg met in 1930, when Stern was a Barnard freshman and Rostenberg a senior at New York University. After they graduated, Stern taught English in a New York public high school ("I hated it"), and Rostenberg opened a rare-book business. Stern had already published a 1942 biography on Margaret Fuller when Rostenberg suggested she take on Alcott. "I had loved her works as a child and adolescent, and I felt that a truly modern biography was needed," Stern recalls in an interview by phone from her New York apartment. A Eureka! moment Perhaps the most significant moment of research came in 1942, when the two women were in Harvard's Houghton Library, trying to confirm their suspicion that Alcott had led "a double literary life" by writing racy "sensation stories" either anonymously or under a pseudonym. As though it were yesterday, Stern remembers the moment in the silent library when Rostenberg came upon a group of letters to Alcott from James R. Elliott of Elliott, Thomes and Talbot. "We would like more stories from you," he wrote, ". . . and if you prefer you may use the pseudonym of A.M. Barnard or any other man's name if you will." "All of a sudden, there was a war whoop from Leona," Stern recalls. The next year, Rostenberg published a paper announcing the discovery of A.M. Barnard, and in her 1950 biography, Stern wrote extensively of Alcott's "blood-and-thunder" stories. But it wasn't until 1974 that Stern had the "brainstorm" to bring together and publish the adult fiction that revealed a darker side of the author of "Little Women." The result was 1975's "Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott ." It created a sensation. "Even Barbara Walters interviewed me on the `Today' show," Stern says. Several more volumes of Alcott's "lost" thrillers followed. Publishers go overboard Now, in the 1990s, Alcott has made news again -- and not just because of the "Little Women" remake. Last year, Random House paid a reported seven-figure sum to collector Kent Bicknell to publish "A Long Fatal Love Chase," a Gothic romance by Alcott that was rejected during her lifetime as too long and too sensational. In her new introduction to " Louisa May Alcott ," Stern wryly writes of "A Long Fatal Love Chase": "A century later, nothing can be too long or too sensational." And on May 1, two professors announced that they had discovered a lost Alcott manuscript at Harvard's Houghton Library. Publishers and film companies immediately lined up to bid on "The Inheritance," Alcott's very first novel. Stern appears unimpressed. She gave "The Inheritance" a one-line mention 46 years ago in her Alcott biography. "Obviously, I didn't think too highly of it," she says. "I don't remember it very well." Stern's reaction to the large sum paid for "A Long Fatal Love Chase" and the excitement over "The Inheritance"? "I think scholarship sometimes is converted into dollarship." Whether those two works deserve to be published or not, Stern has little doubt that Alcott's best-loved work, "Little Women," will endure. "Recently Leona was listening to an audio version of the book, and she said, `I don't see how young people today can take to this story as much as they did in the past.' I don't really agree. It may be more remote than it was in the early 20th century, but it has a universality about it that everybody longs for, the feelings of domesticity, the loving family. And it's beautifully, beautifully narrated." Now in their 80s, Stern and Rostenberg (also an author and expert in 17th-century English publishing history) are still working. Their current project is a joint autobiography about their lives together, which Doubleday will publish. Stern says they are up to 1947, "just back from our first book-buying trip abroad." The collaboration, not their first, has been a challenge. "It's harder to write about yourself," Stern says, "than about other people." |
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