ABSTRACT
Under the name A.M. Barnard, Louisa May Alcott published Behind a Mask: or, A Woman’s Power in The Flag of Our Union in four installments during October and November 1866. While many of these stories did not make their way into print in British publications, there are several angles to reading Alcott transatlantically. Scholars such as Elaine Showalter have linked Alcott’s American brand of sensation fiction to recycled portrayals of powerful, ambitious heroines from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Wilkie Collins’s Armadale. After her prizewinning thriller “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Alcott continued to publish anonymously several sensational stories in this weekly periodical modeled after the Illustrated London News. “A Pair of Eyes” appeared anonymously in Frank Leslie’s in two installments in late October 1863. Although Alcott’s celebrated Little Women (1868-69) and its sequels were circulated in Britain, her earlier sensation stories remained anonymous and were only in print in the United States.
