WORCESTER, Mass. - The American Antiquarian Society in Worcester may be home to several pieces of work by Louisa May Alcott, the author of "Little Women."
Scholar Max Chapnick believes he's found almost two dozen stories and poems written by Alcott under her own name and pseudonyms for Massachusetts newspapers. They date back to the late 1850s and early 1860s.
The society said Chapnick found a story by E.H. Gould, believed to be one of Alcott’s pseudonyms, about her house in Concord. He also found poems written by Flora Fairfield, a known pseudonym of Alcott’s, and discovered a first edition of "Little Women."
"In the 1800s, many authors wrote under a pseudonym, many women wrote under pseudonym, women of color wrote under pseudonym,” said Elizabeth Watts Pope of the American Antiquarian Society. “So this was something that was an established practice, sometimes for anonymity, obviously because they might not have wanted it known everything that they were writing.
"But also there seems to have been a kind of a playfulness to this too, sometimes where people in the mid-19th Century would try and guess who had written something. So I love this idea of these things, whether they’re written by Louisa May Alcott or not, and we think they were, that she is kind of playing with us 150 years in the future. We’re still trying to guess were they written by her or not."
Alcott is best known for “Little Women,” published in two installments in 1868 and 1869. It's been adapted several times into feature films, most recently in 2019.