Moods by Louisa May Alcott

Description

Before Jo March there was Sylvia Yule, almost as headstrong and considerably less lucky. Alcott’s first novel puts her heroine in a room of weather and shadow, a woman of passionate and changeable temperament who believes she can improve herself into steadiness. She loves a man who leaves her, and marries another in a mood of duty and exhaustion that hardens, page by page, into an arrangement neither of them can quite read.

What makes Moods more than an early curio is the honesty of its difficulty. The returning lover, the good husband and the wife who loves both and belongs to neither compose a triangle that Alcott refuses to resolve by villainy or convenience. The book was revised in 1882, and both versions argue the same stubborn point: that a woman’s nature is not a matter for management, and that the marriage question cannot be settled by any man’s case, only by her own.

Why Moods deserves its readers

• Alcott’s rare, clear-eyed portrait of romantic temperament in a woman.
• A serious American novel of the marriage question before the phrase was common.
• All the vividness of Little Women without the safety net.

About This DodaBooks Edition

All 26 chapters are reset in clean, continuous type with a working index.