Behind a Mask: A Quick Read edition
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This Quick Read edition includes both the full text and a summary for each chapter.
- Reading time of the complete text: about 4 hours
- Reading time of the summarized text: 6 minutes
"Behind a Mask" is a novella written by Louisa May Alcott, published in 1866 under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. The story is set in Victorian era Britain and follows Jean Muir, a deceitful governess who manipulates the wealthy Coventry family to obtain their love, respect, and fortune. The novella has become important in critical reinterpretation of Alcott's works and literary importance. Critics treat the novel as a version of the "Beauty and the Beast" trope, while others provide feminist critiques of the narrative. The dominant themes in the novella are the positive treatment of actresses, acting, and theatre, social class, and the attainment of agency. The story has been adapted as a musical and a dramatic adaptation.
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This Quick Read edition includes both the full text and a summary for each chapter.
- Reading time of the complete text: about 4 hours
- Reading time of the summarized text: 6 minutes
"Behind a Mask" is a novella written by Louisa May Alcott, published in 1866 under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. The story is set in Victorian era Britain and follows Jean Muir, a deceitful governess who manipulates the wealthy Coventry family to obtain their love, respect, and fortune. The novella has become important in critical reinterpretation of Alcott's works and literary importance. Critics treat the novel as a version of the "Beauty and the Beast" trope, while others provide feminist critiques of the narrative. The dominant themes in the novella are the positive treatment of actresses, acting, and theatre, social class, and the attainment of agency. The story has been adapted as a musical and a dramatic adaptation.
Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott ( AWL-kət; November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet best known for writing the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871), and Jo's Boys (1886). Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott, she grew up among many well-known intellectuals of the day, including Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Encouraged by her family, Alcott began writing from an early age.
Alcott's family experienced financial hardship, and while Alcott took on various jobs to help support the family from an early age, she also sought to earn money by writing. In the 1860s she began to achieve critical success for her writing with the publication of Hospital Sketches, a book based on her service as a nurse in the American Civil War. Early in her career, she sometimes used pen names such as A. M. Barnard, under which she wrote lurid short stories and sensation novels for adults. Little Women was one of her first successful novels and has been adapted for film and television. It is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters, Abigail May Alcott Nieriker, Elizabeth Sewall Alcott, and Anna Alcott Pratt.
Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist and remained unmarried throughout her life. She also spent her life active in reform movements such as temperance and women's suffrage. During the last eight years of her life she raised the daughter of her deceased sister. She died from a stroke in Boston on March 6, 1888, just two days after her father's death and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Louisa May Alcott has been the subject of numerous biographies, novels, and a documentary, and has influenced other writers and public figures such as Theodore Roosevelt and Ursula K. Le Guin.
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