Behind a Mask, Or, a Woman's Power

The new governess, Miss Jean Muir, has arrived at Coventry House to begin the task of teaching 16-year-old Bella music, French, and drawing. Mrs. Coventry, Bella's mother, has agreed to allow Miss Muir thirty days to see if she is able to accept the educational schedule for which she is hired. After Miss Muir demonstrates her skills to the satisfaction of Mrs. Coventry, brothers Edward and Gerald, and cousin Lucia, she is shown to her living quarters. When she is alone and the curtains are drawn, she pours herself an ardent cordial from a flask she pulls out of her luggage and thinks about her plans for the next day. She has told the mother that she is nineteen years old, but when she removes her makeup and braids she is suddenly 30 and falls asleep quickly and deeply. A complicated scheme of romance and rebellion, cunning and courtesy, stagecraft and assistance is slowly untangled as she uses her accomplishments and sympathies to work her way to the very heart of the Coventry.

FictionMystery & DetectiveCollections & AnthologiesHistoricalWomen

RELEASED2005

PUBLISHERWildside Press, LLC

LENGTH120

LANGUAGEEN

Louisa May AlcottAmerican novelist (1832–1888)

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 29, 1832. She and her three sisters, Anna, Elizabeth, and May, were educated by their father, philosopher and teacher Bronson Alcott, and raised on the practical Christianity of their mother, Abigail May. Louisa spent her childhood in Boston and in Concord, Massachusetts, where her days were enlightened by visits to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s library, excursions into nature with Henry David Thoreau, and theatricals in the barn at "Hillside". Like her character, "Jo March" in Little Women, young Louisa was a tomboy. "No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race," she claimed, "and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences ..." For Louisa, writing was an early passion. She had a rich imagination and often her stories became melodramas that she and her sisters would act out for friends. Louisa preferred to play the "lurid" parts in these plays --"the villains, ghosts, bandits, and disdainful queens." At age 15, troubled by the poverty that plagued her family, she vowed: "I will do something by and by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write -- anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!"

2.0

Behind a Mask, Or, a Woman's Power

by Louisa May Alcott

The new governess, Miss Jean Muir, has arrived at Coventry House to begin the task of teaching 16-year-old Bella music, French, and drawing. Mrs. Coventry, Bella's mother, has agreed to allow Miss Muir thirty days to see if she is able to accept the educational schedule for which she is hired. After Miss Muir demonstrates her skills to the satisfaction of Mrs. Coventry, brothers Edward and Gerald, and cousin Lucia, she is shown to her living quarters. When she is alone and the curtains are drawn, she pours herself an ardent cordial from a flask she pulls out of her luggage and thinks about her plans for the next day. She has told the mother that she is nineteen years old, but when she removes her makeup and braids she is suddenly 30 and falls asleep quickly and deeply. A complicated scheme of romance and rebellion, cunning and courtesy, stagecraft and assistance is slowly untangled as she uses her accomplishments and sympathies to work her way to the very heart of the Coventry.

FictionMystery & DetectiveCollections & AnthologiesHistoricalWomen

RELEASED2005

PUBLISHERWildside Press, LLC

LENGTH120

LANGUAGEEN

Louisa May AlcottAmerican novelist (1832–1888)

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania on November 29, 1832. She and her three sisters, Anna, Elizabeth, and May, were educated by their father, philosopher and teacher Bronson Alcott, and raised on the practical Christianity of their mother, Abigail May. Louisa spent her childhood in Boston and in Concord, Massachusetts, where her days were enlightened by visits to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s library, excursions into nature with Henry David Thoreau, and theatricals in the barn at "Hillside". Like her character, "Jo March" in Little Women, young Louisa was a tomboy. "No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race," she claimed, "and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences ..." For Louisa, writing was an early passion. She had a rich imagination and often her stories became melodramas that she and her sisters would act out for friends. Louisa preferred to play the "lurid" parts in these plays --"the villains, ghosts, bandits, and disdainful queens." At age 15, troubled by the poverty that plagued her family, she vowed: "I will do something by and by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write -- anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!"