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Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women (DVD)

Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women, is an almost universally recognized name. Her reputation as a morally upstanding New England spinster, reflecting the conventional propriety of mid-19th century Concord, is firmly established. Raised among reformers, iconoclasts and Transcendentalists, the intellectual protégé of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Alcott was actually a free thinker, with democratic ideals and progressive values about women – a worldly careerist of sorts. Most surprising is that Alcott led, anonymously and under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, a literary double life not discovered until the 1940s. As Barnard, Alcott penned some thirty pulp fiction thrillers, with characters running the gamut from murderers and revolutionaries to cross-dressers and opium addicts – a far cry from her better-known works featuring fatherly mentors, courageous mothers and impish children.  In Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind ‘Little Women’, the first film biography about the celebrated author, American Masters reveals a remarkable woman, ahead of her time, who was much more than a writer of children’s books. Combining elements of documentary, drama and animation, the film stars three-time Obie winner Elizabeth Marvel as Alcott and Tony winner and Oscar nominee Jane Alexander as Alcott’s first biographer Ednah Dow Cheney. The dialogue is taken exclusively from writings or firsthand reports of conversations. The HD film is shot on original locations including Orchards House in Concord, Emerson’s house in Concord and Fruitlands in Harvard, site of the Alcott’s utopian experiment Interwoven with dramatic scenes are interviews with Alcott scholars Sarah Elbert, John Matteson, Joel Myerson, Daniel Shealy, Madeleine Stern, Dr. Leona Rostenberg, Jan Turnquist, and novelist Geraldine Brooks.