SOURCE: "From Success to Experience: Louisa May Alcott's Work," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. XXI, No. 3, Fall, 1980, pp. 527-39.

In the following essay, Yellin argues that Alcott's feminist concerns are revealed in her novel Work, which is distinguished from other nineteenth-century novels "in proposing that women extend their actions into the public sphere."

From Hawthorne's Zenobia to Chopin's Edna, in nineteenth-century American fiction female characters who stray beyond the domestic sphere end their lives as suicides. This literature was written while feminists were emerging into the public arena demanding economic, social, domestic, and political rights for women. During this period Louisa May Alcott wrote Work, an adult semi-autobiographical novel. Daughter of feminist abolitionist communitarians Abba May and Bronson Alcott, neighbor and friend of Emerson and Thoreau, Alcott lived near the center of many of the radical movements of her time. The most remarkable aspect of her book is...