Under the Lilacs (Esprios Classics) - Louisa May Alcott

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Résumé :
Under the Lilacs is a children's novel by Louisa May Alcott, first published in 1878. Bab and Betty, two little girls, are having a tea party with their dolls when an unknown dog appears and steals their cake. The girls find the dog, Sancho, along with his owner Ben Brown, a run-away from the circus who is hiding in their play barn in a carriage. They discover that Ben is a horse master and when he is taken in by the Moss', they get him a job on a neighboring farm. It is there that he can work with horses and drive cows. Ben eventually finds out that his father, who he loved dearly, was dead. A neighbor, Miss Celia, helps him through his grief and he moves in with her and her brother Thornton who is fourteen. He has a job, and a family, and an opportunity for education.

Biographie:
Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) var en amerikansk forfatter og poet, mest kjent for romanen Sm? kvinner, inspirert av hennes egen oppvekst med tre s?stre i New England. Som datter av den transcendentalistiske l?reren Amos Bronson Alcott og venn av familiene Emerson og Thoreau vokste Alcott opp i et intellektuelt milj? som sterkt preget hennes litter?re stemme. Hun var ogs? sykepleier under den amerikanske borgerkrigen, og hennes verk kjennetegnes av varme skildringer av familieliv, moralske l?repunkter og sterke kvinnelige heltinner....

Sommaire:
A. M. Barnard was one of the pseudonyms used by Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), the American novelist, short story writer, reform-minded author, and one of the most enduring figures in nineteenth-century American literature. Born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and raised in Concord, Massachusetts, Alcott grew up among Transcendentalist thinkers and reformers, including her father Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and others connected with the intellectual life of New England. Her family's financial instability, idealism, and unconventional education shaped both her ambition and her practical understanding of women's limited choices.Alcott is best known for Little Women, the beloved novel of the March sisters, but her career was far broader and more varied than that single classic suggests. Before and alongside her domestic fiction, she wrote thrillers, sensation stories, Gothic tales, melodramas, and psychologically charged works under pseudonyms such as A. M. Barnard. These stories often feature disguise, revenge, obsession, manipulation, social performance, and women who refuse the narrow roles assigned to them. They reveal an Alcott who was commercially sharp, emotionally bold, and fully aware of the darker energies beneath respectable family life.Her life also included work as a Civil War nurse, abolitionist sympathies, support for women's rights, and relentless effort to support her family through writing. Alcott's fiction moves between moral instruction, domestic realism, sentimental appeal, satire, and sensational excitement, making her one of the most versatile American writers of her century. Today, works such as Behind a Mask have helped restore attention to the fierce, ironic, and subversive side of her imagination, showing that the author of Little Women also understood ambition, performance, gendered power, and the dangerous uses of charm....