But Alcott’s career as a writer was much more varied. From fairy tales to romances, didactic novels to sensational blood-and-thunder stories, Alcott, like any professional author, knew how to reach her reading audience and how to judge the literary marketplace. Aunt Nellie’s Diary, the beginning fragment of an early tale, now published here for the first time, reveals the influences that sparked Alcott’s imagination and shows us an emerging talent on the cusp of a promising career at age seventeen. Written in 1849, the same year as her first novel The Inheritance, which was not published until 1997, Aunt Nellie’s Diary forms part of what Alcott, in January 1850, called “The Sentimental Period” (Journals 61). By then, the aspiring writer, whose first story was not published until 1852, was reveling in the works of Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, and Charlotte Brontë.
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