<Text id=JamAmWr>
<Author>James, Henry</Author>
<Title>American Writers</Title>
<Edition>Literary Criticism. Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the U.S., 1984</Edition>
<Date>1865-1912</Date>
<body>
<loc><locdoc>JamAmWr189</locdoc><milestone n=189>
<div0 type=chapter n=1>
<p> <i>Louisa M. Alcott</i> (1)
<p><i>Moods.</i> By Louisa M. Alcott, author of "Hospital Sketches." Boston: Loring, 1865.
<p>Under the above title, Miss Alcott has given us her version of
the old story of the husband, the wife, and the lover. This story has
been told so often that an author's only pretext for telling it again is
his consciousness of an ability to make it either more entertaining or
more instructive; to invest it with incidents more dramatic, or with a
more pointed moral. Its interest has already been carried to the
furthest limits, both of tragedy and comedy, by a number of practised
French writers: under this head, therefore, competition would be . . .
