By 1884, Louisa May Alcott was an accomplished author whose reputation preceded her wherever she went. That year, a book profiling notable women was published—it was called Our Famous Women: An Authorized Record of the Lives and Deeds of Distinguished American Women of Our Time. Louisa May Alcott’s profile is the first in the book--which is partially due to its loose alphabetical structure--but I like to think it was also because of the extent of her fame. Among some twenty other women, the only others who rivaled Louisa in name recognition were Harriet Beecher Stowe and Julia Ward Howe.

On a chilly New Year’s Eve 1862, at the end of the third year of a bitter and bloody war between the Union and the Confederacy, Louisa May Alcott lay in bed waiting for midnight. She wasn’t feeling like her usual self, full of energy and vigor. Instead, she was worn down, inexplicably achy and exhausted. Beginning two weeks before, on December 17, when the wounded soldiers from the Battle of Fredericksburg began to arrive at the hospital where she was stationed in Georgetown, Washington, DC, Louisa May Alcott had been working non-stop to provide for the wounded and tend to the dead.

The past two weeks were a blur of writing letters, wrapping wounds, feeding soldiers, telling them jokes. As she became more exhausted by the effort, she was convinced she needed to work harder. This was a trait she inherited from her mother Abigail, something she had witnessed during Abigail’s years as a “missionary to the poor” in Boston when Louisa was a teenager. Rather than slow down and rest, Louisa began to take runs in the brisk morning air to give her energy and take her out of the hospital walls.

This late December night, she had to admit: she was unwell.

The house is hushed, the bedroom door upstairs on the right is closed. Inside her room, Louisa sits at her half-circle desk, a homemade shawl wrapped around her shoulders, a green silk cap jammed crookedly onto the thick brown hair falling down her back. When you look at her, notice her ink-stained, calloused fingers, the words blooming out from her pen as it moves rapidly across each clean sheet of paper. Step around the manuscripts strewn across the floor, and over the tray of tea and food her mother has left, untouched and cold. I want you to know that her leg is flaring with pain, but that she ignores it. I want you to know that her thumb is permanently crippled from pressing her pen too hard on the page but still she writes. She will go out this evening for her daily jog, but otherwise she will not leave her room today. She is living inside the story she’s creating, listening to her characters, unaware of anything outside the scenes she sees in her head. This isn’t an Instagram photo, a romanticized portrait of a writer, coffee cup steaming in amber light falling across a perfectly positioned page. This is gritty, physical work, at a time when women are supposed to do anything but. As a writer, Louisa threw herself onto her pen and the page like a battering-ram, determined to wrest financial security, personal escape, and self-expression from her writing.

In 1858, when she was 25 years old, Louisa May Alcott returned to Boston yet again to look for work, recording in her journal, “I am the only bread-winner just now.” It had already been ten long years of looking for meaningful, gainful employment. Louisa did not have a plan for winter, and it was October and getting cold. Her sister Lizzie died earlier that year, and her oldest sister Anna had announced her engagement shortly after. Louisa felt like she was losing her family one sister at a time. She had not become the great actress or writer she swore to be when she left Concord years before. Instead, she’d spent ten years toiling: as a teacher, which she hated, and taking in sewing. She had even worked a short time as a domestic servant. No matter how hard she worked, there was never enough money to support the family. There was never enough work.

Once upon a time, four sisters became immortal. When they were young, the four girls were still flesh and blood, ordinary girls who built towers out of their father’s books and put on plays in the barn for their neighbors and went hungry too many nights. One day, when they were all grown up, the second sister took out her magic pen and began to write down the stories of their adventures- the simple yet profound drama of growing up into women and forging their own paths. Like a spell, she transformed her sisters with paper and ink into characters who would live forever: from Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth, and May into Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy.

Before we are consciously ourselves, before we forge our own identities, we belong first to our parents. They are the first tellers of the story of who we are, as our habits, temperaments, and personalities are filtered through the lenses of the adults who care for us. How they respond to what lies within us creates lasting impressions on who we become. We are then left to pick through the labels they lay on us, accepting, discarding, or rewriting each in turn. This was certainly true of Louisa May Alcott. Before she was Louisa the author, she was Louy, the second-born daughter of Bronson and Abigail Alcott, one a philosopher, dreamer, and idealist, the other a headstrong, witty, and intelligent feminist. Louisa was the child most like her mother, the child attempting to please her father, the child more intelligent and perceptive than her sisters yet more wildly temperamental and unruly. Louisa never married or had children of her own, but lived with and supported her parents (both financially and emotionally) her entire life. Throughout her childhood and into her adult life, Louisa’s identity and role as “daughter” would supersede any other way Louisa defined herself; her parents’ analysis and understanding of who she was ultimately influenced her own conception of her personality and purpose.

In the short story Behind a Mask, the young governess Jean Muir is hired by a rich family for her appealing looks and winning personality. Finally alone in her room, Jean kneels in front of the trunk that carries her only worldly possessions. She mixes a cordial and takes a long draught from her flask. Slowly, she removes her hair, then her makeup, then her dress, then her teeth. What’s left of her is a haggard woman in the place of the young, pretty thing she had been moments before. Finally, she half-uncovers her breast to expose the scar of a newly healed wound. Then, she creeps off to bed, worn out by mental weariness and the exhaustion of wearing a costume and playing a part every day of her life.

These macabre, gothic details could be from a story by Charlotte Brontë, but in fact, Behind A Mask was written and published by Louisa May Alcott. For many years, Louisa May Alcott wrote thrillers under a pseudonym as a way to earn money to support her family. Though she was best known for Little Women and the other books known as her “juvenile novels,” Louisa May Alcott’s lesser-known works explore themes such as suicide, poverty, deception, and dark magic. These themes were as much a part of Louisa’s psyche as any of the children’s books she wrote—in fact, as we are going to see in the next eight episodes of Let Genius Burn, they are present in the many facets of Louisa’s character.

Little Women was an instant best-seller, and in the past one hundred and fifty-three years since its debut, Louisa May Alcott has been remembered as a writer of children’s stories, the “children’s friend.” If we look deeper—behind the mask, if you will—we see that her life was not the tidy, moral story of her best-known book. Louisa May Alcott was a complex, ambitious woman who struggled to raise her family out of poverty; through writing, she found escape, solace, and, ultimately, hard-won financial freedom.