I kept hearing Louisa May Alcott had a dark side. That she’s famous for writing Little Women and other innocent books for young people, but she just did that to pay the bills. I kept hearing she was secretly a hard living badass who loved to write about crime and revenge and other badass things. I can’t even remember where I heard this but I know I heard it more than once, and I finally decided to check out some of this “dark side” stuff.

I read “A Modern Mephistopheles,” “A Whisper in the Dark,” “Behind a Mask,” and “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” all available on Project Gutenberg. They were delightful. Not all that dark, but delightful. Alcott is a truly gifted writer, breathing life into every character and scene and effortlessly drawing you into the world she’s creating. She has this wonderful restraint in her writing, making you feel there’s always more to the story than what she’s telling you, creating a sense of conversations and incidents behind the scenes. This gives a real sense of mystery and depth to novels that are actually fairly simple and short. She’s masterful.

Alcott was also a woman of strong moral sense, and she generally can’t leave it behind enough to create real villains or truly dark dilemmas. The four adult novels I read certainly had more exciting plots and daring characters than “Little Women,” but they weren’t as different as I’d been led to believe. Alcott spends a lot less time spelling out moral lessons for the reader than many writers of her day, but her characters themselves often feel constrained by Alcott’s own moral sense. Charlotte Dacre moralized endlessly in Zofloya, but here characters did all sorts of evil and passionate things; Alcott moralizes very little in “Behind a Mask” and “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” but her deceitful villainesses don’t really do anything evil. This is my main disappointment with three of the four novels.

“Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” was her earliest work of the novels I read. Alcott’s gift for character and description are there, but the plot is pretty weak compared to the other two novels. Pauline has been dumped by her lover, who marries an heiress purely for the money. Bent on revenge, she marries a rich, handsome boy who is very much in love with her, and together they set out to make Pauline’s ex-lover sorry. How? By making him fall in love with Pauline again so she can dump him and rub his nose in her new happy marriage. See? Not all that evil, as revenge plots go. It’s a silly plot with a very rushed twist ending, but all the characters are beautifully, realistically rendered and the writing is a joy.

“Behind a Mask” was written four years after “Pauline’s Passion” and this one was my favorite. In this one, governess Jean Muir sets out to seduce and marry literally any man in the rich family she works for. She’s a total fraud and cons both the family’s adult sons and a rich uncle into falling in love with her. But Jean doesn’t do anything really evil–amazingly, both sons become better people because of their infatuation and Jean becomes a wonderful and devoted wife to the uncle. Not dark. Not dark at all. But morally complex, definitely. Technically, Jean is the villain, lying about who she is and only after money and aristocratic titles, and technically the story’s spoiled aristocrats are her victims. But Alcott’s gift for writing characters makes us sympathize with each one and makes it really unclear whose side we should be on. Instead of being a simple morality tale, it was a story about how complicated morality really is, and I loved it.

“A Whisper in the Dark” was actually dark. It was more of a straightforward gothic horror story and quite effective. Alcott focuses on the heroine and her peril–when she discovers a plot to force her into marriage and steal her fortune, she’s declared insane by a corrupt doctor and locked away. The heroine is a more typical ‘damsel in distress’ than Alcott usually writes, but the writing is sharp and draws you in. This story seems proof that if Alcott wanted to write gothic horror she would have been great at it. It was a nicely chilling story and I recommend it, but it didn’t leave the lasting impression and moral musings Alcott’s other novels did. It feels like Alcott’s heart wasn’t really in this one–tales of mystery and revenge seem better suited for working out her thoughts on ethics and human nature.

“A Modern Mephistopheles” was the last novel to be published but the first one I read. It seems it was part of some sort of ‘guess the writer’ challenge so Alcott wrote it in a different style than her usual. The rich characters and vivid descriptions are still there, but this one has a more flowery style of writing and more exaggerated characters than Alcott’s usual works. This is the only one of the three I read with a super submissive, angelic female character in it, and the only one with long, unoriginal descriptions of scenery and drawing rooms. Imitating other writers’ styles sounds like a fun exercise for an author, but in this case it feels like Alcott’s imitating the style of a worse writer than herself. It’s still a good novel, but it doesn’t have quite the sharp focus and sense of restraint of her other work.

It’s still a tale about morality, though, which is true to Alcott. Like “Behind a Mask,” it’s more about the complexities of morality than anything else. Except for the one annoyingly pure female, the characters are all morally complicated and struggling. The story gives you a lot to think about, and I think this is the main value of Alcott’s “darker” stories. While her books for young readers are light and morally easy, her books for adults explore some really deep questions about right and wrong and how people treat each other, and the ones I read offered few easy answers. I went into this expecting pulp fiction and drama, but what I got was amazing writing and characters that made me think hard. Louisa May Alcott is truly a literary great.

But not that dark. Not that dark at all. Four haunted stars.