Behind a Mask is a short novel published by Louisa May Alcott, writing under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard, in 1866. It was largely forgotten until 1975, when it was rediscovered and republished by scholar Madeleine B. Stern, becoming a significant part of the critical reassessment of Alcott's body of work beyond her better-known, more wholesome fiction.
Jean Muir is a governess newly employed by the wealthy Coventry family to educate their young daughter, Bella. Muir is charming, humble, and solicitous-but everything is not as it seems. It's quickly revealed to the reader, if not to the family, that she's actually an aging actress working under far more calculating motives. The story follows Jean as she schemes her way into the affections, and fortunes, of the Coventry men, one by one.
The novel has been critically analyzed as a commentary on female agency, class struggle, and the theatricality of Victorian social performance-all provocative themes for the era in which it was written. Modern critics often approach it through a feminist lens, reading Muir not simply as a villainess but as a powerful, resourceful woman operating within a society that offers her few legitimate paths to security.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)