Complete and unabridged, with 51 full-page plates by Odilon Redon, Giovanni Paolo Panini and Francisco Goya. Two dark stories from the woman the world knew for Little Women: a poet who sells his talent to a patron with a taste for ownership, and a girl shut in a madhouse by an uncle who wants her fortune. Louisa May Alcott published A Modern Mephistopheles anonymously in 1877 and never admitted to it in her lifetime. This is the writing she did for herself, and it is closer to Hawthorne than to Concord. Fifty-one plates of Goya and Redon, from bullfights to butterflies, run through the book like the dark current beneath Alcott's bright surface.