Moods: The first novel by the author of Little Women.

"Like her later works for children, Alcott's first novel is well and imaginatively written, highly moralistic, unlikely, and moving." Moods, Louisa May Alcott's first novel, was published in 1864, four years before the best-selling Little Women. The novel unconventionally presents a "little woman" a true-hearted abolitionist spinster, and a fallen Cuban beauty, their lives intersecting in Alcott's first major depiction of the "woman problem." Sylvia Yule, the heroine of Moods, is a passionate tomboy who yearns for adventure, The novel opens as she embarks on a river camping trip with her brother and his two friends, both of whom fall in love with her. These rival suitors, close friends, are modeled on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Aroused, but still "moody" and inexperienced, Sylvia marries the wrong man. In the rest of the novel, Alcott attempts to resolve the dilemma she has created and leaves her readers asking whether, in fact, there is a place for a woman such as Sylvia in a man's world.