The Reclusive Ghostwriter Behind “Little Women” and “Anne of Green Gables”

Evangeline Cartwright was the hidden brain and invisible pen behind two famous children’s classics — then she disappeared into obscurity.

Evangeline was hurtling toward a deadline, hounded by editors, and harassed by the public face of her latest novel.

Writing furiously by hand at a tiny, sloped walnut lap desk, she churned out thirty pages a day, but no one was satisfied yet. The editor wanted a happy, romantic, weddings-for-all ending. Louisa May Alcott wanted a feminist finale that left her heroines independent women.

Evangeline Cartwright, whose name would not appear on the flyleaf of the completed Little Women, was stuck in the middle.

The eventually-published version of Little Women charmed readers from its first printing in 1868, ending with only the promise of a wedding for one sister. Its sequel, Good Wives, saw three of the four sisters married, but did not match up the characters of Jo and Laurie — a creative decision that has left fans of the work debating for over a century.

And for over a century, Louisa May Alcott, the brains behind the plot (based on her own, and her sisters’, lives) got all the credit. But the woman who actually put the words on paper, spun the story, deliberated over the dialogue? Her name has been almost completely lost to history.

Born in 1839 to a father who was a professor of English literature and a mother who was educated far beyond the typical standard of the day, Evangeline was brought up as an only child in Boston and attended the best young ladies’ seminaries available to her family’s modest budget. Her insatiable appetite for reading was fueled by her father’s university library, the local lending-library, and the meager bookshelves of her friends. To no one’s surprise, she began to write a column for the local paper when she finished school, and by the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, she had landed a job writing war news as an “anonymous home-front correspondent.” (Such positions were normally closed to women, but Evangeline’s writing style was already greatly versatile, and she passed off a masculine writing voice with no trouble.)

At the end of the war, still living at home with her aging parents but longing for a greater view of the world, Evangeline sent multiple fiction manuscripts to a Boston publisher. With no known pen name (due to her previous anonymous journalism experience), the firm was unwilling to sell her work, but one of the editors reached out to her privately and commended her excellent writing. He had a daring proposition. A well-known writer of anti-slavery essays and Gothic thrillers, Louisa May Alcott, wished to write an autobiographical children’s novel, but doubted her abilities to tell her story properly. Would Evangeline consider taking Miss Alcott’s plot and putting the nuts and bolts together on paper? The pay would be good, but the credit would be nonexistent. No one must know that Evangeline had had anything to do with the book.

Evangeline dithered. She longed to write novels, but wanted her own stories to be printed. However, her father had recently died, and her mother had just been diagnosed with consumption (the dreaded ailment we know as tuberculosis today) and the family needed money for expensive treatments. With some trepidation, she signed the contract. And in a cryptic diary entry that day in 1867, she wrote,

I am resigned that the path of Fame may never be mine; but to turn my pen to some worthy pursuit that may bring health and life to my loved ones, satisfaction to my employer, and happiness to gentle readers, ought to be reward enough for any poor struggling Artist.

Evangeline wrote little of her experience crafting the story of the March family. Creative differences quickly arose, and Alcott was not initially happy with the choices Evangeline made in the first draft. Thomas Niles, the editor, sided with Evangeline at first, but finally capitulated to Alcott’s demands for Beth’s tragic death and Jo’s refusal of Laurie’s proposal. In 1868, the first volume of Little Women was published to instant acclaim.

But Louisa May Alcott’s rapid rise to stardom unfortunately did not include Evangeline Cartwright. Evangeline received only the initial eight-hundred-dollar premium she had been promised for writing the novel, with no royalties to follow. Her name was scrubbed from all official correspondence at the publishing house, and Alcott took over the writing of all future novels featuring the March family (often criticized by readers for being of lower quality than her “first attempt”).

Evangeline worked steadily in children’s literature through the remainder of the nineteenth century, caring for her slowly declining mother and then moving in with a cousin’s family after her mother’s eventual death. Still contractually erased from any byline, she wrote Tales from the Henhouse, attributed to Jenny P. Parkington, The Adventures of Belinda Button, ostensibly by Miranda Melendy, and A Tea Party with the First Lady, which no one really believed had been written by Frances Folsom Cleveland. (Sadly, all of these titles are now out of print.)

It was either in 1900 or 1901 — evidence from family letters is inconclusive — that Evangeline received an offer of marriage from an acquaintance of her cousin Betty Paine. It was an awkward situation, as the unnamed prospective suitor was a close friend of Betty’s husband, Morton, and frequently came by the house to visit. Since Evangeline was now a permanent boarder at the Paines’, she could hardly avoid this man forever. Yet what little she did write about him says in no uncertain terms that,

“I could not possibly tie my existence to a person so dull, so inarticulate, so admittedly harmless and yet so wholly lacking in that inner light that cultivates good conversation, good intellect, good morals. Even such a poor wretch as myself cannot deserve such companionship for the rest of my mortality.”

After refusing this mystery man’s offer of marriage — we can at least hope that she let the poor “harmless” fellow down easily — Evangeline became reclusive, venturing out in public only occasionally, and keeping herself busy around the Paines’ home with chores and constant writing. Besides the ghostwriting of children’s books, she penned a society gossip column under the name of Ethel E. Ethelridge, and exchanged letters with pen pals all across the globe.

One such pen pal was to bring Evangeline another wonderful opportunity. A young Canadian writer, Lucy Maud Montgomery, had an idea for a novel that showed real promise. After a debilitating bout of influenza, returning to full-time writing was beyond her reach. But she was anxious to get her story written and sold, since she had shared her idea with several friends, and was worried — in an instance of the paranoia that would nearly consume her later years — that someone might steal her plot. And in a lucky twist of fate, one of the friends in whom L.M. Montgomery confided asked Evangeline if she’d take the job.

Evangeline got to work. The deadline for this story was tighter than any she’d written before. But in just five weeks, Evangeline turned in a manuscript about a red-haired orphan with an imagination bigger than her trials and tribulations.

Writing to a friend from her school days, Evangeline explained, with uncharacteristic frankness about her job, why she had chosen to take on the Anne of Green Gables manuscript.

“I experienced such good fortune, such a satisfying thrill at seeing my own words in print, with Little Women, that I could not resist the second opportunity offered me by a woman with the initials L.M. I shall hold this coincidence in my heart as a good-luck charm, and trust Anne Shirley may be as acceptable to readers as Jo March was, all those years ago.”

By the time of Anne of Green Gables’ publication in 1908, Evangeline was nearly seventy and her eyesight was failing. At the publisher’s and the grateful L.M. Montgomery’s urging, she served as consultant for the sequels Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island, but she never wrote another manuscript. Content to painstakingly maintain her personal correspondence, she lived out the rest of her days in quiet obscurity with Betty and Morton Paine, dying peacefully in her sleep one summer night in 1920.

Evangeline Cartwright’s eulogy made only brief mention of her “fondness for writing,” and did not acknowledge the nineteen titles she had produced in her lifetime. The neighbors that knew her remembered her as a sweet, somewhat dim old lady with a penchant for reading and no talents in the kitchen.

It was not until the release of Kevin Sullivan’s award-winning Anne of Green Gables miniseries in 1985, and the Winona-Ryder feature film of Little Women in 1994, that fans of both works began to put the pieces together. The similarities between Jo and Laurie’s failed proposal, as well as Anne and Gilbert’s first proposal, raised a few eyebrows when the two filmed scenes were compared. Working on a hunch, a young Idaho State University student named Chrystal Lark began researching the history of both books’ publication. After carefully analyzing pages and pages, reading archives from the books’ publishing houses, and finally tracking down Evangeline Cartwright’s personal diaries and correspondence, Lark published a paper in 1998 that revealed the real writer behind both beloved classics.

The estates of Lucy Maud Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott swooped in immediately, paying Lark an enormous sum of hush money to pretend her research had never happened. But copies of Lark’s work still float around obscure corners of the Internet. Though Lark cannot be reached for comment today, she did state in an interview in 2013 that she would love to see Evangeline Cartwright someday receive the fame and recognition she deserves.

Only time will tell if this brilliant storyteller will someday have her own story told.

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If you felt more and more skeptical about this little history as you read, and scrolled to the end to look for my sources, thinking “merciful heaven, where did she GET this stuff?” you’ll find nothing.

Because I made it all up.

L.M. Alcott and L.M. Montgomery wrote their own novels. No evidence of a ghostwriter exists. Evangeline Cartwright is a character I invented. So is Chrystal Lark. That photo is of an unknown woman from my private antique photo collection.

And if you were paying attention, you’ll see that I didn’t share any kind of proof for my wild claims.

But it’s incredibly easy to suck a reader in with an enticing headline, a reasonably believable plot, and a few snippets of truth to check that rising skepticism. And without citations showing exactly whence the information came, any interesting piece could arguably be a figment of an Anne-Shirley-esque imagination.

The Internet is rife with fake news, embellished stories, and rumors captured in print. But the best fact-checking starts with a primary source.

A spoonful of truth can make false information go down — and indeed, I stuck to a realistic historical framework for this piece (correct publication dates and locations, for instance) and tried not to make any element too fantastic in order to keep the story plausible. I’ve been taken in a time or two by Internet “historians” claiming they have the real dirt behind a story I thought I knew. But the appearance of knowledge doesn’t mean anything; real history-telling needs to be backed up with facts.

This is how rumors start. This is how truth gets twisted. This is how we end up with grown-ups who should know better calling their lies “alternative facts.”

If you were fooled by my falsehoods, take a moment to recall the last few historical articles you read, and whether they were able to substantiate their claims. Maybe, like me, you’ll read with a more discerning and even skeptical eye going forward. If you weren’t fooled, congratulations! (Maybe you read my article from 2021 where I did the exact same thing, and saw this trick a mile away?)

Cite your sources, kids. Otherwise, you might end up maligning two brilliant authors who absolutely, positively did write their own stuff.

“Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.”
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

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This piece originally appeared on Medium on April 1, 2022.