Boston Globe Discusses Vanessa Braganza's Archival Research

"Louis May Alcott was heartsick when she checked into the old Hotel Bellevue in Boston. It was April 1880, and Alcott was mourning the death of her sister May, who'd died unexpectedly a few months earlier. 

Alcott was by then one of the country's best-known writers, a household name following the triumph of her novel "Little Women." But that April, as if summoning simpler times, she returned to playwriting, a literary form she'd embraced in childhood, writing dramas her sisters had performed. Newly bereft and holed up at the inn on Beacon Hill, Alcott began a dramatization of Jules Verne's "Michael Strogoff," a daring tale whose eponymous hero seeks to quell a Tartar rebellion on behalf of the czar."