About the author

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As an only child who was often alone, Lin Haire-Sargeant lived a lot in her imagination, an imagination peopled by characters from the many books she read. Her parents’ religious prohibitions kept television from the house and forbade movie-going, so books reigned free. Lin started writing and drawing early, illustrating Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins for a Girl Scout badge and writing her first “novel” in fifth grade. After high school she studied painting and classical guitar before earning degrees in literature.

 

Lin’s most fulfilling writing experiences have grown from her intense identification with favorite fictional characters. Bringing the social and psychological possibilities of her own experience to bear, she enters into the psyche of the character and the original author and imagines other trajectories their lives may have taken in the timeless world of fiction.

 

The inspiration for Lin’s first published novel came from Wuthering Heights and her fascination with the outcast Heathcliff. Why did Emily Brontë leave a 3-year hole in Heathcliff’s story? What did Heathcliff do between the time he ran away from the Earnshaw family and returned as a rich gentleman? The answers led to her critically acclaimed H._, The Story of Heathcliff's Journey Back to Wuthering Heights.

Now, with Who Is Jo March?, Lin has found another mysterious gap to be filled, this one coded into the pages of Louisa May Alcott's masterpiece Little Women, in which the beloved heroine Jo March is presented as a girl who wants to be a boy. From cutting off her hair to writing racy adventures for boys, Jo stubbornly turns away from woman's sphere, yet rejects Laurie's dare that they bolt from home, "If I was a boy, we'd run away together, and have a capital time, but as I'm a miserable girl, I must be proper, and stop at home." 

 

What if Jo had taken Laurie's dare? What if Jo had left domesticity behind, put on boy's clothes, and set out to test her fortunes in wartime Washington? With Jo's headstrong determination to be free pitted against the merciless punishment society brought down on transgressive females, what might have happened? Who Is Jo March? is the author's answer to these questions.

 

Lin Haire-Sargeant received her PhD in Literature from Tufts University; her dissertation American Girl to New Woman includes extensive discussion of Louisa May Alcott and her works. She is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Writing at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston where she teaches Children's Literature, The Graphic Novel, and Novel Writing to classes of wonderfully creative art students. In addition to teaching, she leads the bi-weekly literary Zoom group Constant Readers, co-curates another group on Zoom, Poetry Jukebox, and sings alto in the Choral Arts Society of the South Shore. She lives in seaside Scituate, Massachusetts with her husband Mark and the cat brothers Ricky and Roman.