A Long Fatal Love Chase
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 Cover, Random House edition, 1995. |
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| Author | Louisa May Alcott (Kent Bicknell, editor) |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | J.K. Lambert |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Gothic novel |
| Publisher | Random House |
| Released | 1995 (written 1866) |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 242 |
| ISBN | ISBN 0679445102 |
A Long Fatal Love Chase is a suspense novel by Louisa May Alcott, who wrote the manuscript in 1866, two years before finally establishing her literary reputation with the publication of Little Women (1868). The manuscript remained unpublished until 1995.
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[edit] Publication History
Alcott originally titled the novel A Modern Mephistopheles, or The Fatal Love Chase (Later, she reused the first part of this title for her 1877 novel A Modern Mephistopheles). She submitted this draft to the magazine Flag of Our Union, where it was intended to run as a serial in twelve monthly instalments. When the magazine's publisher, James R. Elliot, deemed the novel too sensational and rejected it, she changed the title to Fair Rosamond and undertook extensive revisions to tone down the more controversial elements of the story. Despite these changes, the book was rejected a second time, and Alcott laid the manuscript aside.
Fair Rosamond ended up in Harvard's Houghton Library, where it remains to this day; the earlier draft was auctioned off by Alcott's heirs and eventually fell into the hands of a Manhattan rare book dealer. Kent Bicknell, headmaster of the Sant Bani School in Sanbornton, New Hampshire, in 1994 paid "more than his annual salary but less than $50,000" for the unexpurgated version of the manuscript, restored it, and later sold the publication rights to Random House for 1.5 million dollars. In the spirit of Ms Alcott, Bicknell gave 25% of the profits to the Orchard House (the museum of the Alcott Family), 25% to the Alcott heirs, and 25% to the Sant Bani School. In 1995, Random House released the novel in a handsome hardbound edition under the title A Long Fatal Love Chase. It became a best-seller, and an audiobook version soon followed. The novel is still in print (February 2007) as a trade paperback from Dell Books.
[edit] Plot Introduction
Love Chase is startlingly different from its more famous successor. The ostentatiously Faustian plot centers on Rosamond Vivian, a lovely but discontented maiden who lives on an English island with only her bitter old grandfather for company and who begins the novel by rashly declaring: I often feel as if I'd gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom. Right on cue, a man named Phillip Tempest - a man who bears a more than trivial resemblance to Mephistopheles - walks in the door. Within a month, Rosamond is in love, and although she realises that this man is "no saint", she marries him, believing with the fatuousness of youth that her love will save him. She sails away from her lonely island in Tempest's yacht, the Circe, and begins her married life in a series of luxurious villas.
Much to his own surprise, Tempest, a heartless libertine, finds that he, too, has fallen in love. He tries to make Rosamond happy, and, at first, succeeds; however, after a year in his company, she begins to realise how conscienceless and cruel he is. She then discovers that Tempest has a wife and son already, making their marriage a sham and Rosamond the unwitting mistress of a man who has grossly deceived her. That same night, she packs a few items, stealthily climbs down from her second-floor balcony, and catches the next train to Paris. Tempest pursues her, beginning the obsessive "chase" of the title.
Tempest hunts Rosamond for two years, telling her he enjoys the sport. To throw him off the track, she assumes a variety of disguises: in Paris, she's a seamstress named Ruth; next, she escapes to a convent, where she's known as Sister Agatha; after that, under the name Rosalie Varian, she travels to Germany as companion to a wealthy little girl. Each time, as she begins to settle comfortably into a new life, Tempest makes a sudden, funhouse-type entrance and ruins everything. Under this treatment, Rosamond learns to hate and fear her former lover. At the same time, a hopeless passion develops between Rosamond and Father Ignatius, a handsome, virtuous man who happens, unfortunately, to be a Roman Catholic priest.
[edit] Critical Reception
Although Alcott wrote the novel hastily while under considerable economic pressure and submitted it under the name "A.M. Barnard" - a pseudonym she used for several other Gothic thrillers of questionable literary merit - Love Chase received good reviews in 1995, 129 years after its intended appearance as an ephemeral potboiler.
Contemporary critics tend to emphasize the novel's strong feminist themes, fast-moving plot, and exuberant trashiness. The Booklist reviewer, for example, declares that "Alcott's melodramatic but intriguing tale dramatises the tragic plight of women in her oppressive times"[1] while Katherine Powers of Forbes recommends the audiobook version as "a real Gothic potboiler by a slumming Louisa May Alcott."[2] Phoebe-Lou Adams of the Atlantic Monthly, wondering why such an exciting and adjective-rich narrative was originally rejected, speculates: "Could the objection have been simply that the heroine, on discovering that she has been duped into a false marriage with a murderer, fails to collapse and die of shame? Instead she scoops up the available jewels, flees by night through a window, and repudiates any guilt in the affair. Perfectly sensible of her--but perhaps not what readers of Victorian light literature were prepared to approve."[3]
[edit] Notes
1. Seaman, Donna. "A Long Fatal Love Chase (Brief Article)". Booklist, September 15, 1995, p. 140.
2. Powers, Katherine A. "Your Cheatin' Ears: adultery on audiotape." Forbes FYI, May 6, 1996, p.S33.
3. Adams, Phoebe-Lou. "A Long Fatal Love Chase." Atlantic Monthly, October 1995, p. 127.
(It is at least possible that Alcott's original editor objected to the love interest between the heroine and a Catholic priest, not to her failure to die from the shame of having lived in sin).
[edit] Online Sources
- A 1995 review by Stephen King which appeared in the New York Times.
- A research guide to Louisa May Alcott, compiled by Elizabeth Blakesley Lindsay and published on www.womenwriters.net.
[edit] Print Sources
- "A Long Fatal Love Chase (Book Review)". Entertainment Weekly, September 15, 1995, p. 98.
- "A Long Fatal Love Chase (Brief Article)". Publishers Weekly, July 7, 1995, p. 218.
- Morrow, Laurie. "The Alcott of Aquarius: Articulating a Practical Christianity...". World & I, May 2002.
[edit] See Also
Jane Eyre.
(Like Jane Eyre, Love Chase includes a mad wife, a red room, a bigamous marriage, and a love affair between an impecunious teenage girl and a wealthy and mercurial older man).
