A Long Fatal Love Chase
Cover, Random House edition, 1995
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| Author | Louisa May Alcott (Kent Bicknell, editor) |
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| Cover artist | J.K. Lambert |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Gothic novel |
| Publisher | Random House |
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Publication date
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1995 (written 1866) |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 242 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 32166212 |
| 813/.4 20 | |
| LC Class | PS1017 .L66 1995 |
A Long Fatal Love Chase is a suspense novel by Louisa May Alcott. She wrote it in 1866, two years before the publication of Little Women (1868) finally established her literary reputation and began to resolve her financial problems. The manuscript remained unpublished until 1995.
In 1866, Louisa May Alcott toured Europe for the first time; being poor, she traveled as the paid companion of an invalid. Upon her return, she found her family in financial straits, so when publisher James R. Elliot asked her to write another novel suitable for serialisation in the magazine The Flag of Our Union (mockingly referred to as The Weekly Volcano in Little Women), Alcott dashed off a 292-page Gothic romance entitled A Modern Mephistopheles, or The Fatal Love Chase. She gave the novel a European setting and incorporated many of her still-fresh travel experiences and observations; Elliot, however, rejected it for being "too long & too sensational!", whereupon she changed the title to Fair Rosamond and undertook extensive revisions to shorten the novel and tone down its more controversial elements. Despite these changes, the book was again rejected, and Alcott laid the manuscript aside.
Fair Rosamond ended up in Harvard's Houghton Library. The earlier draft was auctioned off by Alcott's heirs and eventually fell into the hands of a Manhattan rare book dealer. In 1994, Kent Bicknell, headmaster of the Sant Bani School in Sanbornton, New Hampshire, paid "more than his annual salary but less than $50,000" for the unexpurgated version of the manuscript. After restoring it, he sold the publication rights to Random House, receiving a $1.5 million advance. Bicknell donated 25% of the profits to 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 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 (September 2007) as a trade paperback from Dell Books.
Alcott patiently drudged away at Little Women but found emotional release in scribbling her blood-and-thunder tales. The difference shows: in pacing, tone, and content, Love Chase is startlingly unlike its famous successor. The ostentatiously Faustian plot centers on Rosamond Vivian, a 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 realizes 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 at a luxurious villa in Nice.
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Wikipedia