A Long Fatal Love Chase

By Louisa May Alcott
Random House (1995)
242 pages
Reviewed by J. Douglas Allen-Taylor

As if one needed more evidence of the sad, anti-literate, bottomline state of American publishing these days, this summer's great ballyhoo over two blasts from our 19th century literary past have provided a couple of good examples.

First was the New Yorker's discovery of the "lost" chapter of "Huckleberry Finn" which Mark Twain quite intentionally kept out of the original book. There was nothing insightful, startling, or controversial to be found in "Jim and the Dead Man," only a dull and purposeless episode that advanced neither plot nor our understanding of the characters or the issues. Its "need" to be published was only the "need" of the New Yorker to boost sales of its Annual Fiction Issue.

And now comes Random House's publication of Louisa May Alcott's once-rejected, long-forgotten 1866 melodrama, "A Long Fatal Love Chase." For Miss Alcott’s sake, it should have stayed forgotten.

Although serious Alcott scholars will find "Love Chase" interesting, there is little of value for the modern reader in this book. Its publication is indicative of the hype mentality that has all but taken over the industry. You can pretty much envision some junior executive wielding a spreadsheet at the edge of a long desk, tapping in the value of the Alcott name and the titillation factor of the book’s advertising campaign, trying to figure if this would raise conglomerate year-end profits by one-half of one percent, just enough to get this same junior executive into the next bonus bracket.

Grim thought, isn’t it?

Two years before she began work on the children's classic "Little Women," Alcott submitted "A Long Fatal Love Chase," intended for publication in 24 serialized parts, to a weekly magazine called The Flag Of Our Union. With its plot twists full of tales of marital infidelity and betrayal of priestly vows and the like, it probably would have shocked Victorian sensibilities. Noting in part that the manuscript was "too long and sensational," the magazine’s editor rejected it, and it does not appear that Alcott ever made any effort to sell the book anyplace else. After her death in 1888, "Love Chase" lay for a hundred years unnoticed among the author’s papers. Until a rare book collector purchased it, and got himself an agent, and sold the rights to Random House, and of course, dear reader, you know the rest of the story.

As is often the case these days, some of the best and most creative writing here is in the publicity release spins. The publicists at Random House are touting "Love Chase" as the "very passionate adult side of Louisa May Alcott's writing that was disowned in her time, ...featur[ing] a strong heroine and tread[ing] on very modern territory." The industry bible, Publishers Weekly, bit the bait, too, describing the novel as a "romantic cliffhanger about a woman pursued by her ex-lover, a relentless stalker, [it] seems sprung from today’s headlines." The New York Times art section giddily headlined it "a tale for the 90’s" and to prove it, the newspaper’s book review section commissioned an icon of the pop 90’s, horror writer Stephen King, for a review. Arts & Antiques magazine reported that "the success of the remake of ‘Little Women’ starring Susan Sarandon and Winona Ryder set off a bidding war for the film rights to ‘A Long Fatal Love Chase,’" and why am I not surprised by that?

But as a matter of fact, the "discovery" of an "adult side" to Louisa May Alcott is not even a "discovery;" Alcott published several adult novels in her lifetime--what she called her "lurid" fiction--including several under the pseudonym "A.M. Barnard." According to at least one biographer, Alcott herself valued these works more highly than her children’s fiction. But, of course, the republishing of the adult works Alcott deemed her best would not have had the cash-register splash of first publication of "Love Chase," a manuscript even the author herself seemed to have lost interest in.

The author knew best.

To the plot: In order to pay off gambling debts, an old English gentlemen sells Rosamond Vivian, his 18 year old granddaughter, to Philip Tempest, a rich and dashing adventurer with a sordid past. Rosamond falls in love with Tempest, but threatens to drown herself in the ocean rather than live with him in sin. A ceremony is performed at sea on Tempest’s boat, but Rosamond later learns that it was all a fake because Tempest is already married. She escapes, and much of the book involves how she falls in and out of the clutches of this evil scoundrel, who pursues her across half of Europe.

Those that think this is sort of a "Big Women, Big Men" book that will stimulate 1990’s Ricki Lake/Montel Martin sensibilities are in for a disappointment. There ain’t no sex, folks, nothing, nada, not any allusion to it whatsoever, not even the type of euphemistic passages you’d find in your average modern romance novel at the supermarket checkout counter. Where a modest 20th century author might skip the bedroom scenes, Alcott simply skips the entire first year of the Rosamond/Phillip "marriage," cutting to the chase quite literally. If the heroine thinks of sex at all, she successfully hides it both from herself and from the careful reader.

Oh, yes, that thing about priestly infidelity? There is a priest, Ignatius, and he does fall in love with Rosamond. We see that he is sorely tempted, such as when Rosamond pays an unexpected visit to his room to warn him of a plot against his life:

"He was alone and asleep... A book had fallen from his hands as he lay on the couch, and lifting it Rosamond saw that it was the life of Martin Luther. It had opened at a certain page... It was that part of the story where the great reformer practiced as he preached, and, boldly affirming that priests might marry, confirmed his sincerity by wedding his beloved Katherine. Rosamond’s eye went from the book to the sleeper and an irrepressible hope sprung up within her, for the circumstance had a joyful significance to her."

But not to worry, gentle reader. Rosamond’s bodice remains unripped and the good Father’s pants are never unzipped. Ignatius keeps up his priestly vows quite nobly, as befits a true hero of the Victorian Age.

"Love Chase" does not question or even examine the social mores of its day. Neither Rosamond nor any of the other women of this book question why their only salvation from the various "scoundrels" and "blackguards"is to submit to the protection of noble men. What is called a "strong heroine" in the publicity yarns is merely a woman who insists on deciding in which shadow she’s going to stand.

"Love Chase" is not bad writing; it is just not particularly good. It was dashed off in two months’ time in hope of a quick sale, reportedly solely for the purpose of helping the Alcott family out of its perennial financial problems. As such the novel is choppy and rushes to a dramatically contrived ending, with none of the intelligent insight, or the polish, or the unhurried, child-summer depth that a hundred years of readers came to love in "Little Women" or "Little Men" or "Jo’s Boys" or Alcott’s other major works.

The 1800’s were a period when English language literature was in its infancy, full of arcane language and medieval plotting, and for that reason I tend to avoid books written in that time period. I can think of three overriding reasons why the reading of a novel written in those years would prove valuable to today’s reader. The novel might give one a fresh, contemporary look at a long-gone era that we could never obtain in any other manner. Or it could push at the edge of its society's contemporary norms, giving you an insight into what people thought and what they found acceptable at the time. Or the novel could deal with themes so timeless, they transcend the era in which they were written. Thus were the works of Beecher Stowe, and Poe, and Melville, and Twain. Thus was much of the work of Louisa May Alcott. But not this one. "A Long Fatal Love Chase" was a bad idea, all around.