Bit by bit, I've been growing more interested in gothic fiction. In particular, commentary I read on The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen sent me off on a bit of a book search. Skimming through this list of "20 best gothic novels to read on a gloomy autumn night", I was brought up short by the name Louisa May Alcott (1832-88).

Louisa May Alcott? The same Louisa May Alcott whose Little Women I just ADORED as a child, and read and re-read in a way that I've never re-read anything since? Louisa May Alcott doing Gothic??

Any yes, it is indeed the same person. She wrote A Long Fatal Love Chase in 1866 (two years before the publication of Little Women). But the book wasn't published until 1995. It seems the publisher of The Flag of Our Union asked for a 24-part story for serialization, but when Alcott submitted this manuscript, she was told it was too sensational. She revised the original, in an attempt to make it somewhat less in-your-face, but the result, entitled Fair Rosamond, was a much reduced piece, which was rejected again.

My copy came via Internet Archive, now thankfully back up and running after their DDoS attack. The editor is Kent Bicknell, who acquired Alcott's original manuscript at auction in 1994.





***

We open with a character called Rosamund declaring to her grandfather: "I tell you I cannot bear it! I shall do something desperate if this life is not changed soon. It gets worse and worse, and I often feel as if I'd gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom."

Oooohhh... Be careful what you wish for...

True, her circumstances sound too miserable for a spirited young person still only 18 years old. Her grandfather, a "weird, withered old man", is her only companion, and they live on a remote island off the English coast. He is paralysed, and lives among his books. He's a cold fish, too, and has rejected all the overtures of filial love she has tried to make. He responds to her dangerous plea by washing his hands of her: "Go when and where you like. I have no desire to keep you." But there's the rub. She's female. She responds: "You say, 'Go', but where CAN I go, a girl, young, penniless, and alone?"

And at this moment, Phillip Tempest arrives... This is a great bit of Gothic: "He looked at her an instant, for the effect of the graceful girlish figure with pale, passionate face and dark eyes full of sorrow, pride and resolution was wonderfully enhanced by the gloom of the great room, the presence of the sinister old man and glimpses of a gathering storm in the red autumnal sky."

He's 30-something, has "peculiar eyes" and a scar across his forehead, and resembles the picture of Mephistopheles that hangs on the wall. We KNOW he's going to be bad news, but Rosamund is enraptured. It's not that difficult for him to persuade her to go off with him in his yacht. There's a "marriage ceremony", but -- we were sure of it from the beginning -- it was all bogus, as Mr Tempest already has a wife.

DAH DOH DAAAAHM...

Anyway, before we find this out, we're already starting to see some very nasty characteristics in the aptly named Tempest. He knowingly leads an ill man to a place where he's likely to catch cholera; he sends away the young servant who has become fond of Rosamund (she even suspects her so-called husband might have had the boy done away with); and he rules her with a rod of iron: "I am master here," he tells her, "my will is law, and disobedience I punish without mercy."

Eventually, Rosamund overhears a conversation that tells her all about Tempest's lawful wife and their son (none other than the boy he's managed to "disappear"). From this point, she is implacably set against him, and the chase of the book's title begins. As the flap text puts it, the hunt takes us "across Italy, across France and Germany, from Parisian garret to mental asylum, from convent to chateau". (Alcott visited Europe in 1865, initially as a paid companion, and then on her own, so she would have been familiar with the locales she describes.)


Alcott (and therefore Rosamund) must have seen plenty of scenes like this during their sojourn in the south of France

A Long Fatal Love Chase is undoubtedly a good read. Rosamund gains friends and champions (even a new admirer, although he's a priest, so their relations are fated to be those of siblings only). Every time we think Rosamund has outwitted the vile Tempest (and she's very feisty and full of initiative, so she outwits him fairly often), up he turns again. The man's obsessed. He knows he has lost her affection, but he can't bear to let her go: "Do what you please, except die or marry. I'll stand off and watch the play, but I MUST follow. I like the chase, it is exciting, novel and absorbing. I have tried and tired of other amusements, this satisfies me and I am in no haste to end it."

You have to admire Rosamund, who refuses to be daunted. This woman was created in 1866, but she sounds much more modern than that, as we see from this dialogue, for example, between Rosamund and her tormentor:

"I warn you to beware, Rose, I am in earnest and I ALWAYS CONQUER."
"I am in earnest and I NEVER YIELD."

Yay! Go Rosamund!

She's a complex character, and sometimes she's tempted to rejoin Tempest. Which is very realistic. Manipulative stalkers do exert a baleful hold over their victims. Fortunately, our Rosamund always makes the better choice, encouraged by those around her. To protect herself, she even agrees at one point to marry an older man, although she admits to him she doesn't really love him. But the evil Tempest manages to scuttle this plan too.

Ignatius, our young man of the cloth, is (of course) also a man of nobility, "who led the gallant students in the last revolution". But he will not renounce his vows, so even if the conniving Tempest were out of the picture, we know we're going to be deprived of the conventional happy ending.

Given the title, it's not exactly a spoiler to say that our heroine dies (through the ill will and mismanagement of Tempest). Ignatius is stricken but stoical, because he believes he will see her again in the next life. Tempest has no such faith, and the book ends like this: "Like a fallen spirit shut out from eternal life, Tempest looked at [Ignatius] a moment, then, as the old fire blazed up within him for the last time, he drove a hidden dagger deep into his breast and, dropping on his knees, gathered the dead woman in his arms, saying with mingled love and defiance in his despairing voice, 'Mine first -- mine last -- mine even in the grave!'"

As Stephen King points out in a review in 1995, "This is quite a distance from the sunny sensibilities and high moral tone of Little Women."


Louisa May Alcott, aged 20

***

King's review is very illuminating. A Long Fatal Love Chase was the last and longest of Alcott's "sensation stories", and King is worth quoting at length on the possible reasons for this:

"If there were two Louisa May Alcotts, in the end the daylight version was probably the more real of the two -- if, that is, one equates the dominant traits of a personality with 'reality.' The key to the dichotomy can probably be found in Little Women, where the priggish and unintentionally repulsive Professor Bhaer lectures Jo March on her sensational tales in The Spread Eagle and The Weekly Volcano. 'I would more rather give my boys gunpowder to play with than this bad trash,' he says, and Jo herself is forced to agree. They are trash, she says of her stories. 'I can't read this stuff in sober earnest without being horribly ashamed of it.' And then she thinks, as surely Alcott herself must have on more than one occasion: "I almost wish I hadn't any conscience, it's so inconvenient.' These reflections are followed by what is surely the most horrible sentence in Little Women, the one that finishes 'and Jo corked up her inkstand.'

"So did Louisa, at least when it came to penny-dreadful fiction, following A Long Fatal Love Chase. She supported her family with sensational tales for 10 years, from 1857 to 1867, then simply stopped. Fortunately for her readers, she had work left to do that would satisfy both them and her repressive moral sense, which made her as contemptuous of those who read her thrillers as she was of herself for writing them, and made some of the moralizing in her later works so tedious. Worst of all, she may have thought, was how much she enjoyed what she was doing. She claimed it was a matter of sheer practicality..., but practicality alone cannot explain the final five or six chapters of A Long Fatal Love Chase, in which the narrator seems on fire with excitement, delirious with the joy of creation.

"Genius burned for Louisa May Alcott following A Long Fatal Love Chase, brightly but never again with such primitive and joyful heat. One wonders what kind of writer she might have been had she been able to cast the malignantly conventional spirit of Professor Bhaer from her, and to take her thrillers as seriously as her feminist editors and elucidators do today."