A Long Fatal Love Chase was written by Alcott in 1866 — two years before Little Women — but was rejected by her publisher as “too long and too sensational.” The manuscript languished unpublished for 127 years until it was discovered in the collection of Alcott’s papers at Harvard’s Houghton Library and published by Random House in 1995, becoming an immediate bestseller.
The novel reveals an Alcott utterly different from the gentle moralist of the March family saga: Rosamond Vivian, eighteen and restless, enters a relationship with Dorian Doyle — handsome, wealthy, cultivated, and already married. When she discovers the bigamy and attempts to leave, Doyle pursues her obsessively across Europe — from England to France to Germany to Italy — and Rosamond’s flight becomes increasingly desperate as she discovers that wealth and determination make her pursuer almost impossible to escape.
The novel is a Gothic thriller written with fierce energy: Alcott knew sensation fiction (she wrote it under pseudonyms, most notably A.M. Barnard) and she deployed its conventions — disguises, narrow escapes, a convent refuge, a faithful servant, a villain who is genuinely charming — with professional skill. But beneath the genre conventions runs a serious feminist argument: Rosamond’s vulnerability derives entirely from her legal and economic subjection as a woman; if she had rights to property, to divorce, to police protection, Doyle could not pursue her.
Collecting A Long Fatal Love Chase
First edition (Random House, New York, 1995): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Signed advance copies: $30–$60
- The original 1866 manuscript: Institutional (Harvard/Houghton Library)