About the Author

Louisa May Alcott, born in 1832, was the second child of Bronson Alcott of Concord, Massachusetts, a self-taught philosopher, school reformer, and utopian who was much too immersed in the world of ideas to ever succeed in supporting his family. That task fell to his wife and later to his enterprising daughter Louisa May. While her father lectured, wrote, and conversed with such famous friends as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, Louisa taught school, worked as a seamstress and nurse, took in laundry, and even hired herself out as a domestic servant at age nineteen. The small sums she earned often kept the family from complete destitution, but it was through her writing that she finally brought them financial independence. “I will make a battering-ram of my head,” she wrote in her journal, “and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world.”

An enthusiastic participant in amateur theatricals since age ten, she wrote her first melodrama at age fifteen and began publishing poems and sketches at twenty-one. Her brief service as a Civil War nurse resulted in Hospital Sketches (1863), but she earned more from the lurid thrillers she began writing in 1861 under the pseudonym of A.M. Barnard. These tales, with titles like “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” featured strong-willed and flamboyant heroines but were not identified as Alcott’s work until the 1940s.

Fame and success came unexpectedly in 1868. When a publisher suggested she write a “girl’s book,” she drew on her memories of her childhood and wrote Little Women, depicting herself as Jo March, while her sisters Anna, Abby May, and Elizabeth became Meg, Amy, and Beth. She re-created the high spirits of the Alcott girls and took many incidents from life but made the March family financially comfortable as the Alcotts never had been. Little Women, to its author’s surprise, struck a cord an America’s largely female reading public and became a huge success. Louisa was prevailed upon to continue the story, which she did in Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886.) In 1873 she published Work: A Story of Experience, an autobiography in fictional disguise with an all too appropriate title.

Now a famous writer, she continued to turn out novels and stories and to work for the women’s suffrage and temperance movements, as her father had worked for the abolitionists. Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott both died in Boston in the same month, March of 1888.

Reviews

"A deliciously readable page-turner."—New Yorker

"A suspenseful and thoroughly charming story...and it tends to confirm Alcott's position as the country's most articulate 19th-century feminist."—Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review

"Sensational in every sense of the word: filled with exotic locations, lusty appetites and page-turning treachery."— Seattle Times

"A tale of obsessive love, stalking and murder that seems ripped right off today's tabloids."—USA Today

"Intriguing...Alcott's tale of obsession and sexual politics deepens our appreciation for her championing of women's rights and for her extraordinary storytelling skills."—Booklist

"At its core, Love Chase showcases an alluring, inspiring, made-for-movies heroine."—Entertainment Weekly

"There's something utterly refreshing about getting a glimpse of Alcott letting her hair down...A Long Fatal Love Chase gives us a glimpse of the wild, free creature Alcott the writer must have longed to be...the book is lively, so exuberant, and so naughty, reading it is like biting into a juicy peach."—Boston Phoenix

YA‘Unpublished until now, this story is the same type of moral tale as Richardson's Pamela or Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. Alcott's heroine, Rosamond Vivian, is the antithesis of Jo March. She has been brought up by a cold grandfather in complete seclusion. She does not have the support of family and educated community found in the Concord of Little Women. Nor is she of a literary or spiritual turn. Her one passionate desire is for freedom, and she seizes the opportunity by eloping with Philip Tempest, who deceives her into a mock marriage. Her subsequent disillusionment and flight result in a mad pursuit across Europe by the desperate Tempest. Continuous close calls and betrayals involve male disguise, secret letters, and escape in a hamper. The novel shows the perils awaiting a young woman some 100 years ago who defies society and finds herself beyond its protection and support. While not strong in YA appeal, fans of Little Women may be asking about it.‘Frances Reiher, Fairfax Public Library System, VA

This romantic cliffhanger about a woman pursued by her ex-lover, a relentless stalker, seems sprung from today's headlines. Yet Alcott (1832-1888) wrote it more than a century and a quarter ago, in 1866 (two years before the appearance of Little Women), only to see it rejected it as ``too sensational'' by the magazine that had requested it. The novel has remained unpublished until now. Its heroine, the lonely, trusting 18-year-old Rosamond Vivian, who lives with her flinty, unloving grandfather on an English island, falls for the cynical, suave Phillip Tempest, who's nearly twice her age. He whisks her off to his Mediterranean villa near Nice, promising to marry her, but when she discovers that he is secretly married (and strongly suspects that he has murdered the son he never acknowledged), Rosamond flees to Paris, assuming a new identity. Phillip obsessively stalks her for two years, from France, where she seeks refuge in a convent and falls in love with a protective priest, to Germany, where Phillip has her committed to a lunatic asylum; eventually she flees to England. Alcott's portrayals of the pathological Phillip and of the conflicted Rosamond‘who initially clings to her ex-lover, hoping to reform him until she realizes he is a murderous brute‘show strong psychological insights. This absorbing novel revises our image of a complex and, it is now clear, prescient writer. Major ad/promo; Literary Guild selection; first serial to Ladies Home Journal; film rights to Citadel Entertainment (Sept.)

"A deliciously readable page-turner."-New Yorker

"A suspenseful and thoroughly charming story...and it tends to confirm Alcott's position as the country's most articulate 19th-century feminist."-Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review

"Sensational in every sense of the word: filled with exotic locations, lusty appetites and page-turning treachery."- Seattle Times

"A tale of obsessive love, stalking and murder that seems ripped right off today's tabloids."-USA Today

"Intriguing...Alcott's tale of obsession and sexual politics deepens our appreciation for her championing of women's rights and for her extraordinary storytelling skills."-Booklist

"At its core, Love Chase showcases an alluring, inspiring, made-for-movies heroine."-Entertainment Weekly

"There's something utterly refreshing about getting a glimpse of Alcott letting her hair down...A Long Fatal Love Chase gives us a glimpse of the wild, free creature Alcott the writer must have longed to be...the book is lively, so exuberant, and so naughty, reading it is like biting into a juicy peach."-Boston Phoenix