by Jesse Garon

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.

Eighteen-year-old Rosamond Vivian lives alone with her grandfather on a small island off the coast of England, yearning to see the world and experience the pleasures that she has read about in novels. When the mysterious Phillip Tempest, a man nearly twice her age, comes to visit her grandfather, she is captivated, and she ends up running away with him on his yacht. But as she gradually learns the true nature of the handsome villian, she flees, and thus begins an obsessive pursuit across the European continent, full of suspense, intrigue and melodrama.

It sounds like any number of Harlequin romance novels, but A Long Fatal Love Chase was an early novel by one of America's most famous writers: Louisa May Alcott. Two years before securing her literary immortality with the publication of Little Women in 1868, Alcott wrote a 24-chapter novel on spec for James R. Elliott, the publisher of The Flag of Our Union. The proposed novel would have run in 12 issues, with a cliffhanger in every second chapter to hold the reader's interest until the next installment. The 34-year old author spent two months working on the novel, only to have it rejected as "too long and too sensational." Over a century later, collector Kent Bicknell bought the manuscript of the novel and, after restoring Alcott's original language, which she had toned down in revisions in order to make the story less sensational, he shopped the novel around until placing it with Random House.

Meanwhile, William Morrow and Company has rereleased Behind a Mask, their 1975 collection of four previously unpublished thrillers by Alcott, writing anonymously or using the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. The anthology has a new afterword by its editor, noted Alcott scholar and biographer Madeleine Stern. Like A Long Fatal Love Chase, these stories combine the elegance and simplicity of Alcott's 19th century prose with gripping, fast-paced psychological drama.

In the title novella, for example, Jean Muir, a mysterious young lady, is hired by the Coventry family to act as a governess to the young daughter, Bella. But soon after her arrival, she has aroused curiousity -- and other emotions -- in Bella's brothers, Gerald and Ned, as well as jealousy in their cousin Lucia. The plot becomes a race: will Jean succeed in her nefarious plans before the Coventry family becomes wise to her? Alcott pushes the conflict right down to the wire, and although the final pages are a bit muted, as she tries to have evil both triumphant and defeated at the story's close, the characters are compelling throughout the narrative's twists and turns.

A Long Fatal Love Chase also holds up well after more than a century of obscurity. Although the novel is far from subtle, and telegraphs nearly every major plot turn well in advance, the thrust of the novel, Tempest's relentless pursuit of Rosamond, is driven by the personalities of the major participants. And Alcott crafts those personalities intricately, skillfully, so that each major character comes across as something a little more than a stock figure in a 19th-century melodrama. It's not an innovative novel by any means, but it is an exciting read, one that will keep readers hooked until it reaches its conclusion, startling in its intensity despite having been revealed to the reader 200 pages earlier.