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| AlcottWeb: Home | Alcott ' s ` blood and thunder tales ' Helle Bering-Jensen 12/03/95 The Washington Times Page B7 (Copyright 1995) Copyright 1995 News World Communications, Inc. Reprinted with permission of The Washington Times -- http://www.washtimes.com . Could it indicate a certain dearth of talent among contemporary literati that there is such a thriving business in the never-before-published works of authors who have long departed this world? Whether that is indeed the case - or whether Louisa May Alcott is enjoying a revival on the strength of the big-screen success of "Little Women" - it is a rare pleasure to find on one's desk no fewer than three books by Alcott, one published for the first time and two reissues of work that have only in recent years come out under her own name. These are not, however, the kind of writing for which the Concord, Mass., author is justly famous, such as "Little Women," "Little Men" and "Jo's Boys," children's books full of New England enlightenment, humanity and good moral sense. Rather, "A Long Fatal Love Chase," "Behind a Mask" and "A Modern Mephistopheles" belong to the genre of Victorian gothic and lurid psychological thrillers that Alcott, it turns out, absolutely adored and much preferred to her more wholesome works. She scribbled tirelessly under the pen name A.M. Barnard for the new literary journals of the time such as the Saturday Evening Gazette and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. She called these works her "blood & thunder tales ," a highly accurate description. It is a fitting irony that these stories helped sustain the Alcott family for decades, a task that her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, the most transcendental of Concord transcendentalists, was never up to. From the evidence here, Alcott was no Edgar Allan Poe (which was certainly just as well for her), but her explorations of the sinister side of the human soul, of love, obsession and madness, are nonetheless absorbing, good reading. If she knew one thing, she knew how to spin a plot. Most intriguing of the three is "A Long Fatal Love Chase," which now appears almost 130 years after it was written. Dating back to 1866, it was actually Alcott's first full-length novel and was commissioned as a 12-part serial for the Flag of Our Union magazine. By request of publisher James R. Elliott, "the close of each second chapter {had to be}so absorbingly interesting that the reader will be impatient for the next." Eager to comply, Ms. Alcott gave the good Mr. Elliott a tale of ripping suspense and perverted passions, which was rather more than he bargained for. The Flag of Our Union rejected the novel as too long and too sensational, and the manuscript spent more than a century gathering dust, eventually in Harvard's Houghton Library. In 1993, the family sold it to a collector in New Hampshire, and it was soon snapped up for publication. "I tell you I cannot bear it," so the first sentence goes, spoken by the anguished young heroine, Rosamond, who is trapped in high Romantic fashion on a lonely island off the British coast with a skinflint of a grandfather as a guardian. "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." As we all know, no one need offer her soul to the devil twice, and Rosamond soon gets her wish, being swept off her feet by a suitor, the most appropriately named Philip Tempest. He is a wealthy older man who dotes on her and carries her off to Nice on his yacht (the Circe) and pretends to marry her in a fake ceremony. When Rosamond discovers the deception, she is horrified. She also discovers that Tempest has a second family and suspects he may even have murdered his own son - a bad egg if ever there was one. Fearful and distraught, Rosamond flees to Paris and tries to hide as a seamstress, with Tempest in hot pursuit, as obsessive and fiendishly clever a stalker as any Hollywood writer might think up today. Tempest even commits Rosamond to a German insane asylum in an effort to break her spirit. She finally reaches safety in England again, with the help of a priest who has fallen in love with her, and places herself under the protection of Tempest's first wife, of all people. Maybe it isn't so strange that the Flag of Our Union found the fare a little strong for its readers. The four long novellas in "Behind a Mask" also belong to Alcott ' s blood-and-thunder oeuvre. We find here "Behind a Mask, or A Woman's Power," "Pauline's Passion and Punishment," "The Mysterious Key and What It Opened" and "Abbot's Ghost, or Maurice Treherne's Temptation." "Pauline's Passion and Punishment" is probably the best-known of the four and revolves around a typical Alcott femme fatale who has been scorned by her lover, Gilbert Redmond, and plots her dreadful revenge. "Behind a Mask" is a fascinating and revealing self-portrait of the author. By day, the protagonist is a sweet young governess; at night she becomes a bitter, worldly woman who bewitches every male member of her household, wreaking havoc and destruction in the family. Throughout all these works run Alcott's ever-present longings for adventure, for the courage to sin and break molds. "An arsenal of powers" was how Bronson Alcott described his daughter; she was that and a powder keg as well. Looking back on the frustration so clearly felt by ambitious, intelligent women such as Louisa May Alcott in the mid-19th century, a reader might ponder why many women today are ambivalent about the opportunities that we have since achieved and that Ms. Alcott would have loved. Few among us today would cast such musings in terms of psychological melodrama and Faustian temptations, but clearly a bargain was struck when women were "liberated," and we are still sorting out the consequences. Helle Bering-Jensen is deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Times. ***** A LONG FATAL LOVE CHASE By Louisa May Alcott Random House, $21, 242 pages BEHIND A MASK: THE UNKNOWN THRILLERS OF LOUISA MAY ALCOTT By Louisa May Alcott Morrow, $23, 281 pages A MODERN MEPHISTOPHELES By Louisa May Alcott Bantam, $7.95 paper, 212 pages |
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