THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 24, 1995 TAG: 9509210600
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY
LENGTH: Long : 104 lines
BEHIND A MASK
The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott
EDITED BY MADELEINE STERN
William Morrow. 281 pp. $23.
A LONG FATAL LOVE CHASE
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
EDITED BY KENT BICKNELL
Random House. 242 pp. $21.
It's been a good couple of years for Louisa May Alcott - a novel published, a collection of short stories reprinted, her most popular book made into a movie. Not bad for someone who has been dead for more than 100 years.
Alcott (1832-1888) won her place in American literature with Little Women, a classic children's tale. But in her novel and short-story collection, we see the full range of her talent: Alcott writes of revenge and obsession, of good and evil. We meet powerful heroines and sinister lovers. We watch them kiss, tangle and spiral to their destiny. Few happy endings here.
There is abundant melodrama in her ``blood-and-thunder'' thrillers and sudden plot twists. Sometimes, it's like reading a bad Nancy Drew book. But there are also flashes of brilliance in her psychological insights.
The tales in Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott are suspenseful and designed to feed the appetites of the readers of her day and at the same time feed her family. They are dark stories, heavy with foreshadowing and full of scorned lovers, fresh graves, disguises and deceit. Her characters tell lies, live lies and sometimes die because of them.
Alcott came of age in Concord, Mass., played with Ralph Waldo Emerson's children, went berry picking with Henry David Thoreau and occasionally saw Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her father, Bronson, was a philosopher; her mother, Abba, a social worker. Alcott loved to write, and, as soon as possible, she made writing a career - often penning under a pseudonym.
A Long Fatal Love Chase was rejected by her 19th century publishers. Too long and sensational, they said. Ironically, modern readers will recognize a popular topic of today in her stalking story.
Her plotting is fast-paced. Each chapter is written so that magazine readers would be desperate for the next installment. The novel is entertaining, although the coincidences become comical, and the stalker lacks depth.
Rosamond Vivian is an 18-year-old woman taking care of her elderly grandfather on an island off the English coast. She falls for Phillip Tempest, a handsome man nearly twice her age who comes to visit one stormy night. She sails with him to his Mediterranean villa. He promises to marry her, but she discovers he is already married. Vivian flees, and the chase is on. It will take her across Italy, France and Germany and even to a convent.
``Like many another woman she hoped to save him through her love, and as time showed her more and more clearly the nature of the man, she tried to forget his sins to others and remember only his generosity, his tenderness to her,'' Alcott writes.
Vivian assumes a new identity, yet Tempest finds her and demands her love. At one point, he locks her away in an insane asylum.
By the end, she says: ``I detest, despise, hate and discard this man forever. My delusion is gone, I know him now, and nothing can restore love, respect or confidence. He is my evil genius, and long ago when as a reckless girl I said I'd sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom little I knew that I should be taken at my word in such fearful earnest.''
Alcott enjoys playing with the ideas of master and slave, of power and who has it. We see this in A Long Fatal Love Chase when Tempest becomes slave to his love - to the woman whom he has told: ``Rose, remember one thing. I am master here, my will is law, and disobedience I punish without mercy''; and again in her story, ``Behind a Mask or a Woman's Power.''
There, 19-year-old Jean Muir is a character whose evil games rival those of Tempest. She has come to be a governess to the wealthy Coventry family. But nothing is that simple. She also has come to dominate. She tells one of the family members who has become a suitor: ``I am a witch, and one day my disguise will drop away and you will see me as I am, old, ugly, bad and lost. Beware of me in time. I've warned you. Now love me at your peril.''
This is the best of the stories in the collection. Alcott sustains the tension, develops the characters and weaves a clever tale. Muir is Everywoman to the men in the book. The feminist in Alcott comes out here in her belief in women's victory over men.
Also in the collection is ``Pauline's Passion and Punishment'' about a woman scorned who seeks revenge, and ``The Mysterious Key and What it Opened'' about a man who must search a family tomb to find love. The fourth story is ``The Abbot's Ghost or Maurice Treherne's Temptation,'' a love story set in an English abbey.
The true reward in A Long Fatal Love Chase and the collection of thrillers is the chance to add dimensions to an author many of us thought we knew. Here is the bad-girl Louisa May Alcott. And her playground is a place of mystery, seduction and death. MEMO: June Arney is a staff writer.
(EDITOR'S NOTE: Also just published, The World of Louisa May Alcott
(HarperPerennial, 120 pp., $22.50), a lavishly illustrated paperback
book about Alcott's life and times.) BY JUNE ARNEY
ILLUSTRATION: Photo courtesy of THE LOUISA MAY ALCOTT MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION
by CNB