Forgotten Manuscript Louisa May Alcott Love Tale Will Find Its Way Into Print And A TV Miniseries

Kent Bicknell is the rarest of creatures, a man who is a genuine, unabashed Louisa May Alcott fan.

Headmaster of a New Hampshire private school he helped found in 1973, Bicknell is a collector of literary artifacts, especially Alcott materials.

Two years ago, Bicknell found out through a friend in New York that an unpublished Alcott manuscript was for sale. He could not rest until he tracked it down.

The result of Bicknell’s quest, a romantic thriller called “A Long Fatal Love Chase,” is in bookstores now and may be a four-hour television miniseries as early as next fall.

Writing at length in the New York Times Book Review, novelist Stephen King called it “a wonderful entertainment … and it tends to confirm Alcott’s position as the most articulate 19th-century feminist.”

Reflecting on his successful chase during a recent visit to Chicago, Bicknell says: “The idea of having an entire work of a major literary figure, an unpublished work, was incomprehensible to me and I spent the next year trying to raise the money to purchase it.

“Terrified that the thing had been sold, I called the dealer and found out that not only had it not been sold but people weren’t interested, people weren’t nibbling, which was astounding. I spent the next year trying to raise the money to be able to purchase it.

“This was at a time when I felt, ‘There’s no way I can get the money together to buy this. Am I crazy? This costs more money than I make in a year.’

“A benefactor of our school was delighted to help me out on this. He loaned me the money, basically,” Bicknell says, declining to name an amount.

It wasn’t until he knew he would be able to buy the manuscript that Bicknell holed up in a Manhattan hotel room and read it. “I was completely captured by it, not even noticing what page I was on,” he recalls.

“A Long Fatal Love Chase” is the story of Rosamond Vivian, a young woman brought up on a remote island off the coast of England by her grandfather, a cold and unloving man. As the novel opens, she declares: “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.”

When a dashing stranger nearly twice her age, Phillip Tempest, visits her grandfather, Rosamond is swept away. The wealthy Tempest takes her to his Mediterranean villa, promising to marry her. But soon Rosamond discovers that he is already married and suspects that he may have murdered a son he never acknowledged. She flees, and the chase begins. No matter where she goes, the obsessed Tempest always finds her.

Alcott wrote “A Long Fatal Love Chase” in 1866 as a serial for a popular magazine, but it was rejected by the publisher as “too long and too sensational.” She tried to tone it down, but it made no difference, and the manuscript languished until her heirs put it on the market in 1992.

After Bicknell bought the manuscript, 290 pages of wheat-colored paper with faint blue lines covered with Alcott’s tiny backhand in brown ink, he and an assistant from his school meticulously copied it onto a word processor “word for word, line for line, the same number of lines per page, every cross out, every insert, so that we had an actual transcript of the thing as she wrote it.”

Then Bicknell was steered to literary agent Lane Zachary of Boston’s Palmer and Dodge Agency, a major Alcott fan who promoted it in a “Talk of the Town” piece in The New Yorker, and quickly the publishing houses began calling. Random House bought it for a $1.5 million advance.

No sooner did the ink dry on the deal than Hollywood agents were calling Bicknell and his agent. “Barbra Streisand was really interested,” he says. “Sharon Stone. Michelle Pfeiffer. Marisa Tomei had read it and was really interested.”

It ultimately was sold to Citadel Entertainment, a division of Time Warner Inc., for development as a miniseries on NBC, with Bicknell as a literary consultant.

Bicknell says he is not disappointed that “Long Fatal” won’t be seen on the silver screen. “When you think about it, this thing was written obviously to be serialized. It has plenty of opportunities for commercial breaks. I think it will be fun to see it get four hours instead of just two.

“Louisa May really was good. She was a fan of Charlotte Bronte and there’s a lot of ‘Jane Eyre’ in ‘A Long Fatal Love Chase.’ The characters of Rochester and Tempest are parallel. She also has the ability to describe things in such a visual way. She was enamored of the stage and as a kid wrote dramatic productions for herself and her sisters.

“Louisa May was forged out of a peculiar smithy. She was a multifaceted, multitalented woman. Elaine Showalter, a very good Alcott scholar, once said of ‘Little Women,’ ‘Has there ever been any other book that has been so avidly read by one half of the population and so little commented upon by the other half?’

“It’s a really interesting thought. I have run into that same sort of thing from white males who genuinely ought to know better who would still prefer to dismiss Louisa May Alcott, but she is tenaciously holding on.”

Alcott, who was born in 1832, spent most of her life in Boston and Concord, Mass., in the company of family friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Her father, Bronson, was a transcendentalist philosopher and author but rather impractical. After the failure of Fruitlands, a Utopian community he founded, Louisa May began supporting her family. She taught, worked as a domestic and then began writing.

“Little Women,” based on Alcott’s childhood memories, was published in 1868 and 1869 and became an immediate success.

She followed it with “An Old Fashioned Girl,” “Little Men,” “Eight Cousins” and “Jo’s Boys.” She also wrote sensational stories under a pseudonym.