The Chase, also titled A Long Fatal Love Chase, is one of a number of early books by American author Louisa May Alcott, and was written in 1866 under the nom de plume A.M. Barnard, as a serialised novel for a magazine. It was rejected as "too long and too sensational" and was not actually published until 1995. Living on an island with her unloving grandfather, eighteen-year-old Rosamond Vivian is ripe for the plucking when rich Phillip Tempest comes along in his luxury yacht. After a month of courting, they are "married" and set sail for an idyllic life together. After a year of wedded bliss, Rosamond discovers that her husband and their marriage are not what she believed. She escapes, and the chase begins; it is a chase that takes Rosamond and Phillip from Nice to Paris, a convent in Amiens, Wiesbaden, Cologne and eventually back to England and her grandfather's island. This novel is quite unlike Alcott's better-known works: there are daring rescues, narrow escapes, disguises, obsessed lovers, a mental asylum, flight by train, boat and carriage, an heroic monk and plenty of melodrama. It is easy to see how this may have seemed risqué in the 19th century. Very different Alcott fare.