“The omen never fails”: Appropriating Intertexts in Louisa May Alcott’s A Long Fatal Love Chase
Emma Butler-Way
Abstract
Not seeing publication until 130 years after it was written, Louisa May Alcott’s A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866) was deemed “too sensational” to be published by her publisher (Alcott 1989: 153). Thus far, academic work on the novel has largely explored its place within Alcott’s wider canon of work and the relationship between Alcott’s work and that of Charlotte Brontë, particularly Jane Eyre (1847). This article takes the latter approach as its starting point, using Gerard Genette’s theory of hypertextuality as a primary lens through which to approach the novel, exploring A Long Fatal Love Chase’s relationship not only to Jane Eyre, but also to mythology, the works of Shakespeare and Tennyson, and Goethe’s Faust (1808). By doing so, this article undertakes a Genettian analysis of Alcott’s novel not only to show how Alcott ultimately attempts to refute prevailing literary modes, but also to offer a reading that takes us into the realms of the hypothetical, which in turn highlights the role of the personal reader response in intertextual analyses.
Keywords
Louisa May Alcott; A Long Fatal Love Chase; hypertextuality; transtextuality; Gerard Genette; intertextuality; Charlotte Brontë; Jane Eyre; Goethe; Faust
Date of Acceptance: 1 July 2026
Date of Publication: 3 July 2026
Double Blind Peer Reviewed
Recommended Citation:
Butler-Way, Emma. 2026. “‘The Omen Never Fails’: Appropriating Intertexts in Louisa May Alcott’s A Long Fatal Love Chase.” Victorian Popular Fictions, 8.1 (Spring): 47-63. ISSN: 2632-4253 (online) DOI: https://doi.org/10.46911/YERW5050
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
