Louisa May Alcott's lost novel, A Fatal Love Chase

Found this book in the library sale for $1 and nearly read it in one sitting, finishing it last evening...a compelling artful telling of a young woman wanting to sell her soul to the devil for a year of freedom, and managing to do so...in the form of a man who plays her grandfather her guardian, for her and she has her year...and then what follows:  betrayal, the discovery(as in Jane Eyre, there is a wife!) and then when Rosamond will not obey her captor, he puts her in a mental asylum, from which she escapes to a nunnery, where the Father Ignatius befriends her, and more. The rest of the novel, she is pursued by the lover, who is determined to have her, but she resists on moral principles, and will not relent...a portrait in the beginning of the novel will reappear in the final chapter, artfully tying together the tangled threads of this novel of deceptions, of betrayals, and yet, what redeems it, is love; even the Satanic character grows to understand the meaning of love, but noone can have what he wants, and the end is necessarily tragic, like a grand opera.   As in her beloved "little Women" read as a child, and taught in China, as the American "Jane Austen"...Louisa May Alcott reveals in this early novel, her own search for truth and love, which plays out differently with her heroine Jo, and her sisters, in the classic.   Characterization is a trump care for LMA; one cannot help but caring, and the writing is so vivid, it is a real page turner.   Hard to believe, but true!  LMA campaigned for womens rights, though Margaret Fuller was the political voice of her native Concord, Massachusetts.  She had to earn an income so she turned to writing mysteries and early novels such as this one, republished in 1995 in Canada, to support herself and her family, due to her father being Bronson Alcott, and his utopian views which failed them for support of the household.