Ten novels about ....
romance and love
To mark St Valentine's Day, here are ten enduring accounts of love.
Love in a Cold Climate, by Nancy Mitford
Never more appropriate than in February, Mitford's wickedly sharp account of a May-December liaison is not just hilarious but sad. To the shock of all her family, the beautiful heiress Polly is smitten by her lecherous uncle, and refuses to see sense.
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
Perhaps the most famous novel about adultery, it shows the effect of boredom and dissatisfaction can have on a narcissistic woman. Emma Bovary, wife of a small-town doctor, seeks excitement. In the process, she loses everything.
Persuasion, by Jane Austen
Austen's most bittersweet and sensitive work, it shows Anne Elliott still tormented by being persuaded into breaking her engagement years earlier with Frederick Wentworth, whom her famly deemed beneath her. He has since made his name in the navy, but has not forgiven her. An autumnal and eventually joyous novel.
The Go-Between, by L P Hartley
The narrator of this claustrophobic tale is a schoolboy who is put to use as messenger boy between the daughter of a grand house and a neighbouring farmer, with whom she is having an affair. The disastrous effects of this mesalliance are felt for the rest of the boy's life, which is almost as ruined as that of the smitten farmer.
North and South, by Mrs Gaskell
A tale of opposites, who are inevitably attracted, this romantic gem is set in the industrial north of England in the mid-1800s, where mill owner John Thornton finds himself harangued by a spirited social reformer, Margaret Hale. Not only a love story but a sliver of social history as well.
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte
The romance to end all romances, this gothic but brilliantly overwrought work is a stark warning against falling for a dark and brooding man, though nobody seems ever to have listened.
Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D H Lawrence
A lyrical depiction of sexual awakening, between the lady of the house and her gardener, it has survived the headlines and the sniggering to become a classic of almost innocent, and tender, carnality.
The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro
One of the quietest love stories ever told, Ishiguro's masterly cameo of the straitlaced butler Stevens who discovers he is susceptible to the outspoken new housekeeper, Miss Kenton, is hauntingly full of regret.
Sunset Song, by Lewis Grassic Gibbon
A heart-rending evocation of young Chris Guthrie's love for her farmer husband, Ewan, and the effect his soldiering in the trenches was to have on them both. One of the most affecting, harsh accounts of love in Scottish fiction.
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, by Elizabeth Smart
Loosely based on the Canadian novelist's affair with poet George Barker, this prose poem was acclaimed for its description of the agonies of love. Angela Carter admired it, but said one of the reasons she founded the feminist publishing house Virago Press, was so that no daughter of hers could ever write such a book: "By Grand Central Station I Tore off His Balls would be more like it, I should hope," she said.
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