5 Best Literary Love Stories of All Time

Some are classics. Some are contemporary. All will have you swooning.

I was in one of my favorite indie bookshops recently when I saw that they installed an enormous set of shelves dedicated to bestselling romance novels. To be clear, these are not bodice rippers; most books on these shelves read more like 80s rom-coms, some of them listed in yesterday’s episode of

Overbooked Mama

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NPR did a fascinating deep dive into why Gen Z (and members of every other generation) are buying more romance than ever. The primary explanation: They’re fun! But also in these uncertain times, readers want a predictable ending. Think about it. Every romance ends with the girl getting the guy. Still, I’m not a huge romance reader per se, mostly for those very predictable endings, and yet (YET!) I am a hopeless romantic. So I pulled some of my favorite schmoopy scenes from my favorite books to relive them just in time for Valentine’s Day.

In thinking about my favorite swoon-worthy scenes in books, you know the ones that make you clutch your chest and say, “Awwwwwww,” I had to go back to the beginning of my reading journey…to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Mr. Rochester was definitely the first literary hunk I ever met, and I fell for him hook & line, particularly when he delivers the world famous lines that stopped a thousand hearts in Victorian England. They certainly stopped mine when I read this book at fifteen.

“I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you–especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.” –Mr. Rochester 

The love story I’ve always loved most though is the one played out in the pages of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. As far as I’m concerned, every romance novel ever written tries to recapture some of the tortured attempts at connection that play out between Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy. Austen keeps the two apart for nearly the entire novel so when Mr. Darcy finally (finally!) makes clear his feelings for her, I fell in love with him forever.

I have to say though that the most romantic lines delivered in an Austen book aren’t from Pride & Prejudice; it’s in Austen’s final novel Persusasion. At the very end of the book, Anne reads a letter written by Mr. Wentworth (even if they are attracted to one another, they haven’t spoken for the entire novel), and the words are perhaps the most romantic of any of the Austen novels.

“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you.”

LOVE that one.

My favorite love story of the twentieth century is the fiery one that ignites between Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. I’ve always loved Daisy’s rich girl whimsy, her careless heart, the ways in which she uses Gatsby to make Tom Buchanan jealous. In the end though the power of the love story works only because Fitzgerald shows us the deep well of Jay Gatsby’s love. Not only has he done everything to earn Daisy’s affections — even buying the mansion across the water from her — he’s also waiting for the right moment to be alone with her. That patience! He’s just the right balance of mysterious and expressive, and he never gives the reader too much but it’s enough to capture our hearts. The sweetest part of Gatsby though is the description of Daisy and Gatsby’s kiss. It’s the stuff of legend:

“His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

I read The Time Traveler's Wife when it first came out in 2003, and it was one of those books that stayed with me for years after. The love story between Claire and Henry has been celebrated, maligned and even written off as sexist — but I fell for the deep love that author Aubrey Niffenegger masterfully captures in her pages. There are so many great love scenes in the book, too, that it’s hard to narrow it down to one (I’m not a huge fan of any of the TV and film adaptations).

The scene that I always return to is when Henry travels back in time to Claire’s childhood and he meets her playing in a field. There’s so much mind-bending moments in this novel where you’re trying to keep track of where they are in time, but what you realize is that this is the moment they’re truly meeting for the first time. Not only do we see innocent young Claire in light of the tragic love story she’ll come to endure in her twenties, but we love that Henry gets to meet her childhood self. Because in seeing her that young, Henry is able to see all of her. He’s able to love her at all of her ages. Grab the tissues! At another point in the novel, there’s this quote:

“Henry loves my hair almost as though it is a creature unto itself, as though it has a soul to call its own, as though it could love him back.” 

Lastly, this one may throw you for a loop. But my favorite love story written this year was the unconventional love triangle captured in Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Hardly a classic love story or maybe not a love story at all — at the end, the boy does not get the girl. Still, the heart of the story asks the question: What if your soul mate isn’t the person that you’re in love with? Tracking longtime friends Sadie and Sam, readers follow them through a lifetime of ups and downs as students in the Ivy League, then video game designers and ultimately, as partners in a video game company.

The most romantic scene in the book though comes in the very first chapter when Sam and Sadie first meet up in a train station in Boston. I don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say Sam and Sadie have had just as many problems communicating as Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett. But in the opening chapter, they strike up a conversation after years apart, and after catching up, it’s time to say goodbye. The moment sets up the entire novel.

“She gave Sam another quick hug. ‘Good running into you.’

She started walking toward the train, and Sam tried to figure out a way to make her stop. If this were a game, he could hit pause. He could restart, say different things, the right ones this time. He could search his inventory for the item that would make Sadie not leave. They hadn’t even exchanged phone numbers, he thought desperately.”

There’s so much longing in what he says there, and I love that Zevin shows us how badly he wishes he could control the situation like he could the design of a video game. In one paragraph, Zevin makes clear that Sam is desperate to keep talking to her, and I literally held the book to my heart and smiled when I read that. (I’m embarrassed to say that that really happened when I read that part of the book!)

Anyway, I’m dying to know: What is your favorite love story in a novel? If something pops into your head, please share. It’s probably one of mine, too.

xo

Brooke