CLASSIC BEST ROMANCE NOVELS OF ALL TIME TO BE READ
CLASSIC ROMAN NOVELS TO BE READ
Classic romantic stories about boy and girl meeting; boy and girl fall in love, get married and live happily ever after, but this rarely happens in real life. Where is the turmoil, the heartache, the deceit and the messy breakup?
What happened to the unrequited love affairs and the stories of forbidden love and the insidious feeling that you will never be truly happy?
Whatever the storyline, we all know that with every great classic comes the 'emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending'. Or is this really always the case?
Some classic novels have been known to pull into the reader's heart to ensure that the story is full of lust, love and fairytale endings, but what about the others? Some classic stories explore the dark side of romance; the toxic side effects that result from giving your heart to another.
So, when you're looking for a new classic romantic novel, which one should you delve into first?
Below you will find a mix of happy-ever afters and heartbreak; stories of true love, adultery, unrequited feelings and intimate contacts.
It's a list that's guaranteed to evoke mushy, limp, and maybe even tender loving feelings in all of us, whether you already have star-eyed or cold-hearted and cynical when it comes to the idea of finding that one true love.
Each of the books listed here was written before 1980, which is why I have classified them as either a classic or a modern classic. These are the books which, even now, years after they were written, are widely remembered and often quoted from; several have even been turned into Hollywood movies, so there's clearly something about the storyline.
Our Classic Romance Recommendations
# 1 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)
No list would be complete without this one!
Shakespeare creates a world of violence and generational conflict in which two young people fall in love and die because of that love. The story is quite extraordinary because the normal problems that young lovers face are so great here. It's not just that Romeo and Juliet's families disapprove of the lover's affection for each other; Rather, the Montagues and the Capulets are on opposite sides in a blood feud, trying to kill each other in the streets of Verona. Every time a member of one of the two families is killed in the battle, his relatives demand the blood of his murderer. Because of the feud, if Romeo is discovered by her family along with Juliet, he will be murdered. Once Romeo is banished, the only way Juliet can avoid marrying someone else is to have a potion that apparently kills her so that she is buried with the bodies of her murdered relatives. In this violent world of death, the movement from the story of love at first sight to the union of lovers in death seems almost inevitable.
See Also: 12 Novels Considered the 'Best Fiction Books of All Time'
# 2 Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
In what is arguably Dickens's best novel, humble, orphaned Pip is apprenticed to the blacksmith's dirty work, but dares to dream of becoming a gentleman - and one day, under sudden and puzzling circumstances, he finds himself with "high hopes''. In this gripping tale of crime and guilt, revenge and reward, the compelling characters include Magwitch, the fearful and formidable convict; Estella, whose beauty is surpassed only by her pride; and the exasperated Miss Havisham, an eccentric, confused bride.
# 3 Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
Margaret Mitchell's epic novel about love and war won the Pulitzer Prize and one of the most popular and celebrated films of all time.
Many novels have been written about the Civil War and its aftermath. No one takes us to the burning fields and cities of the American South the way Gone With the Wind does, creating terrifying scenes and thrilling portraits of characters so vivid that we remember their words and feel their fear and hunger for the rest of our life.
In the two lead characters, the white-shouldered, irresistible Scarlett and the flashy, scornful Rhett, Margaret Mitchell not only conveyed a timeless tale of survival in the harshest of circumstances, but she also created two of the most famous lovers in the English-speaking world since Romeo. and Julia.
# 4 Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
"It is a widely recognized truth that a single man who owns a fortune must miss a wife."
Thus,begins Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's witty comedy of manners - one of the most popular novels of all time -with beautifully civilized sparring between proud Mr. Darcy and biased Elizabeth Bennet as they reenact their spirited courtship in an eighteenth-century salon series. intrigues.
# 5 Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)
Wuthering Heights is a wild, passionate tale of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father. After Mr. Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff is bullied and humiliated by Catherine's brother Hindley and mistakenly believing that his love for Catherine is not reciprocated, he leaves Wuthering Heights, only to return years later as a rich and polished man. He takes terrible revenge for his past woes.
# 6 Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
When Emma Rouault marries Charles Bovary, she imagines she will indulge in the life of luxury and passion she reads about in sentimental novels and women's magazines. But Charles is a dull country doctor, and provincial life is very different from the romantic excitement she craves. In her quest to make her dreams come true, she takes a lover and begins a devastating spiral of deception and despair.
Flaubert's novel outraged its readers when it was first published in 1857, and it remains unsurpassed in its revelation of character and society.
# 7 Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)
Dr. Yury Zhivago, Pasternak's alter ego, is a poet, philosopher and physician whose life is disrupted by war and his love for Lara, a revolutionary's wife. His artistic nature makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks. The poems he writes are among the most beautiful texts in the novel.
# 8 Women in Love (DH Lawrence)
The novel tells of the relationships of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, who lived in a mining town in Midland in the years before World War I. Ursula falls in love with Birkin (a thinly veiled portrait of Lawrence himself), and Gudrun has an intense but tragic affair with Gerald, the son of a local coal mine owner.
# 9 The Graduate (Charles Webb)
When Benjamin Braddock graduates from a small Eastern college and moves into his parents' house, everyone wants to know what he's going to do with his life.
Benjamin becomes unhappy in an affair with Mrs. Robinson, the relentlessly seductive wife of his father's business partner. It's only when the lovely co-ed Elaine Robinson comes home to visit her parents that Benjamin, now smitten, thinks he may have found some sort of direction in his life. Unfortunately for Benjamin, Mrs. Robinson plays both the role of a protective mother and that of a mistress. A wonderfully fierce and absurd struggle of will follows, in which love and idealism triumph over the forces of corruption and conformity.
# 10 The French Lieutenant's Woman (John Fowles)
The scene is the village of Lyme Regis on Lyme Bay in Dorset and the main characters in the triangle between love and intrigue are Charles Smithson, 32, a lord of independent means and vague scientifically crooked; his fiancée, Ernestina Freeman, a beautiful heiress, daughter of a wealthy and pompous dry goods merchant; and Sarah Woodruff, mysterious and fascinatingly left after a brief affair with a French naval officer, shortly before the story begins.
Obsessed with an irresistible fascination with the enigmatic Sarah, Charles is hurled to the edge of the existential void by a moment of accomplished lust. Duty dictates that his engagement to Tina must be broken when he sets out again to find the woman who has conquered his Victorian soul and the heart of his lord.
# 11 Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)Leo Tolstoy
's classic tale of doomed love is one of the most admired novels in world literature. Generations of readers have been captivated by his great heroine, the unhappily married Anna Karenina and her tragic affair with the boisterous Count Vronsky.
Frivolous contacts are commonplace in their world, but Anna and Vronsky's consuming passion makes them targets for contempt and leads to Anna's increasing isolation. The heartbreaking trajectory of their relationship is in stark contrast to the colorful swirl of friends and relatives surrounding them, especially newlyweds Kitty and Levin, who forge a moving bond as they struggle to build a life together.
Anna Karenina is a masterpiece not only because of the unforgettable woman at the core and the grim drama of her destiny, but also because it explores and illuminates the deepest questions about how to live a fulfilled life.
# 12 Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
Orphaned in her Aunt Reed's Gateshead household, subjected to the brutal regime at Lowood charity school, Jane Eyre nevertheless proves unbroken in spirit and integrity. She takes the post of governess in Thornfield, falls in love with Mr. Rochester and discovers the impediment to their legal marriage in a story that transcends melodrama to portray a woman's passionate quest for a wider and richer life than Victorian society has traditionally allowed. .
With a heroine full of desire, the dangerous secrets she encounters, and the choices she eventually makes, Charlotte Bronte's innovative and enduring romantic novel continues to captivate and provoke readers.
# 13 Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
The novel begins in Monte Carlo, where our heroine is swept away by the dashing widower Maxim de Winter and his sudden marriage proposal. Orphaned and working as a maid, she can hardly believe her luck. It is only when they arrive at his enormous estate that she realizes how great a shadow his dead wife will cast over their lives, presenting her with a lingering evil that threatens to destroy their marriage from beyond the grave.
# 14 The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
Powered by the dreams and struggles of three generations, The Thorn Birds is the epic story of a family rooted in the Australian sheep country. At the heart of the story is the love of Meggie Cleary, who can never own the man she so desperately adores, and Ralph de Bricassart, who is ascending from pastor to the innermost circles of the Vatican ... but whose passion for Meggie has taken him all. days of his life.
# 15 A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, aging Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There, the lives of two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a notorious but brilliant English lawyer, become entangled in their love for Lucie Manette. They are pulled from the quiet roads of London against their will to the vengeful, blood-stained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror, and soon fall under the deadly shadow of La Guillotine.
# 16 A Room with a View (EM Forster)
While on vacation in Italy, Lucy meets two gentlemen, George Emerson and Cecil Vyse. After twice rejecting Cecil Vyse's marriage proposals, Lucy finally accepts. On hearing of the engagement, George protests and confesses his true love for Lucy. Lucy is torn between the choice to marry Cecil, who is a more socially acceptable partner, and George who she knows will bring her true happiness.
A room with a view is a tale of classic human struggles, such as the choice between social acceptance or true love.
# 17 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor Hugo)
Quasimodo, the hunchbacked Hunchback, lives in the vaulted Gothic towers of Notre-Dame. Mocked and shunned for his looks, he only takes pity on Esmerelda, a beautiful gypsy dancer to whom he becomes fully devoted. However, Esmerelda has also caught the attention of the sinister Archdeacon Claude Frollo, and when she rejects his lecherous approaches, Frollo hatches a plot to destroy her that only Quasimodo can prevent.
Victor Hugo's sensational, evocative novel brings life to the medieval Paris he loved and mourn its passing in one of the greatest historical novels of the nineteenth century.
# 18 Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Pierre Choderlos de Laclos)
The complex moral ambiguities of seduction and revenge make Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782) one of the most scandalous and controversial novels in European literature. The subject of major film and stage adaptations, the novel's protagonists, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil, form an unholy alliance, turning seduction into a game - a game they must win.
# 19 A Midsummer Night's Dream (Shakespeare)
A story about the adventures of four young lovers and a group of amateur actors, and their interactions with forest fairies and a duke and duchess. Set in a mythical Athens and an enchanted forest, there is a handsome fairy king, a deluded parent, star-crossed lovers, a weaver transformed into a half-ass, forest ghosts and elves.
# 20 The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
The fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, from lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times remarked that 'gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession, ”it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.
# 21 Lady Chatterley's Lover (DH Lawrence)
Lawrence's candid portrayal of an extramarital affair and the explicit sexual explorations of the central characters saw this controversial book, now considered a masterpiece, banned as pornography until 1960.
# 22 The Emerald Peacock (Katharine Gordon)
They fled to an exotic palace high in the majestic hills. Bianca O'Neil, a beautiful Irish girl and Sher Khan, the passionate Prince of Tigers, ruler of Lambagh and heir to the Peacock Throne.
It was a turbulent passion overshadowed by betrayal and greed, consumed by the flames of rebellion that engulfed the land, and ultimately challenged by enemies who coveted the emblem of Sher Khan's power, the rare and wonderful jewels of the emerald peacock.
# 23 Breakfast at Tiffany's (Truman Capote)
In this seductive, wistful masterpiece, Truman Capote created a woman whose name has entered American idiom and whose style is part of the literary landscape. Holly Golightly knows nothing bad can ever happen to you at Tiffany's; her poignancy, humor and naivety continue to charm.
# 24 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Anita Loos)
If a twentieth century American fictional character seems immortal, it's Lorelei Lee from Little Rock, Arkansas, the not-so-stupid blonde who knew diamonds were a girl's best friend. Outrageous, charming and unforgettable, she has been played on stage and on screen by Carol Channing and Marilyn Monroe and has become the archetype of the footloose, good-hearted gold digger, with an insatiable appetite for orchids, champagne and gems.
Here are her 'diaries', created by Anita Loos in the Roaring Twenties, as Lorelei and her friend Dorothy meet everyone from the Prince of Wales to 'Doctor Froyd' across Europe - then home again to marry a Main Line millionaire and become a movie star. In this wonderfully funny and witty book, Lorelei Lee's wild antics, unique outlook and imaginative way shine with language.
# 25 The Weather on the Streets (Rosamond Lehmann)
In The Weather in the Streets, we see Olivia Curtis ten years older, a failed marriage behind her, slimmer, sadder and apparently not much wiser. A chance meeting on a train with a man who enchanted her as a teenager leads to a forbidden love affair and a new world of secret meetings, short phone calls and snatched contacts in anonymous hotel rooms.
This subtle and powerful novel, ahead of its time when it was first published, shocked even the most loyal of Lehmann fans with its searing honesty and passionate portrayal of clandestine love.
With so many great, classic novels out there, why not take this opportunity to curl up on the couch and enjoy reading about what we all really crave: true love.
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