Falling in love is the one experience nearly everyone shares — which is why the greatest writers have taken it so seriously. Here are the love stories that endure.
The oldest plot, told with the most intelligence
Romance is the oldest plot in literature, and the most misunderstood. We treat "love story" as a lesser category, but the truth is that the deepest novels ever written are love stories: Anna Karenina, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice. Love is where character is tested, where money and class and pride collide, where people become most fully themselves and most capable of ruin.
This collection gathers the great romances of the public domain — the courtships and the catastrophes, the marriages and the betrayals. Austen treats love as a problem of judgment; the Brontës treat it as a force of nature; Tolstoy treats it as a moral reckoning. The poets — Browning, Neruda, Millay — treat it as the thing language exists to attempt.
Read them for the pleasure of the plot, and stay for what they know about the human heart, which is more than almost anything else ever written.