Authors’ Classic Love Stories

Yesterday some of our favourite book-bloggers picked their top love stories – today our authors have their say.

We asked our willing contributors to recommend one love story for Valentines week, in any medium – whether a film, book, play, poem, or song – and the response was magnificent.

There’s something for everyone in the suggestions that follow – read on for some valentines inspiration…

Laura Spinney, The Quick

“Tomas came to this conclusion,” Milan Kundera writes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”

Is he pulling our leg? I don’t think so. In the land of Tereza’s sleep, Tomas is king. Knowing when she arrives in dream’s antechamber, he says to her, “Goodbye, I’m going now.” Then he leaves. Fast asleep, she follows him. She trails him down to the first landing of his apartment building, where he is waiting for her. Taking him by the hand, never waking, she leads him back to bed. Love declared through sleep: now that is beautiful.

Susan Arnout Smith, The Timer Game

Jim and Della Dillingham Young get my vote. Even when I first read as a young teen “The Gift of the Magi” by O’Henry, the story was about more than perfect waist-length hair and a gold watch passed down from Dad. It was about trying to make somebody else happy; that the act of trying–of doing whatever was needed to create a moment of joy in the other–was worth any personal price.

The great kicker in this tale is that each still gets to see that joy on the face of the other, and in the most unexpected way. They see it in the click of realization that comes in knowing that each values the other with the same deep, abiding tenderness. It’s moments like that in real life that create couples sitting in matching rockers in their eighties on a porch under a deepening sky, still talking. Still laughing. Still reaching across the fragrant twilight to find the other’s hand.

Rudolph Delson, Maynard and Jennica

What is it about the phrase “love story” that makes me want to barf?

Put another way, what is it about having to name a favorite love story that awakens in me the pedantic and vindictive urge to recommend Jonathan Schell (on the epic love of politicians for nuclear holocaust) or Joan Didion (on their sultry affairs with clichés)?

Anyway, the least barfy and most genuine love story I can think of at the moment is Nicholson Baker’s ‘Room Temperature‘. The passage about the wife’s nicknames for the husband is as sweet and sophisticated as anything I’ve ever read.

Roma Tearne, Mosquito

This is a true story. Once upon a time there was a young man with very blue eyes. In order to make some money during vacation from studying at Cambridge, he did supply work in a school in London. He was in his twenties and the children he taught were ten year olds. But the school was horrendous and the children badly behaved, with fights breaking out all the time. The young man had enough and left. There were other, easier ways to make money.

Many years passed. Our hero grew older, moved on, led a completely different life. After scores of adventures, he fell in love for the last time and decided to marry. One evening at dinner he told his future wife about his brief experience as a teacher.

“It put me off teaching for life,” he said, ruefully. “There was one little girl in particular who was a complete and utter nightmare.” Something about the story was uneasily familiar.

“What was the name of the school, did you say?” I asked, casually, adding, as he fixed me with a stare, “Well, your eyes don’t appear to have changed colour, anyway.”

Katherine Bucknell, What You Will

W.H. Auden’s centenary year runs until his birthday, February 21. He wrote some of the finest poems ever about love. Here is the first stanza of “Lullabye”:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fever burns away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

And here is the last stanza of “Tell Me the Truth about Love”:

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I’m picking my nose,
Will it knock on the door in the morning
Or tread in the bus on my toes,
Will it come like a change in the weather,
Will its greeting be courteous or bluff,
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.

Now, don’t you want to read the rest before the man reaches one hundred and one? While you’re at it, take a look at some of my other favourites, “This Loved One,” “As I Walked Out One Evening,” “Funeral Blues,” “Heavy Date,” “In Sickness and in Health,” “The More Loving One,” “The Love Feast,” and “Amor Loci”. (Extracts © The Estate of W.H. Auden)

Ffion Hague The Pain And The Privilege

While researching the women in Lloyd George’s life I found stories of passion and jealousy in abundance. I also found true love between Lloyd George and his first bride, Margaret Owen.

Their courtship, set in rural North Wales in the 1880s, was formal and chaste: Margaret was a cut above Lloyd George socially and both belonged to strictly religious families. Lloyd George, handsome and flirtatious, had his work cut out to convince Margaret’s parents to let them meet at all and Margaret too was no push-over. Lloyd George addressed his letters to ‘Dear Miss Owen’ and proudly records ‘the first time she ever gave me a kiss’, three months after proposing to her

Lloyd George and his ‘Maggie’ were married in 1888 and she was his lynchpin for fifty-three years. He never wavered in his love for his wife although he made her jealous with his constant womanising: ‘You talk as if my affection for you came & went,’ he wrote in 1924. ‘No more than the sea does because the tide ebbs & flows. There is just as much water in it…’

Theirs was a love that stood the test of time. There is nothing more romantic than that.

Tracy Quan, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl

Blossom Dearie’s version of “Manhattan.” I see this as a theme song for my fictional heroine, Nancy Chan, known to many as the Manhattan Call Girl. And it’s all about how she cheats on her businesslike relationship with the city.

I imagine her taking the day off, playing hookey with a guy, but only for his charming company and his love-making. He’s a playmate — neither a client, nor a father-figure. He’s not a prospective husband and, by Manhattan standards, he might not even be boyfriend material. That’s his appeal:

The great big city’s a wondrous toy
Just made for a girl and boy
We’ll turn Manhattan into an isle of joy.

New York is the place where she becomes a woman, seeks her fortune and works pretty hard. So it’s a luxury to
imagine the entire city transformed from a workplace into a toy, a place where Nancy can escape her obligations
and have a pointless love affair.

Blossom Dearie’s voice (so girlish!) evokes Nancy’s longing for a love that’s immature and non-materialistic. Do I regard materialism as an evil distraction from love? No way. I think materialism tests a girl’s character. The longing wouldn’t be so pleasurable, nor would the boy be so tempting, if my fictional heroine were truly free of materialist anxieties. And the song ends with a deceptively whimsical phrase — I’ll take Manhattan — which can mean any number of things.

Jane Dunn, Read My Heart

As a love story Dorothy Osborne and Sir William Temple’s has everything — and most powerfully so because it is true.

They met across political divides during the English civil wars: both families forbade contact and clandestine letters and occasional stolen meetings were all that sustained them through a six year secret courtship. Their letters are masterpieces of 17th century wit and deeply felt emotion and both of them recognised their own story was as full of passion and reversals of fortune as the most epic of fictional romance. ‘Can there be a more romance story than ours would make if the conclusion should prove happy?’ Dorothy wrote to William, and he responded, ‘As those romances are best which are most like true stories, so are those true stories best which are most like romances’.

Their lives were made all the more enjoyable for me to research and write by the interesting times in which they lived; civil war, a republican experiment, treacherous foreign diplomacy and finally the ‘Glorious Revolution’ they enabled by promoting the marriage of William of Orange and Mary that would alter the course of monarchy and the future of Great Britain itself.

Dorothy and William’s rollercoaster courtship of fragile hopes and thwarted desire reminds us lucky 21st century lovers how our freedom of choice and absence of constraint has lost us a certain intensity of feeling and supercharged rapture.

Brian Patten, Collected Love Poems

Looking through an old note book I see I’ve written down various quotes on the subject of love. Amongst my favourites is Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness. That’s Bertram Russell. Also there is an old Spanish proverb: Amor no tiene eleccion (In love there is no choosing) Then of course you have Woody Allen with endless quips: I was nauseous and tingly all over. I was either in love or I had smallpox. As far as love poems go, the shortest one of my own is called ‘The Cynic’s Only Love Poem’:

Love comes and goes
And often it has paused,
Then come back to see
The damage it has caused.