Abcde BLOG

Top Ten Tuesdays is a weekly meme hosted by the Broke and the Bookish.  Each week we get a new theme to engage our list-making OCD.  This week the theme is greatest love stories in literature.  You should check it out!

I realized while trying to make this list that I don't read a great number of books with love/romance plots, and those I do read tend to focus on dysfunctional love.  Meh.  To shamelessly distort a Tolstoy quotation "Every happy marriage is the same; but each unhappy marriage is unhappy in its own way."  Consequently, I have some non-traditional choices mixed in with my list.

1.  Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester--probably the most traditionally romantic couple that I love.  I love Jane's spirit and Rochester's burning desire to re-gain the happiness he thought he'd lost forever.  Um, I also love that they have a psychic connection that calls Jane back to him.


2.  Nick and Nora Charles from The Thin Man.--in my eyes Nick and Nora are the ultimate manifestation of married love.  How great is it that for all the teasing and the hard times they give one another, they are so obviously in love that they function as equals more or less?


3.  Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane--because any romance conducted largely through quotation and allusion is an automatic WIN in my books.

original art created by queensjoy on LJ

4.  Annabelle and Humbert Humbert from Lolita--yes, their romance is dysfunctional, yes it ruins his life, yes it leads to child abuse, but a passion that could manifest itself for so long after the event changes a person's very core and adds a layer of tragedy to love.



5.  George and Martha from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?--ok, so they are loud drunken disrespectful adulterous academics, so they destroy everyone and everything around them.  They still have a shared bond so powerful that they were able to maintain an intensive fictionalized existence for more than 16 years.  Plus, it takes an incredible amount of passion to fight like that.


6.  Charlie Brown and the Little Red-Headed Girl--my first introduction to the pain and beauty of unrequited love.

totally snagged from Charles Schultz

7.  Christine Daae and the Phantom--another great unrequited love.  And the Phantom is so much more interesting, and in a way alluring, than Raoul.  Every single time I see the performance or the films, I always hope against hope that Christine will go back to the Phantom.


8.  Stevens and Miss Kenton from The Remains of the Day--this book is one of my all time favorites.  The quiet tragedy of their lives appeals to somewhere deep in my core.  Another unrequited love, but this time because it was unrealized.


9.  The narrator of "The Raven" and Lenore--I'm just going to leave that riiiiiiight here without explanation.

illustration by Gustav Dore--he really is quite a useful fellow

10.  Sherlock Holmes and John Watson--Oh, come on!  It's practically canon.  The only time Holmes ever shows any emotion is when Watson gets shot in "The Three Garridebs".  To take a line from the Top Gear fandom "Man love rules, ok?"