This is a diverting delight, a window on romance in literature. There are high lovers and low lovers, tragic lovers, comic lovers, and lovers who shouldn?t be doing what they are doing at all and certainly not then and there. There is even Fanny Hill trying not to discover what physical love is about when set upon by an old rou? who has paid for the privilege. Though of special interest for lovers and their special lover's day of St Valentine, it is an amusing and sometimes surprising collection.
1. The Old Testament – Adam and Eve by Anonymous 2. Frankie and Johnny by Anonymous 3. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 4. Peter Pan by J M Barrie 5. Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare 6. Emma by Jane Austen 7. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy 8. The Odyssey by Homer 9. The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare 10. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë 11. Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne 12. Love’s Secret by William Blake 13. Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare 14. Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy 15. Vanity Fair by W M Thackeray 16. Aeneid by Virgil 17. A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare 18. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert 19. Hiawatha's Wooing by H W Longfellow 20. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens 21. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot 22. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens 23. She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron 24. Ulysses by James Joyce 25. Henry V by William Shakespeare 26. Middlemarch by George Eliot 27. Launcelot and Guenever by Sir Thomas Malory 28. When We Two Parted by Lord Byron 29. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens 30. The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde 31. The History of Tom Jones – A Foundling by Henry Fielding 32. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare 33. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo 34. Persuasion by Jane Austen 35. La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats 36. Swann in Love by Marcel Proust 37. The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear 38. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott 39. Perfect Woman by William Shakespeare 40. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne 41. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë