Love & Literature

As I look back through my writings—my novels but also my journals—a few main themes emerge. The past and time passing (Nabokov “je suis chez moi dans les souvenirs.”), certain beloved places (Rushville, Yachats, now Jonchères), my attachment to family, and family history, the inspiration and thrill of travel. But above and beyond those themes, running like a thread through all my writing, is the subject of love—love, passion! My journals contain a little of everything of course, but in them every one of my love stories since the tender age of nineteen has been recorded in such detail that I can relive them all simply in going back and reading those scribbled notebooks (now however, mostly typed onto the computer). These love stories then got transformed by the bias of fiction into some of my novels and short stories. One of my novels is entitled The Perfect Lovers, and was an attempt to capture the fleeting experience of falling in love. Another is called Unsent Love Letters from the Heart of my Garden, sixty letters to an unnamed lover. Another of my books (not very successful, it was one of the first I wrote), Through the Sandglass, was based on my first rather traumatic love story with the young Sam Jordan, story of a young white woman and a young black man trying to have a relationship during the tumultuous civil rights years of the early sixties. Another of my books—a novella—is a backward look at a romance in Burma many years ago. Then there is the book called Embrace of Stone and Flesh, in which my dear French husband figures as a Russian poet, and in which two love stories intertwine. I also have a book of poems called Winter Love Poems and a book of short stories called The Poet and other Love Stories. Indeed, while I have also written on other subjects in my novels, essays, children’s stories, accounts of my travels around the world, and an “autobiography through photographs”, it’s clear that the subject that has most enthralled and entranced and mystified me over the years—and so which I have continually tried to unravel and understand—is the mystery of passion and love between two human beings.
So then I thought I would like to make a little list of favorite books whose primary subject is love, books which have perhaps formed or influenced me in my own writing, or from which I may have gotten certain insights into the subject from other writers also impelled to put down either their own story or a fictionalized story or who have written poems or essays about this emotion of love which is the basis of all human relationships.
So here is my list. Perhaps, if this blog begins to be read by others, there will be additions to my list. But here is mine. In another post, I may include a few reviews of some of these books.

Favorite Books on Love and Passion:
Novels, plays (17th- 19th century)
*Romeo and Juliet & Much Ado about Nothing by William Shakespeare

*La Princesse de Cleves by Mme de la Fayette

*Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Emma, Sense & Sensibility, Northranger Abbey, Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

*Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

*Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

*Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

*The Lady with the Lapdog by Anton Chekhov

*Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

*Wings of a Dove by Henry James

*Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmund Rostand

*Le Roman de Tristan et Iseult (as retold by Joseph Bedier)

Novels, Plays (Contemporary)
*L’Amant & Hiroshima Mon Amour by Marguerite Duras

*Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann

*Ada or Ardor by Nabokov

*Evening by Susan Minot

*Theater by Somerset Maughn

*Gone with the Wind by Marguerite Mitchell

*Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

*The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart

*Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

*Remembrance of Time Past (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu) by Marcel Proust

*Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen

*The Snow Goose byPaul Gallico

*Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

*The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

*An Equal Music by Vikram Seth

Non-fiction (letters, essays, poems, anthologies etc.)
*De l’Amour by Stendhal

*A Venetian Affair by Andrea di Robel

*The Natural History of Love by Morton Hunt (a non-fiction work on the subject of love)

*Lettres d’ Heloise et Abelard

Sonnets by Louise Labé

Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Sonnets by William Shakespeare