love stories through the ages, part 2
some book recommendations for my favorite sub-genre (literary fiction about relationships)
Welcome to part 2 of my book recommendations series!
While I am not a big romantic and tend to be very cynical when it comes to romance, I do love well-written stories and novels about love and relationships. Here is my big list of literary fiction books about romance that I enjoyed, and books that are on my immediate to-read list (that are highly recommended by my friends, so I have no doubt that I will enjoy and love).
These books are not ‘romance’ books, but rather novels about love, marriage, and relationships—good, romantic, bad, messy, toxic, insane, nostalgic. They range from Austen classics to contemporary fiction! After all, we have been writing about love for a very long time.
This is a continuation of my Instagram post, and the list is organized by date of publication. This is part 2 of the series: books published in the 20th century.
You’ll need to view this on the app or site because the email gets cut off!
The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1907)
The Shuttle is about American heiresses marrying English aristocrats; by extension it is about the effect of American energy, dynamism and affluence on an effete and impoverished English ruling class. Sir Nigel Anstruthers crosses the Atlantic to look for a rich wife and returns with the daughter of an American millionaire, Rosalie Vanderpoel.
He turns out to be a bully, a miser and a philanderer and virtually imprisons his wife in the house. Only when Rosalie's sister Bettina is grown up does it occur to her and her father that some sort of rescue expedition should take place. And the beautiful, kind and dynamic Bettina leaves for Europe to try and find out why Rosalie has, inexplicably, chosen to lose touch with her family. In the process she engages in a psychological war with Sir Nigel; meets and falls in love with another Englishman; and starts to use the Vanderpoel money to modernize ‘Stornham Court’.
A Room With a View by E.M. Forester (1908)
"But you do," he went on, not waiting for contradiction. "You love the boy body and soul, plainly, directly, as he loves you, and no other word expresses it ..."
Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her, until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George.
Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart?
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton (1911)
The classic novel of despair, forbidden emotions, and sexual undercurrents set against the austere New England countryside.
Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena's vivacious cousin enters their household as a hired girl, Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent.
In one of American fiction's finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies. Different in both tone and theme from Wharton's other works, Ethan Frome has become perhaps her most enduring and most widely read book.