Top 25 Love Stories of All Time

Esther Freud, one of my most favorite authors, provided a list of her top 10 love stories in the Guardian a few years back. Using her picks as my starting point, I made a few changes, added my own selection of books, legends, films, and plays to come up with the following Top 25 Love Stories of All Time. 

Which titles would you add or take away?

1100s
Tristan and Iseult
Abelard and Eloise

1597
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

1847
Jane Eyre* by Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

1877
Anna Karenina* by Leo Tolstoy

1891
Tess of the D'Urbervilles* by Thomas Hardy

1936
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

1945
The Ghost and Mrs Muir by Josephine Leslie (AKA R.A. Dick)
The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

1951
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

1957
Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
An Affair to Remember* with Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant

1967
Barefoot in the Park* with Jane Fonda and Robert Redford

1970
Love Story* by Erich Segall

1973
The Way We Were* with Barbra Steisand and Robert Redford

1975
Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson
(filmed as Somewhere in Time)

1977
The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough

1984
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

1989
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

1997
Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx

2006
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

2007
Love Falls by Esther Freud

2008
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

2009
One Day by David Nichols

* = read or seen but not yet blogged about.

Anne of Green Gables

"Anne of Green Gables" is a sweet story about a young girl's adoption, growing up, settling down, and getting an education. It's also the first novel I've read completely online through iBooks. :-)

Anne Shirley, when we first meet her, is an overly dramatic, extremely talkative 11-year old. She has a temper she cannot control and a passion to speak her mind. She is high-spirited, scatterbrained, and always in some kind of innocent but problematic trouble.

As the young girl ages, under the strong care of Marilla Cuthbert and her quiet but loving brother Matthew, Anne becomes more balanced. She works hard, achieves recognition as a scholar, and makes solid decisions that put others before herself.

Mark Twain is said to have called Anne "the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice." The character is certainly well developed with both positive qualities and youthful faults. Anne is driven by her emotions and imagination and later by her ambitions. She can be set apart from other young heroines by her rich inner life. Additional characters within the story are less developed, though, and men are positively absent or barely significant to the plot.

Which of the following portrayals come closest to how you IMAGINE Anne Shirley to look?

Mary Miles Minter

Dawn O'Day

Meghan Follow

50 Classic Matchbook Girl Novels

Are you a Matchbook Girl?  Matchbook is an online magazine that covers "past and present fashion ... the arts, travel, and culture." It seeks to "inspire women around the globe to design a life they adore."

And here is the Matchbook list of Classic Novels.

How many have you read?

1811
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

1813 
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

1815
Emma by Jane Austen

1847
Jane Eyre* by Charlotte Bronte
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackery
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

1853
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

1857
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

1861
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

1865
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

1868
Little Women* by Louise May Alcott

1869
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

1874
Middlemarch by George Eliot

1877
Anna Karenina* by Leo Tolstoy
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell

1880
Heidi by Johanna Spyri

1881
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

1891
Tess of the d'Urbervilles* by Thomas Hardy

1900
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

1902
The Wings of the Dove by Henry James

1905
The House of Mirth* by Edith Wharton
The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

1908
Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery (Canadian)

1909
A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter (American)

1911
The Secret Garden* by Frances Hodgson Burnett (English-American)

1918
My Antonia* by Willa Cather (American)

1920
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (American)

1924
A Passage to India* by E.M. Forster

1925
The Great Gatsby* by F. Scott Fitzgerald (American)
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (British)

1926 
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (American)

1927
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (French)
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (British)

1928
Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

1932
Little House of the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

1934
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (American)

1936
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (American)

1943
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn* by Betty Smith (American)

1945
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

1951
The Catcher in the Rye* by J.D. Salinger

1955
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

1957
Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

1958
Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

1960
To Kill a Mockingbird* by Harper Lee

1961
Franny and Zooey* by J.D. Salinger

1963
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

1970
Play It as it Lays by Joan Didion

1978
The World According to Garp by John Irving

1984
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

* = books I've read but not yet blogged about.

Memories

One of my three earliest memories is of being on a train. Kennedy was killed in November 1963; we took the train to New York City the following month, and in January 1964 my my little sister was born.

I remember my mother crying when Kennedy was shot. For years, I held the memory of our house and that moment very clear in my mind, but once I actually spoke about it and described the event, the clarity was gone.

I remember my sister coming home from the hospital in a big bassinet and her accoutrements taking up the whole back seat of our car. I sat with my legs pulled up, scrunched in the corner near the window, wondering about this teeny tiny baby who later became my very best friend.

My first ride on a train was a bit scary ... the gaps between the cars were huge and I was upset over having lost a toy that turned up later left at home.

I am on a train now, many years later, headed for Lynchburg, Virginia, to discuss my family history with my mother and her cousin.

In the early 1980s I visited my grandmother in Franklin, Tennessee, and attended a Cousins Luncheon, as she called it. I was in my early 20s and the guests were much older, some of them in their 80s. I collected all of their documentation and information the best I could. Over the years, my ability to research has accelerated tremendously. No longer do I have to write letters to court houses, pay people to pull and copy records, and then wait several weeks for them to confirm that X married X in the small town of X. One small piece of information that I can now save to my desktop in a split second. I can reconstruct towns and neighborhoods late at night, in my pajamas, when all of the libraries are closed.

I am now considered my family's historian. I am proud of that role, even if I am overwhelmed by the amount of information I have and the disorganized manner in which I file it.

I don't have any children. It just happened that way but if I can leave behind my family's story, I will have done something significant with my life and something that honors all of those who came before me and those who are here with me now. We are a great story even if we are an ordinary one.

Ultimately, we are nothing more than a memory and a few lines in a historical document hidden away in a dusty basement or stored away on some forgotten file that can no longer be opened. I hope to preserve as many memories as I can for as long as possible.

All Windows Open (2012)

"All Windows Open" is a recently published book that includes a namesake novella and a collection of short stories each running about 10 pages long. To summarize the group would be to say that they all deal with longing, lust, and desire, sometimes fulfilled, often times not.

The novella is dual narrated by lovesick Chrissie and the widow Magda who knows everyone's secrets, both those spoken and those surmised. The author Hariklia Heristanidis has created a genuine neighborhood of people who interact in a tightly knit, sometimes oppressive, but always caring fashion. To say anything more about the plot would be to spoil the surprises and humor that follow.

My biggest compliment is that the story is thoughtful and well considered. Random events and comments come full circle and build character or have meaning later in the story.

The book arrived in the mail late last night and I finished all of the stories this morning with coffee. A very good read and a highly recommended book.

To find on Amazon: All Windows Open: and Other Stories

I Am Gabriella (1955)

From the book cover:

"Karen hadn't seen her cousin in years, and when they finally met in Paris, she sensed something was wrong. This wasn't the girl she had known as a child.

And then she disappeared ...

In an isolated chateau with a strange old woman and an evil-faced man, Karen found the missing girl. But she kept insisting, I am Gabriella! I am Gabriella!"

Karen's cousin's name was Maxine. Who was this girl with Maxine's face? And why was she so afraid to admit her true identity? Was it because the man who had murdered to keep them apart as children had returned ... intent to kill again to keep the truth from coming out?"

Okay ... written in the 1950s by an author of romantic suspense and advertised as a gothic, this book is actually a detective story along the lines of Tommy and Tuppence or Nick and Nora Charles.

Anne Maybury's Nick and Karen Arnold work together to solve the mystery of the missing girl and actually like each other. There's an old house, some intrigue, but not much else other than a lot of cigarette smoking and attempts to limit the number smoked during periods of high anxiety and stress.

I'm not sure what the cover means by the person who murdered to keep them apart as children. Whatever orphaned the two girls as children and brought them together as cousins with the same guardian later on played no part in the overall story and was never even suggested as a potential reason for the identity conflict. We can just file that away under cover art that has nothing whatsoever to do with content.

To find on amazon: I Am Gabriella

Everyday Life in Early America

I've been reading non-fiction for a change, and chose this book in an attempt to further my family history knowledge. (More about that in a different post.)

David Freeman Hawke's "Everyday Life in Early America" gets high marks for readability but I'm left merely with an impression of the times and no hard solid facts or information.

When the English arrived in America, the goal of the crown was to supplement the economic needs of a home country even if the land and settler's needs didn't support it. After an initial attempt (as would seem natural) to replicate the world they left behind, the settlers adjusted their buildings, diet, and practices to fit a new environment and emerged as Americans.

While this book was a breeze to read, it's not memorable and I'm not sure I really learned anything significant. More interesting and useful was "The Planters of Colonial Virginia" to be discussed next.

To find on amazon: Everyday Life in Early America