Monday, April 1, 2013

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 (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 Segal

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.

2 comments:

Hariklia said...

Great list Leslie!

Here are the ones I have read or seen and also love:
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
Barefoot in the Park with Jane Fonda and Robert Redford
Love Story by Erich Segal
The Way We Were with Barbra Steisand and Robert Redford
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
One Day by David Nichols

Want to read:
The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri - I've not heard of this one, though I've read a couple of her other books.

ihopemybipolarbrotherisok said...

These are all film suggestions:

In the Mood for Love directed by Wong Kar Wai

Girl on the Bridge directed by Patrice Leconte

The Remains of the Day directed by Ismail Merchant, adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro's novel.