ROMANTIC TALES
Even before Romeo and Juliet became lovers, literature has been telling stories of true love. Here’s a guide to some of those stories:
1 Romeo and Juliet Two rival families, Montague and Capulet, carry an old grudge match to extremes. Romeo Montague falls in love with Juliet Capulet, but their young love proves to be brief, and tragic. But at least it ends their family feud.
2 Wuthering Heights It may sound like a housing development, but it’s just a remote cottage on the English moors, wherein lives the moody Heathcliff, tragically in love with the lovely Catherine — who spurned him and married Edgar instead. (Spoiler alert! Catherine’s a ghost and author Jane Eyre tells their story mostly in flashbacks.)
3 Gone With the Wind Margaret Mitchell’s sweeping 1936 novel of the U.S. South after the Civil War won her the Pulitzer Prize and became an equally sweeping 1939 film starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh as Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara.
4 The Notebook IMDb.com gives this description of the 2004 movie starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams (each of them the pride of London, Ont.) and based on the Nicholas Sparks novel: “A poor yet passionate young man falls in love with a rich young woman, giving her a sense of freedom, but they are soon separated because of their social differences.” Come to think of it, that’s pretty much any Sparks novel, really.
5 The Princess Bride Many people who know the 1987 Rob Reiner movie adaptation of the love between the princess Buttercup and the farm boy Westley may not have read the original novel by William Goldman. The movie is good fun (Goldman also wrote the screenplay, so he was able to keep much of its offbeat spirit), but the book has other delights that sadly didn’t make it to the screen. Pirates, sword fights, giants, true love — what more could you ask for?