BEST BOOKS ON... UNREQUITED LOVE

THE bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life. UNREQUITED love certainly makes a plot go round, so it crops up an unhealthy amount in fiction. It’s a torture that no outsider can control; it tests a character. Let’s hope there’s more of it in novels than in life.

It can’t be helped, of course, but it is the ultimate in self-destruction. As the romantic, but sensible, Georgette Heyer has it: ‘There’s nothing so mortifying as to fall in love with someone who does not share one’s sentiments.’ Quite.

Dickens understood the depths of suffering involved; that’s why he inflicts it on poor Pip. Mind you, he does have an outsider stoking his ardour, ratcheting the torture up.

‘Love her, love her, love her!’ Miss Havisham insists in Great Expectations. ‘If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces . . . Love her, love her, love her!’ In case you’re wondering, that’s a particularly rubbish piece of advice.

In Ann Patchett’s debut, Patron Saint Of Liars, there’s unrequited love aplenty — a dilapidated mansion full of it. It’s the Sixties, and St Elizabeth’s is a hostel for abandoned pregnant women waiting to give birth and give their babies up for adoption.

They all have their own miserable, romantic reasons for being there and their own reactions to their plight. But in that environment, tended by nuns and, especially, by each other, they find the overwhelming compensations of sisterly love.

The sensible approach is not to bother with the unobtainable, but some people just can’t help themselves. In Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, Leonard loves Madeleine but Madeleine loves Mitchell. They’re all young, just leaving college, and Leonard refuses to give up hope.

As time goes on, though, and his heart remains steadfastly broken, an uncomfortable truth begins to dawn: ‘Either his love was pure and true, or he was addicted to feeling forlorn. He liked being heartbroken.’ And that is a mortifying thought.