Alpha Male Romance Novels

 Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen (1813)

This perennially delightful romantic comedy gives us timeless lovers and sly social satire. “You could not shock her more than she shocks me,” wrote WH Auden, who thrilled to read the “English spinster of the middle class/ Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’”.

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Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë (1847)

“I will be myself” the passionate and moral governess tells her saturnine employer. “ Mr Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me – for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you.”

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Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë (1847)

Disdained on publication for its “vulgar depravity” and difficult characters, even the sniffier early critics acknowledge the “rugged power” of the romance between Catherine Earnshaw, and adopted gypsy Heathcliff with whom she feels a love eternal as the rocks beneath the moor.

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Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert (1856)

A kindly but unexceptional provincial doctor marries a woman whose expectations have been raised unrealistically by reading too many romantic novels and, perhaps inevitably, things end badly.

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The Portrait of a Lady

Henry James (1881)

On his deathbed, Isabel Archer’s cousin Ralph gasps, “Love remains. I don’t know why we should suffer so much. Perhaps I shall find out.” But readers still argue over the nature of her affection for her cruel and oppressive husband.

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A Room with a View

EM Forster (1908)

A murder in an Italian piazza and an unexpected kiss in a field of violets shake muddled Lucy Honeychurch out of her repressed middle-class life in Surrey. Forster, says Zadie Smith, allows the English comic novel to exist “as a messy human concoction”.

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Le Grand Meaulnes

Alain-Fournier (1913)

A recent poll of French readers placed Fournier’s novel sixth of all 20th-century books, just behind Proust and Camus. Julian Barnes called this nostalgic tale of lost adolescent love: “magical, high-hearted, yet never sentimental”.

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By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

Elizabeth Smart (1945)

Loosely based on the Canadian author’s destructive, 18-year affair with the British poet George Barker, during which she bore him four of his 15 children, Angela Carter reviewed this astonishing, infuriating prose poem as “Like Madame Bovary blasted by lightning”.

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Gone with the Wind

Margaret Mitchell (1936)

So hefty that its vintage erotica-aficionado author used parts of her manuscript to prop up the couch on which she wrote, this Pulitzer Prize winning Civil War epic pits flouncing Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara against the “dark sexuality” of roguish Rhett Butler.

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Love in a Cold Climate

Nancy Mitford (1949)

When the remote and lovely Polly returns from India and reveals she wants to marry her lecherous uncle she sets the cat among the inter-war, upper-class pigeons in this deliciously sharp and funny novel, a companion piece to The Pursuit of Love.

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The End of the Affair

Graham Greene (1951)

“Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust,” writes Greene in this novel of agonisingly restrained passion, set amid the shattered stained glass of wartime London.

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Oscar and Lucinda

Peter Carey (1988)

A Devon vicar’s son bets the woman he loves that he can build her a glass church in the Australian outback. Jonathan Miller once described this vivid, Booker Prize-winning novel as “a sort of science fiction set in the past”.

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Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak (1957)

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (incensing the Communist Party which had refused its publication in the USSR) Pasternak’s tale of a rich industrialist’s son who embraces the revolution takes a dark turn when the woman he loves is exiled.

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Norwegian Wood

Haruki Murakami (1987)

Roughly five per cent of the Japanese population bought a copy of Murakami’s haunting and original debut novel, in which 37-year-old Toru Watanabe (a man neither uchi or soto — inside or outside — of his milieu) hears a song which recalls a formative college encounter.

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Atonement

Ian McEwan (2001)

In the heatwave of 1935, Robbie Turner accidentally sends his benefactor’s daughter an explicit letter via her sister Briony, who later implicates Robbie in a crime. And Briony is “possessed by a desire to have the world just so”.

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Bonjour Tristesse

Françoise Sagan (1954)

Written when Sagan was just 17, this sultry, lyrical novel captures the confusion of a girl on the cusp of adulthood, meddling with others’ romantic affairs with disastrous consequences.

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The Swimming-Pool Library

Alan Hollinghurst (1988)

Hollinghurst’s beautifully controlled and sexually explicit debut is 25-year-old William Beckwith’s account of summer 1983, during which he was “riding high on sex and self-esteem”. Cruising in a public lavatory, he saves the life of an octogenarian peer.

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The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)

Seeking a recognisable English myth, Ishiguro chose the English butler, saying Jeeves was a big influence. But Salman Rushdie notes that “death, change, pain and evil invade the innocent Wodehouse-world”. And the butler wants the former housekeeper back.

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The Well of Loneliness

Radclyffe Hall (1928)

A pioneering lesbian novel, in which an upper-class “invert” falls for another woman, judged obscene because it promoted lesbianism although the only sexual reference is: “that night, they were not divided”.

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THE BEST OF THE REST

Women in Love

DH Lawrence (1920)

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The Blue Flower

Penelope Fitzgerald (1995)

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The Go-Between

LP Hartley (1953)

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Death in Venice

Thomas Mann (1912)

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The Graduate

Charles Webb (1963)

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The French Lieutenant’s Woman

John Fowles (1969)

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The Far Pavilions

MM Kaye (1978)

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The Piano Teacher

Elfriede Jelinek (1983)

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Foreign Affairs

Alison Lurie (1984)

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The Lover

Marguerite Duras (1984)

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The Passion

Jeanette Winterson (1987)

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Possession

AS Byatt (1990)

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The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje (1992)

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Music & Silence

RoseTremain (1999)

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The Reader

Bernhard Schlink (1995)