The House of Mirth

A lonely dreamer meets a young woman over four St. Petersburg nights and falls for her while she waits for someone else. Dostoevsky's shortest and most tender study of hope that has nowhere to go.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Jay Gatsby builds an entire fortune and an entire life around a woman who married someone else. The definitive American novel about loving an idea of a person rather than the person.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Cyrano writes the love letters that win Roxane for another man, never signing his own name. A verse drama about a love kept silent out of shame over appearance.

Edmond Rostand

Heathcliff loves Catherine and loses her to a marriage of convenience, then spends decades turning that loss into revenge. Unrequited love as a force that ruins two generations.

Emily Brontë

Werther writes letter after letter about Lotte, who is promised to another man. The book that made unrequited love a literary subject in its own right.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe