Romance - Leisure Reading — Literature - Library Guides at University of Notre Dame

Read it for the romance!

We are all fools in love.

--Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Valentine's Day Card, ca. 1910, Wikimedia Commons

Romantic Fiction

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Romance genre stories involve chivalry and often adventure. The prevailing type of story in the romance genre consists of a love relationship between a man and a woman, often from the woman’s point of view. There is always conflict that hinders the relationship, but is resolved to a “happy ending.”

--The Book Genre Dictionary

Arabella by Georgette Heyer
Publication Date: 1949
Daughter of a modest country clergyman, Arabella Tallant is on her way to London when her carriage breaks down outside the hunting lodge of the wealthy Mr. Robert Beaumaris. Her pride stung when she overhears a remark of her host's, Arabella pretends to be an heiress, a pretense that deeply amuses the jaded Beau. To counter her white lie, Beaumaris launches her into high society and thereby subjects her to all kinds of fortune hunters and other embarrassments.
The Dream of the Red Chamber by Tsao Hsueh-Chin
Publication Date: 1958
The "Red Chamber" is an expression used for the sheltered area where the daughters of wealthy Chinese families lived. Believed to be based on the author's own life and intended as a memorial to the women that he knew in his youth, The Dream of the Red Chamber is a multilayered story that offers up key insights into Chinese culture.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Publication Date: 2001
The story of a plain and penniless orphan who accepts a job as governess at Thornfield Hall and soon finds herself in love with her melancholy employer, Mr. Edward Rochester, a man with a terrible secret.
Jazz by Toni Morrison
Publication Date: 1992
In Harlem, 1926, Joe Trace, a door-to-door salesman in his fifties, kills his teenage lover. At the funeral, his wife Violet slashes the dead girl's face and then desperately searches to find why Joe was unfaithful. The profound love story is immersed in the sights and sounds of Black urban life during the Jazz Age.
The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks
Publication Date: 2008
Is there really such thing as a lucky charm? The hero of this novel believes he's found one in the form of a photograph of a smiling woman he's never met, but who he comes to believe holds the key to his destiny. The chain of events that leads to him possessing the photograph and finding the woman pictured in it is the stuff of love stories.
Milk in My Coffee by Eric Jerome Dickey
Publication Date: 1998
Jordan Greene moves from the deep south to New York City, and finds more than he ever bargained for. When he shares a ride with a vivacious young white girl, a romance grows between the unlikely pair--much to the chagrin of Jordan's friends and family. Love on the other side of the color bar forces him to examine his own values and follow his own heart.
The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks
Publication Date: 1996
At thirty-one, Noah Calhoun, back in coastal North Carolina after World War II, is haunted by images of the girl he lost more than a decade earlier. At twenty-nine, socialite Allie Nelson is about to marry a wealthy lawyer, but she cannot stop thinking about the boy who long ago stole her heart.
Persuasion by Jane Austen
Publication Date: 2001
Persuasion follows the romance of Anne Elliot and naval officer Frederick Wentworth. They were happily engaged until Anne’s friend, Lady Russell, persuaded her that Frederick was “unworthy.” Now, eight years later, Frederick returns, a wealthy captain in the navy, while Anne’s family teeters on the edge of bankruptcy. They still love each other, but their past mistakes threaten to keep them apart.
Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson
Publication Date: 1932
A huge popular and critical success when it was first published in 1884, Ramona is set among the California Spanish missions and tells the story of the young mixed-blood heroine, Ramona, and her Native American lover Alessandro, as they flee from the brutal violence of white settlers.
A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
Publication Date: 1992
A social comedy set in Florence, Italy, and Surrey, England. Its heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, struggling against straitlaced Victorian attitudes of arrogance, narrow-mindedness and snobbery, falls in love-while on holiday in Italy-with the socially unsuitable George Emerson.
Caught up in a claustrophobic world of pretentiousness and rigidity, Lucy ultimately rejects her fiancé, Cecil Vyse, and chooses, instead, to wed her true love, the young man whose sense of freedom and lack of artificiality became apparent to her in the Italian pensione where they first met.
The Shoemaker's Wife by Adriana Trigiani
Publication Date: 2012
Two star-crossed lovers--Enza and Ciro--meet and separate, until, finally, the power of their love changes both of their lives forever. Set during the years preceding and during World War I.
A Virtuous Woman by Kaye Gibbons
Publication Date: 1989
When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned anything in his life. She was newly widowed after a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter. He had never asked a woman to do more than help him hitch a mule. They didn't fall in love so much as they simply found each other and held on for dear life.
Waiting by Ha Jin
Publication Date: 2000
This book portrays the life of Lin Kong, a dedicated doctor torn by his love for two women: one who belongs to the New China of the Cultural Revolution, the other to the ancient traditions of his family's village.

--The Book Genre Dictionary

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Armin
Publication Date: 1922
The women at the center of The Enchanted April are alike only in their dissatisfaction with their everyday lives. They find each other—and the castle of their dreams—through a classified ad in a London newspaper one rainy February afternoon. The ladies expect a pleasant holiday, but they don’t anticipate that the month they spend in Portofino will reintroduce them to their true natures and reacquaint them with joy. Now, if the same transformation can be worked on their husbands and lovers, the enchantment will be complete.
Eye of the Beholder by Ruth Ann Nordin
Publication Date: 2009
Mary Peters despairs that she will never get married. At nineteen, she has no prospects of finding a husband, so she takes matters into her own hands and becomes a mail-order bride. When she arrives in Omaha, Nebraska to meet the man she's due to marry, he takes one look at her homely appearance and rejects her.

But fate has other plans for Mary. Dave Larson happens to be nearby and thinks she will make a good wife. Though she is stunned that someone as handsome and as kind as Dave would ask her to marry him, she accepts. She knows that this marriage will not bear the fruits of love. Love, after all, is for beautiful women. Isn't it?
Kilmeny of the Orchard by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Publication Date: 1910
Eric Marshall, recent college graduate, has the world at his feet. He’s handsome, popular, wealthy, and surprisingly, single. Living the bachelor lifestyle with his widowed father, he’s never given much thought to romance. When an old school friend asks Eric to substitute teach for him on Prince Edward Island while he recuperates from an illness, Eric thinks, why not? He’s got some time to kill before diving into the family business with his father, and the rustic island may be a good diversion for him.

Eric falls into the easy routine of island life, and his status as eligible bachelor endears him to the locals. Eric is still not thinking of romance, but he’s about to find it in a most unexpected place…
Love among the Chickens by P. G. Wodehouse
Publication Date: 1906
This is the only novel to feature the recurring character Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, whose appearances are otherwise confined to short stories. The novel is written in the first person, from the point of view of Jeremy Garnet, an author and an old friend of Ukridge. Seeing Ukridge for the first time in years, with a new wife in tow, Garnet finds himself dragged along on holiday to Ukridge's new chicken farm in Dorset. The novel intertwines Garnet's difficult wooing of a girl living nearby, with the struggles of the farm, which are exacerbated by Ukridge's bizarre business ideas and methods.
Marcia Schuyler by Grace Livingston Hill
Publication Date: 1908
Marcia takes her sister's place at the altar. When Kate returns, determined to win David back, Marcia must fight to save the man she loves from a web of lies and deceit.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Publication Date: 1813
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
Villette by Charlotte Brontë
Publication Date: 1853
Another powerful novel from Charlotte Brontë, Villette tells the story of Lucy Snowe, a teacher at an all-girls school who finds herself in the thralls of romance and adventure. A novel known less for its plot than the compelling psychology of protagonist, Villette touches upon the themes of gender roles, repression, and religious conflict in nineteenth century Belgium.