Favorite literary couples

Francisco Hayez's The Kiss

Happy Valentine's Day! Before some of you roll your eyes, just know that typically I would be doing the same, but not today. The lack of a significant other in my personal life isn't going to stop me from enjoying this day for lovers. Actually, I can't do that since I spent most of the morning editing the great love scene in The Burning Candle between Isabel de Vermandois and William de Warenne. Well, I'll see if I think it's a great love scene when I finish up after work.

My work has also inspired some thoughts of my favorite literary couples and consideration of what made their attachment to each other so powerful. Elizabeth Bennett and FitzWilliam Darcy. Lancelot and Guinevere. Romeo and Juliet. Each relationship had it's own tragedies to overcome and HEA wasn't necessarily assured, but what endures in my mind is the power of that love between the couple.

In writing The Burning Candle, I've tried to capture the essence of that all consuming love. I've tried to imagine what it must have been like for the real William and Isabel, how she endured a marriage to another man, while yearning for William, until the day he stole her way to his castle at Lewes. How she felt in returning to her husband, knowing the consequences of her adultery with William and how the members the Anglo-Norman nobility might have regarded her. When William Shakespeare wrote, "The course of true love never did run smooth," he could have easily been referring to William and Isabel.


Who are some of your favorite literary couples? What is about their passion for each other that makes them remarkable?