An illustration from Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece, Anna Karenina, shows Anna with her lover, Count Vronsky. The 19th century Russian novel is University Professor and Chair of English David St. John’s favorite romantic novel. (Image Source: Courtesy Harold B. Lee Library/Brigham Young University, via flickr.)

5 favorite love stories for Valentine’s Day

Moving, passionate, romantic — love stories inspire us, thrill us and sometimes move us to tears. In celebration of Valentine’s Day, we present five of the best, as chosen by USC Dornsife English Department Chair David St. John. [1 ¾ min read]

BySusan Bell February 12, 2019

Everyone loves a good love story.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, leading scholar David St. John, University Professor and professor of English and comparative literature, presents his top five personal favorites. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (he is the author of 11 collections of poetry), St. John has also written libretti for the opera and for choral symphony.

Here, he ranks his five favorite books about romantic love — four novels and one collection of letters — that together span 136 years. Notably, St. John’s top choice goes to a novel first published nearly 150 years ago — further proof (if more were needed), that love stories are truly eternal.

1. Anna Karenina (1878) by Leo Tolstoy.

“I love its extravagant passions set against a landscape of social censure and political change. It’s also a book that understands the prismatic aspects of romantic love, as well as its wildness and its domesticity.”

David St. John. (Photo by Peter Zhaoyu Zhou.)

2. My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz (2011).

“Here are two artists who changed the way we think about painting and photography. For 30 years Stieglitz and O’Keeffe exchanged more than 5,000 letters. It’s the passionate and intellectual intimacy here, framed by the daily practice of art, that I treasure.”

3. The Heat of the Day (1948) by Elizabeth Bowen.

“Bowen’s novels reflect the damage of secrecy and lies in the lives and love affairs of her characters. The psychological acuity of her work is never more poignant than when she writes of adolescent anxiety and desire.”

4. Women in Love (1920) by D. H. Lawrence.

“Lawrence’s second novel featuring the extraordinary Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula, as they negotiate their redefinitions of what love might be in early 20th-century England. In this novel, Lawrence’s idea of a relationship being a constantly reinvented dialectic between individuals (‘twin polar stars,’ he says) is most complexly embodied.”

5. Next Life Might Be Kinder (2014) by Howard Norman.

“Norman’s novel concerns a man whose wife, after her murder, begins to return to him. Is it a haunting or a manifestation of the speaker’s grief? The book’s mystery is far more about our relationship to time and love than it is about the murder within the book.”

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