In a world where it’s acceptable for your relationship status on Facebook to read “it’s complicated”, where there’s ghosting and negging and subtweeting and all manner of things lining up to ruin your love life, at least there’s always one place you can escape to live out your romantic ideal. Books! While it’s not obligatory to have amorous tendencies toward one of the characters in your favourite novel, it can certainly help things along, especially if the whole point of the story is whether the protagonists are going to get it on. From Pride and Prejudice to Wuthering Heights, the love matches of our favourite characters can help ease some of the anguish our real-life lovers can cause.
But are we really better off jumping into Jane Eyre and snogging the face of Mr Rochester? If you’re seriously thinking of running off into the sunset with a literary love god, there are a few things you really need to know. (Warning: contains an insane amount of spoilers from some very famous books.)
You’re probably going to fall ill and/or die
Obviously the Grim Reaper’s scythe will tap-tap-tap at the door for all of us eventually, but should you decide to plight your troth to, or even merely become an object of affection for, a novel’s leading man, your odds of surviving to the end of the last chapter begin to plummet.
Poor Catherine Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights didn’t even get to snog Heathcliff before she turned up toes. All she had to do was be the focus of Heathcliff’s unrequited love – well, kind of, she did love him back in a way – and she was soon heading feet-first into the local chapel sporting a fetching wooden ballgown. His actual wife Isabella didn’t fare much better either, did she? No sooner had she eloped with our favourite violent psychopath than she was back at the Heights getting assaulted left, right and centre, before finally making her escape. Sure, she manages to live somewhere near London and outwit death for another 12 years or so, but you can’t argue with a plot device – before long she’s croaked and her pride and joy is wrenched from her rapidly cooling bosom to live with his bastard of a father.
You’ll have some serious competition
You don’t think the other characters in the novel are just going to give up without a fight, do you? You may have your sights locked on your romantic idol, but guess what? There’s a queue.
Poor sweet Miriam in Sons and Lovers thought she was a shoo-in for Paul Morel’s affections – he was never away from that bloody farm pestering her and her brothers, for a start – but hey-ho, here comes troubled married woman Clara Dawes with her raunchiest lipstick and an array of saucy millinery and before you know it, wimpy dreamer Paul has got sexual symbolism gushing out of every pore. Sure enough, Clara’s got him down by the canal showing him her tan lines faster than poor Miriam can wash a teacup in time for his arrival. And even if you get to be the sassy Clara of the storyline, you’d have your dimwitted estranged husband chasing after you, trying to beat up your beau, and everyone slut-shaming you for not going to live in a cave once you’d left your husband. And then at the end you have to get back with him.
He’s probably got to go off to war or on some ridiculous quest
Oh, forget the heroic Sharpe. Picture him on your first date: “Yes, before we get going I should probably tell you that I am away a lot, doing ‘war’. And most of the women I start dating do have an uncanny knack of dying quite horribly. Usually in childbirth. But… erm… no two days are the same.”
Swashbuckling Hornblower, too, when not off “doing Navy stuff” wouldn’t be showing you any gratitude for keeping the home fires burning. He’d be sniffing round the underskirts of Lady Barbara – his boss’s wife, btw, what a “legend” – while you watch your children die of smallpox. And even if you are lucky enough to be Lady Babs herself, could you really love a man who treated his wife that way? Best to leave him messing around on his boats and hope one sinks.
He won’t be very nice to you
Phwoar, that debonair Maxim de Winter from Rebecca, eh? Summers in Monte Carlo, before schlepping back to the gorgeous Manderley to live out your days as lady of the manor and bossing around the servants to within an inch of their lives. The dream!
Trouble is, though, that Maxim’s an incommunicative weirdo with zero control over his staff and his favourite way to spend a Sunday is to gang up on you with his possessed housekeeper because you broke one of his crappy ornaments, despite the fact that once he dies, you will own everything as far as the eye can see. While you cut him some slack because he’s trying to get over his dead wife or whatever, it turns out he didn’t worship the ground she walked on after all – he hated her. You spent months staring into the fire sipping tea and wishing you were Rebecca; he could’ve said something. When was he going to mention this, you wonder. Before you’d flung yourself out of a window, tormented by her ghost, or after?
Rhett Butler, too, in Gone With The Wind – obsessed by Scarlett O’Hara from the very moment he lays eyes on her. He demonstrates this infatuation by talking to her for decades like she’s something he stepped in and mocking her when she calls him out on it and rebuffs his advances. When he does eventually marry her, and she’s wracked with grief over the death of their child, he sods off – and you have to wait 50 years and a dodgy sequel written by someone else for them to get it on again.
He’s likely to have a dark past
Ooh, Mr Rochester, eh? Passionate, brooding, mysterious. Hmmm, you know why he’s acting all evasive? Yeah, it might be something to do with that new loft conversion he’s had done – and you won’t believe what he’s got up there. By the time you get your hands on any leading man, he’s usually lived some sordid life that he’s desperate to escape from, right into your hands. Great, except who wants to start a relationship with someone who needs fixing? You’ll spend half of your relationship helping him confront his demons and the other pretending it’s totally fine that he’s ruined your honour. Jane Eyre should’ve been getting straight on to that local cab firm the minute she found out it wasn’t just old clothes and Christmas decorations he had shoved up in that attic.
He’ll only care about himself
Because he’s the leading man and you’re just some kind of bangle to make him look good or drive his story forward, your protagonist probably isn’t going to give two hoots whether you live or die. And if he does, it’ll be nothing more than a vestige of guilt that he caused your demise in the first place. Take handsome, charming hedonist Dorian Gray – another dodgy bloke with an attic full of secrets. The talented Sibyl Vane fell head over heels for him, and even gave up her promising theatrical career to tend to his every whim. It turns out, as it always does, that Dorian was only really into her because she was an actress and once she’s given up treading the boards, he’s not remotely interested. When he learns she’s offed herself by way of a gruesome poisoning, Dorian feels terrible for about a millisecond – the modern-day equivalent would be perhaps expressing regret you ordered a latte and not a cappuccino – before getting back to lounging around opium dens and winking at boys.
So when you look over at your beloved and wish they were a little less pizza-guzzling and a bit more Pride and Prejudice, remember that Lizzie Bennet would probably very happily change places with you. There’s no central heating in Pemberley, after all.
