Love and the Novel: Life After Reading

Romantic love was born alongside the novel, and books have been shaping how we experience and think about our most intimate stories ever since. But what do novels give us when our own lives diverge from the usual narrative paths? Christina is a professor used to examining stories with a critical eye; until one day in middle age she finds herself falling in love and leaving her marriage for a romance with another woman. This involves a familiar enough tale, but when her new partner suffers a stroke, Tina begins to reflect on the sorts of love that novels rarely capture. A heady mix of memoir, criticism and storytelling that draws on novels ranging from Pride and Prejudice to Price of Salt, Anna Karenina to Conversations with Friends, to illuminate the ways love and novels work, and show how some types of love, which don’t race to a narrative end-point, might be the most important of all.

Christina Lupton is a literature professor at the University of Warwick and is currently on secondment to the University of Copenhagen. She has a PHD from Rutgers NJ, and has held Leverhulme, Humboldt and Carlsberg fellowships. She is a regular contributor for publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, n+1 and the TLS.