Star-Crossed Lovers in Literature

Elizabeth and Darcy are rock stars of star-crossed love. I mean, my dear friend’s standard poodle is named Mister Darcy. I know people who went to see the exhibition of The Shirt. And these two lovers should be so embraced! They have an impossible labyrinth to get through, perfectly impossible, and they earn their triumph. It’s a magical equation by the master Jane Austen.

Winston and Julia suffer when Big Brother reaches up into the constellations and thinks he can move things around. Then they play out what it means to rebel, to rebel with love—a perfect thing to study right now.

This nonfiction epistolary story is a treasure chest, packed with a wry New Yorker (Helene herself), a formal Brit (the bookseller Frank Doel at 84, Charing Cross), a genuine old-school badass bookstore, actual letters handwritten and exchanged via the postal system, and decades of life and star-crossed friendship distilled in the correspondence. 

The star-crossed blueprint. But this glorious play has a secret escape plan in it for cursed lovers, so I use this quote to open White Fur: “Call me but love, / and I’ll be new baptized; / Henceforth I never will be Romeo.” The possibility that we can slip the shackles of social identity, and run away, become someone new, by way of love—this means the world to me.