by Ali McGhee –

As much as I love love, I’ve always been a little cynical about Valentine’s Day.

I think it started when a high school boyfriend gave me a tulip and took me to Waffle House for dinner to celebrate (bad move, high school boyfriend). I get a little cranky this time of year (frankly, mostly because I’m cold).

My favorite Valentine’s Day was in college when a campus group I was involved with threw a party where you could decorate your own anti-Valentine’s, complete with sparkles and skull and crossbones stickers.

So many of the literary relationships we’ve come to idealize originated in the strange gender and sexual norms of the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century is kind of my thing, so I’m just going to embrace it.

So, in the spirit of my cynicism, I now present to you the Best Worst Couples in Nineteenth-Century Literature (some spoilers ahead!). Read while drinking tea and having a nice biscuit, alone or with your favorite someone.

Everyone (but especially Heathcliff and Catherrine Earnshaw) in Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

This classic of early Victorian literature depends on the failed relationships of pretty much everyone in it. Heathcliff and Catherine have become a symbol of eternal romance, probably because their story is so exquisitely tragic and their suffering is pretty much unnecessary. They get bonus points for the suffering they inflict on other characters. The moody, sweeping English landscape adds an extra touch of sublime melancholia.

Mr. Rochester and Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.

Published in the 20th century but reflecting back on 19th-century colonial Jamaica, this is one of the most beautiful and haunting books I’ve ever read, and it justifies Mr. Rochester’s brutal punishment in Jane Eyre.

Eustacia Vye, Damon Wildeve, and Clym Yeobright in The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy.

Thomas Hardy’s beautiful, tragic novel revolves around the gorgeous and hopelessly bored Eustacia Vye, whose marriage to the cosmopolitan Clym backfires when he decides to open a school instead of return to the glamour of continental Europe. The lothario Wildeve wants Eustacia too. It’s a Thomas Hardy novel, so lots of people end up dead because of this scenario.

Count and Countess Fosco in The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

The Count and Countess actually have a healthier relationship than most of the other characters on here, though it’s partially dependent on the Countess’s unquestioning obedience of / obsession with her larger-than-life husband, one of literature’s most compelling and charming villains (he is also a true animal lover!).

This couple proves that conspiring to murder and identity theft is the best way to keep the spark alive in your marriage. Neither the truly sensational mystery surrounding the mysterious woman in white nor the exceptionally intelligent Marian Holcombe can pull Fosco away from his Countess in the end.

Mr. Rochester, Jane Eyre, and Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

This – perhaps my favorite – love triangle explodes in a conflagration of epic proportions. It’s probably not a best practice to keep your actual wife locked up while trying to pursue another woman. While Rochester and Jane end up finding their forever love, it’s not without its price. Tsk tsk, Mr. Rochester.