The Book of Love

Synopsis

A selection of letters, poetry, fiction, essays and memoirs, this book celebrates our greatest pastime and obsession. A treasury of more than 200 works, it is a panorama of the finest writing about the many moods and majesties of love, from all the veils of flirtation, seduction and marriage to the tempests of suspicion, jealousy and heartache. Here Oscar Wilde's "The Nightingale and the Rose" and Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" can be sampled. There are excerpts from "Romeo and Juliet", "Madame Bovary", "Justine", "The Odyssey" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover" along with selections from the "Karma Sutra" Benjamin Franklin's "Advising a Young Man as to the Selection of a Mistress" and Freud's "Delusion and Dream". Letters include those from Emilie du Chatelet to Richlieu, George Eliot to Herbert Spencer and Henry Miller to Anais Nin, while memoirs range from Colette's "Earthly Paradise" to Jan Morris' "God, Love and Abysinnian Cats".