Valentine's Day is the 14th and then it's gone for another
year. Fortunately, romance never goes away.
I came across a list referred to as History's
Romantics and, in honor of the day of romance I'd like to share it with
you. I don't recall where this list came from, but I'm sure you can think of
several truly romantic people (and certainly many romantic couples) not on this
list.
I do have to take exception to some of these choices being
considered truly romantic. But I leave that decision to you. Keep in
mind that the list refers to real people, not fictional characters—Romeo and
Juliet (even though based on real people, according to some) don't count. :)
Sappho
Much uncertainty surrounds the life story of the celebrated
Greek lyric poet Sappho, a woman Plato called the tenth Muse. Born around
610 B.C. on the island of Lesbos, now part of Greece, she was said to have been
married to Cercylas, a wealthy man. Many
legends have long existed about Sappho's life, including a prevalent one—now
believed to be untrue—that she leaped into the sea to her death because of her
unrequited love for a younger man.
Vatsyayana, author of
the Kama Sutra
This ascetic, probably celibate scholar who lived in
classical India around the 5th century A.D. is an unlikely candidate to have
written history's best known book on erotic love. Little is known about his life, but in
his famous book—actually a collection of notes on hundreds of years of
spiritual wisdom passed down by the ancient sages—he wrote that he intended the
Kama Sutra as the ultimate love manual and a tribute to Kama, the Indian god of
love. Though it has become famous for
its sections on sexual instruction, the book actually deals much more with the
pursuit of fulfilling relationships, and provided a blueprint for courtship and
marriage in upper-class Indian society at the time. The Kama Sutra has been translated into
hundreds of languages and has won millions of devotees around the world.
Shah Jahan
Emperor of India from 1628 to 1658, Shah Jahan has gone down
in history for commissioning one of history's most spectacular buildings, the
Taj Mahal, in honor of his much beloved wife.
Born Prince Khurram, the fifth son of the Emperor Jahangir of India, he
became his father's favored son after leading several successful military
campaigns to consolidate his family's empire.
As a special honor, Jahangir gave him the title of Shah Jahan, or King of the World. After his father's death in 1627, Shah Jahan
won power after a struggle with his brothers, crowning himself emperor at Agra
in 1628. At his side was Mumtaz Mahal,
or Chosen One of the Palace, Shah
Jahan's wife since 1612 and the favorite of his three queens. In 1631, Mumtaz died after giving birth to
the couple's 14th child. Legend has it that with her dying breaths, she asked
her husband to promise to build the world's most beautiful mausoleum for
her. Six months after her death, the
deeply grieving emperor ordered construction to begin.
Giacomo Casanova
The name Casanova
has long since come to conjure up the romantic(?) image of the prototypical
libertine and seducer, thanks to the success of Giacomo Casanova's posthumously
published 12-volume autobiography, Histoire
de ma vie, which chronicled with vivid detail—as well as some
exaggeration—his many sexual and romantic exploits in 18th-century Europe. Born in Venice in 1725 to actor parents,
Casanova was expelled from a seminary for scandalous conduct. He embarked on a varied career including a
stint working for a cardinal in Rome, a violinist, and a magician, while
traveling all around the continent. Casanova's celebration of
pleasure seeking and much-professed love of women—he maintained that a woman's
conversation was at least as captivating as her body—made him the leading
champion of a movement towards sexual freedom, and the model for the famous Don
Juan of literature. After working as a
diplomat in Berlin, Russia, and Poland and a spy for the Venetian inquisitors,
Casanova spent the final years of his life working on his autobiography in the
library of a Bohemian count. He died in
1798.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley
The only child of the famous feminist Mary Wollstonecraft
and the philosopher and novelist William Godwin, both influential voices in
Romantic-Era England, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin fell in love with the poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was only 16.
He was 21 and unhappily married. In
the summer of 1816, the couple was living with Shelley's friend and fellow
poet, the dashing and scandalous Lord Byron, in Byron's villa in Switzerland
when Mary came up with the idea for what would become her masterpiece—and one
of the most famous novels in history—Frankenstein
(1818). After Shelley's wife committed
suicide, he and Mary were married, but public hostility to the match forced
them to move to Italy. When Mary was
only 24, Percy Shelley was caught in a storm while at sea and drowned, leaving
her alone with a two-year-old son (three previous children had died
young). Alongside her husband, Byron,
and John Keats, Mary was one of the principal members of the second generation
of Romanticism; unlike the three poets, who all died during the 1820s, she
lived long enough to see the dawn of a new era, the Victorian Age. Still somewhat of a social outcast for her
liaison with Shelley, she worked as a writer to support her father and son, and
maintained connections to the artistic, literary and political circles of
London until her death in 1851.
Richard Wagner
One of history's most revered composers, Richard Wagner set
his work on the famous Ring cycle aside in 1858 to work on his most romantic
opera, Tristan and Isolde. He was inspired to do so partially because of
his thwarted passion for Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a wealthy silk
merchant and patron of Wagner's. While
at work on the opera, the unhappily married Wagner met Cosima von Bulow,
daughter of the celebrated pianist and composer Franz Liszt and wife of Hans
von Bulow, one of Liszt's disciples.
They later became lovers, and their relationship was an open secret in
the music world for several years. Wagner's
wife died in 1866, but Cosima was still married and the mother of two children
with von Bulow, who knew of the relationship and worshiped Wagner's music (he
even conducted the premiere of Tristan
and Isolde). After having two
daughters, Isolde and Eva, by Wagner, Cosima finally left her husband; she and
Wagner married and settled into an idyllic villa in Switzerland, near
Lucerne. On Cosima's 33rd birthday,
Christmas Day 1870, Wagner brought an orchestra in to play a symphony he had
written for her, named the Triebschen
Idyll after their villa. Though the
music was later renamed the Siegfried
Idyll after the couple's son, the supremely romantic gesture was a powerful
symbol of the strength of Wagner and Cosima's marriage, which lasted until the
composer's death in 1883.
King Edward VIII
Edward, then Prince of Wales, was introduced to Wallis
Simpson in 1931, when she was married to her second husband; they soon began a
relationship that would rock Britain's most prominent institutions—Parliament,
the monarchy and the Church of England—to their cores. Edward called Simpson,
whom others criticized as a financially unstable social climber, the perfect woman. Just months after being crowned king in
January 1936, after the death of his father, George V, Edward proposed to
Simpson, precipitating a huge scandal and prompting Britain's prime minister,
Stanley Baldwin, to say he would resign if the marriage went ahead. Not wanting to push his country into an
electoral crisis, but unwilling to give Simpson up, Edward made the decision to
abdicate the throne. In a public radio
address, he told the world of his love for Simpson, saying that "I have
found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to
discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support
of the woman I love." They were married and
given the titles of Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Edith Piaf
Though her life was marked by sickness, tragedy and other
hardships from beginning to end, the famous French chanteuse with the throaty
voice became the epitome of classic Parisian-style romance for her legions of
fans. Born Edith Giovanna Gassion in
1915, she was abandoned by her mother and reared by her grandmother; while
traveling with her father, a circus acrobat, she began singing for pennies on
the street. Discovered by a cabaret
promoter who renamed her Piaf, Edith enjoyed a meteoric rise to stardom and
by 1935 was singing in the grandest concert halls in Paris. Piaf was married twice, but her great love
was the boxer Marcel Cerdan, a world middleweight champion who was killed in a
plane crash en route from Europe to New York in 1949. It was for Cerdan that Piaf sang the achingly
romantic Hymne a l'amour, celebrated
all over the world as one of her best loved ballads.
Kathleen Woodiwiss
Born in 1939 in Alexandria, Louisiana, Kathleen Woodiwiss
was a young wife and mother when she began writing romantic fiction as a
response to her dissatisfaction with the existing women's fiction of the
time. In 1972, she published her first
novel, The Flame and the Flower, set
on a Southern plantation in the late 18th century. Its historical setting and theme, florid
prose style, and steamy sex scenes inspired a legion of imitators and its
smashing commercial success sparked a new boom in romance fiction. Woodiwiss was given credit for inventing the
modern romance novel. In an interview with Publisher's Weekly, Woodiwiss firmly denied the characterization of
her books as erotic, maintaining that she wrote only "love stories—with a
little spice." By the time of her
death in 2006, Woodiwiss's spicy love stories had sold more than 36 million
copies in 13 countries.
Elizabeth Taylor
An actress since early childhood, the dark haired,
violet-eyed Elizabeth Taylor has won two Best Actress Oscars (for
Butterfield 8 in 1960 and
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966)
but is perhaps best known for her rare beauty—and her epic love life. She has been married a total of eight
times—twice to the same man, the actor Richard Burton, whom she has called
"one of the two great loves of my life." The first 'great love of her life' (but not
her first husband) was the film producer Mike Todd, who died in a plane crash
in 1958. Taylor and Burton met on the
set of
Cleopatra, when both were
married to other people; their affair soon made headlines around the world and
earned a public rebuke from no lesser authority than the Vatican. After divorcing in 1973, they found it
impossible to stay apart and remarried in 1975, only to break up four months
later. Barred from Burton's funeral in
1984 by his last wife, Taylor still received legions of condolences, honoring her
and Burton's place in the history of celebrated love stories.
