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.
NOTE: This is a list
of individuals considered to be romantics, not romantic couples.
I do have to take exception to some of these choices as 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 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 while 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 up Simpson, 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. [There
have been persistent rumors and conspiracy theories that in reality Edward was
forced off the throne because of his pro-Hitler attitudes as Germany pushed
toward World War II.]
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
raised 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 traveling 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 pantheon of history's most celebrated love stories.
