First of all, I want to state clearly that I DO NOT read trashy romance novels! Perhaps that's why it has taken me so long to put a Love and Romance Index on this site. I really didn't plan to at all, but the amount of material that belongs here became overwhelming. The truth is, the majority of books use love and romance as a main theme, or important secondary theme. Once I succumbed to that realization, then the addition of this index became inevitable.
Of course, the next hurdle I had to clear was how to classify all these literary lovers. Oh, dear. What a mess. There's romantic comedy, of the Jane Austin variety, romantic tragedy, like Romeo and Juliet, unrequited love, as in The Sorrows of Young Werther, dysfunctional love, as in most of Dostoyevsky's novels, love that overcomes immense obstacles, as in The Mysteries of Udolpho, which is also a Gothic Romance, in addition to having more than one romantic attachment going on at once, of very different sorts. In fact, many novels have more than one romantic involvement, which may be of totally different classifications.
What I have decided to do is include only books where love is truly an important theme, and to not include collections of stories, because most collections have at least one story where love or romance is a theme, and often several stories of totally different types of romantic relationships. Many novels fall into several different classifications of romance, so, the best I could, I chose the one that was the most dominant. Below the listings is a guide to my criteria in classifying each novel. Bear with me, this list will no doubt undergo metamorphosis. Fortunately, updating these pages is a breeze. So, here it all is. Throw away the Harlequins and read some of these juicy gems!