The Top 6 Unrequited Loves in Literary History

Jonathan Safran Foer and Natalie Portman
Oh wait, no, there totally is a reason Foer’s new novel inspired this rumination on unrequited literary love. After Foer interviewed actress Natalie Portman in The New York Times, seemingly everyone remembered simultaneously that Foer’s marriage apparently collapsed because he fell in love with Portman while working with her on a film adaptation of his nonfiction book Eating Animals. The story goes that Foer told his wife about his decision to be with Portman before checking with Portman, who basically Bye, Felicia’d him. As far as cringe-worthy stories of unrequited love go, this one takes the cake. While a disintegrating marriage does feature in Here I Am, it’s not the focus of this sprawling, epic-scale novel—a novel that has a pretty good shot of making us forget all about Natalie Portman.

Jane Austen and Tom Lefroy
No one can prove that Jane Austen was hopelessly in love with Tom Lefroy, or that Lefroy was the inspiration for Mr. Darcy, or anything beyond the documented facts that Austen and Lefroy flirted a bit and had some sort of go-nowhere relationship. The circumstantial evidence is powerful, however: Austen wrote three novels in a furiously passionate period immediately following her time with Lefroy, hinting at some sort of powerful emotional event—like, say, the man you’d fallen in love with leaving you to pursue (an admittedly brilliant) legal career.

Charlotte Brontë and Constantin Heger
Slightly sadder is Charlotte Brontë’s story of unrequited love, wherein she apparently fell hopelessly in love with older, married professor Constantin Heger, who taught the Brontë sisters French. After leaving school, Charlotte wrote Constantin a lot, which obviously delighted his wife, who rebuked the future author and demanded she stop writing so much. Constantin didn’t respond, and the letters become sadder and sadder, until Charlotte finally stopped writing altogether. Four of the letters survive, although three were mysteriously torn up and then mended—or, better said, three were not at all mysteriously torn up, but mysteriously mended.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Charlotte Buff
Goethe was a rock star in 18th-century Germany. His novel The Sorrows of Young Werther is widely regarded as not only the motivating work of the so-called Sturm und Drang literary movement, but was arguably the world’s  first bestseller. Goethe was just 24 when he wrote it, and he dashed it off in just a few weeks of passionate work—probably because he had just been kicked to the curb by Charlotte Buff, who inspired the character of Lotte. Goethe came to be intensely embarrassed by a book he regarded as juvenalia, although in his later years, he came around to appreciate it as a work that many people connected with.

Hans Christian Andersen and Everybody He Met
Hans Christian Andersen is mainly known as that guy who wrote every single fairy tale you’ve ever heard, but he was a prolific writer in general. He was also a guy who apparently fell in love with almost everyone he met, who once wrote in his diary “Give me a bride! My blood wants love, as my heart does!” In his younger days he fell in love with a woman named Riborg Voigt; upon his death 50 years later, a letter from her was found along with his body. In-between were many other objects of Andersen’s affection—men and women—but no one, as far as we know, returned the sentiments.

Emily Dickinson and Master
Chances are if you don’t know anything else about Emily Dickinson, you know that her poems can all be easily sung, thanks to her dedication to common meter—nothing beats singing “Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me” to the Gilligan’s Island theme song. But Dickinson’s life is one of mystery, and surprisingly little is known of her, partly due to the fact that her fame as a poet didn’t come until after she’d died. What is known is that in addition to many poems that reference unrequited love (as well as death and funerals), Dickinson left behind several drafts of letters to an unnamed “Master” that imply tortured, unfulfilled desires. Many theories attempt to identify Master, but the fact is, we’ll probably never know who set afire the heart of one of our greatest poets.