Once you realise that romance means long dresses - of the billowing variety that looks particularly well when on horseback - filtered sunlight, birch trees, a lake and Chopin nocturnes, you're well on the road to disappointment. No, I didn't mean that. Still, birch groves are seldom there when you need one. Some element of solitude, with at least an awareness of the loved one, is essential for the true romantic, so is a little bit of pain. No - better make that a hint of wistful longing. Anyhow, as every schoolgirl knows, Antony And Cleopatra is so much more real, so much more romantic, so much more felt than Romeo and Juliet.
One of the most enduring of romantic images occurs as Jane Eyre's walk is interrupted by the sound of a horse crashing through the woods and, hey presto! interestingly gloomy, dark, stern-featured Gordon Brown-lookalike Mr Rochester is delivered more or less at her feet. Okay, so he fell off the horse but let's not quibble, the main thing is he appears, albeit limping. Not too handsome but compelling, a real man, not a simpering cissy. There are problems, like the mad wife in the attic, but isn't there always something? Even common sense fails to diminish the savage appeal of Heathcliff. Should you like your romance wild, menacing and positively doomed, go for Wuthering Heights. Thomas Hardy's view of romance will not only leave you weeping, it could encourage most comely maidens to hit the ground running and stay running. Remember Tess Of The D'Ubervilles? Poor Tess is such a victim not even being so beautiful could justify all that suffering. It might be marginally more fun to be Bathsheba in Far From the Madding Crowd with three suitors and her own sense of independence.
Robert Browning's poetry offers a less painful form of Victorian romance. But few 19th-century English writers could hope to improve on Jane Austen's exploration of love's regrets as experienced by Anne Elliot in Persuasion. Having bravely swallowed her remorse to the point of despair, she eventually marries Captain Wentworth. A lot less hopeful but so gorgeous as to ease one through the heartbreak is Turgenev's First Love in which a man remembers his first experience of love. At that time he was 16 and fell madly in love with a beautiful, older woman - well, she is 21. "Zinaida guessed at once that I had fallen in love with her, but then I wouldn't have thought of concealing it. My passion amused her." Among Zinaida's several suitors, however, is the narrator's handsome, unhappily married father. The father dies. Years pass and just when the narrator is about to visit the object of his love, she dies. It is exquisite torment, Russian-style, endorsing the Russian writers as masters of romance - from Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, to all of Tolstoy (most obviously Anna Karenin and Resurrection) to Nabokov's Mary, a delicately beautiful elegy about lost love. Whatever about the miscast movie, Pasternak's Dr Zhivago alerted me to the possibilities of being trapped in a cabin in the snow.
Henry James is a subtle romantic; the ailing Ralph Touchett in The Portrait Of A Lady is one of the most beguiling of unrequited lovers. Ireland's finest literary spokesman on long-term matters of the heart is Yeats: "How many loved your moments of glad grace,/And loved your beauty with love false or true,/But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,/ And loved the sorrows of your changing face." Romance is not Joyce's strongest subject, but who can fail to be moved by Gretta in The Dead and her treasured memory of young Michael Furey who died of love for her.
Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes explores the twilight world joining boyhood and manhood. It is about the innocence of romance. Scott-Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby evokes an aura of romance which exceeds the boundaries of relationship, as does Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.
This same sense of romance as dream or aspiration applies to Cormac MacCarthy's All The Pretty Horses - as well as the ill-fated boy-meets-girl, that novel offers the definitive romance, that of a cowboy and his horse.
About the most recent romantic novel I've read is The English Patient. So what's happened to romance? Graphic sex scenes, cynicism, male/female hostility and the death of erotic mystique. So quick - play the Moonlight Sonata and reach for a 19th-century novel.