I'm not sure if it's actually taggef as romance, but 'The song of Achilles' by Adeline Miller was amazing. If you haven't heard about it, it's a retelling of the Illiad with a focus on the romance between Achilles and Patrocles and I thought it was amazing and well paced.

Sense and Sensibility(sort of)

I don't know if I'd call it positive, though. Typical romances aren't usually supposed to be massive tearjerkers.

/waits for someone to recommend CoHo

👀💀💀💀

yeah it is NOT a happy romance I completely overlooked that😭

History of romance novels and comic books as we know them today are interesting.

Publishers who kicked off the comic book industry designed them to market to a male audience, often illiterate, telling simple stories with archetypes based in familiar virtues, with emphasis on action and things. At the same time they also produced products marketing toward women. For matters of preference, this became the romance novel.

Women did not buy as many comic because they weren't being written from AB testing designed to cater toward womens interests. Men did not buy as many romance novels because they weren't being written from AB testing designed to cater toward mens interests. Two differing forms of media emerged from what sold in those demographics. The work in entertainment we see today trying to go back in time and hammer comic books into women, and romance novels into men, is in context a weird and counterintuitive pastime destined to inefficiently burn up investment.

There exists a romance novel that predates all of these tropes and recent history. The Romance period out of France. Where the printing press first brought affordable books to the public in the 1500s shortly thereafter you get a popular trend of romance novels.

I'd skip the fluff and go to the older works. Find the forgotten romance novels. You can find discoveries that lift the spirit and seed higher aspirations there. This is a powerful counter weight to modern tropes.

Unless you're truly looking for the smut variety of romance novel. Fan fiction world produces no shortage of that. Sort of a baser pursuit.

Jennifer Crusie!!!

Jane Eyre is one of my favorites.

I recommend Penny Reid. Her Winston brothers series is my favorite. I suggest starting with {{Beauty and the Mustache}} which is the crossover book from her Knitting in the City series to this one.

To get better results you might want to ask this question on r/RomanceBooks.

The Lover, by Marguerite Duras, is beautifully written.

Thank you ❤️ I find myself intimidated by the language in older books but I think I just need to get over that

Please post recommendation requests in /r/suggestmeabook or the weekly thread.

Hi there. Per rule 3.3, please post book recommendation requests in /r/SuggestMeABook or in our Weekly Recommendation Thread. Thank you!

You can pick up the language by context of how words are used. No harder than keeping up with new language firehose put out through social media.

As extra reach, it's useful to have a printed copy of the dictionary from before the internet. This is the last anchor-point of widest accepted definition of language before it was easy to redefine what words mean from one week to the next. Printed copy provides a Rosetta stone for earlier texts not influenced by modern conceptions of what would be useful running afoul of what is.