A Vindication of Love

This book is worth reading for the introduction alone. While the main chapters look at romance in the works and lives of Dante, Abelard and Heloise, George Sand, and many others, the intro is more than literary analysis: it's paradigm-shifting. Cristina Nehring challenges all our modern suspicions about romantic love, tackling in particular its association with weakness. If you were told that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, this book will send you back to the bike shop. Love as strength, love as creativity, love as adventure, love as ourselves, part of our deepest nature. And it is this birthright which feminism is duty-bound to restore to us, just as in recent years it has restored to good graces the experience of motherhood and homemaking.