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So, what makes a great love story? Initially, this seemed the easiest of the seven categories that make up our series. All great novels are essentially about love, aren't they? As it turned out, things weren't so easy. There is, as one of our panel remarked of Madame Bovary, often precious little loving going on in these famous love stories. With the exceptions of Jane Austen and sometimes Dickens there are very few guaranteed happy endings. "Reader, I married him" is quite defi nitely the exception to the rule — unless our poor heroine has married the wrong man, or he is in love with someone else. The contemporary novel, for one, has fallen out of love with love. When our most successful and popular authors choose to write love stories, they look to the past, as do TV producers with the endless return to old favourites for the Sunday night bonnet slot. And you can be sure that in any poll of the nation's favourite novels Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights will be somewhere at the top. So perhaps we haven't become disillusioned with romance itself, just distrustful of its ability to thrive in such a cynical age.

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