Love and marriage, love and marriage
They go together like a horse and carriage
This I tell you, brother
You can’t have one without the other. -“Love and Marriage,” by Frank Sinatra

Every generation has particular ideas about how to conduct a love affair.  My mother grew up listening to Frank Sinatra, and love and marriage did go together, she thought.  I was so attached to her as a young child that I preferred Sinatra to the Beatles. One of the Beatles’ early songs, “I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah,” seemed crude after Sinatra’s smoothness. Much later, I stopped listening to both Frank Sinatra and the Beatles, but there is no doubt that their popular songs influenced my ideas about love.

The same can be said of novels. In E. Nesbit’s collection of short stories, The Literary Sense (1903), she explores the idea that reading novels can influence a real person’s love affairs.  When actual people squabble with their lovers, they remember similar scenes in novels and the dramatic reaction of the characters. They often  break up when they do not want to because of their knowledge of fiction. 

In “The Unfaithful Lover,” the characters are referred to only as “he” and “she.”  On a bitterly cold day in London, he asks, “Shall we walk along the Embankment, or go somewhere on the Underground?”

She believes that the Embankment would be more romantic but that he ought to insist on the railroad carriage.  And so she says, “’Oh, the Embankment, please!’ and felt a sting of annoyance and disappointment when he acquiesced.”

Shivering with the cold, they stop in a cafe, and he confesses that he kissed another woman at a dance.  She is not very shocked, but knows from novels that she should be.  She says that she cannot forgive him.  The squabble ends in their break-up, though neither wanted it.  Literature scores a point. 

All of the stories in this collection are thematically tied, and it is a clever idea, but limited.  In one of the best stories, “The Second Best,” Nesbit breaks the formula.  A couple who broke up two years ago have tea together.  The woman is now a widow, and he is a successful lawyer, but they did not know each other’s history since the break-up.  That is ironic and sad, but there is an unexpected twist. The ending is refreshing, a break from the formula.

When I was a child, I loved E. Nesbit’s children’s novels, but her adult work is inconsistent.  She seems more self-conscious when she tries to write for an adult audience.  But The Literary Sense is very clever and contains some of her best writing for adults. It is flawed, but definitely worth reading.

N.B.  It is difficult to find The Literary Sense, but the Read Books LTD  is well above the usual standard of print-on-demand, and this is actually a very attractive paperback.