Certain celebrity couples have always intrigued me. They look so perfect on the pages of glossy magazines surrounded by their photogenic children. They gaze lovingly into each other’s eyes. They give interviews saying they are each other’s best friends.
Suellen Dainty by Mat Smith Photography
Is it cynical to sometimes think that people who are really in love might like to spend time at home on their own instead of going out and being photographed all the time?
This was the question I kept asking myself when I created the characters of Rob and Emma in The Housekeeper. Are they for real? Or is it all a game?
With that in mind, here is my Top Ten list of fiction’s most intriguing couples.
Amy and Nick Dunne in Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. A master class in manipulation, deceit and dysfunction. Amy and Nick are both narcissists and sociopaths, which should be a turn off. But I couldn’t stop turning the pages.
Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Miscommunication, destructive jealousy, overwhelming desire and final tragedy. Did I miss anything here?
Tom and Daisy Buchanan in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. This couple is best described by the author himself. ‘They smashed up things and creatures… and let other people clean up the mess they had made.’
Valmont and Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. Two cruel, scheming and amoral French aristocrats playing games with other people’s lives. Repellent, but fascinating.
Frank and April in Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. This story of the disintegration of a marriage set in the American suburbs of the early 1960s is one of my all time favourite novels.
Erin Twist and Jack del Mar in Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx’s short story. A tender, genuinely loving but ultimately doomed relationship between two men working as sheep-herders in the Wyoming mountains in 1963, when being openly gay was not an option if you wanted to avoid being lynched.
Jane and Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Not many laughs here, but a wonderful story of a plain unconventional heroine who is strong, self-reliant and would rather remain on her own if she cannot marry for love. Happily, she does just that at the end.
Francis and Elizabeth Urquhart in The House of Cards by Michael Dobbs. The original Machiavellian political power couple in the novel that was adapted by Netflix and made Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright international stars. But this book, published in 1989, is where it all began.
Anna Karenina and Alexei Vronsky in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. She really should have kept him as a toy boy on the side, but her fatal passion dictated every move.
Finally, just to prove that I’m not totally cynical, my last couple is Jo March and Professor Friedrich Bhaer in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Readers may have wanted Jo to marry Laurie, but the much older, heavily accented German academic was always the right man to win her heart.
The Housekeeper by Suellen Dainty is out 30th March (£8.99, Simon & Schuster)