Books › Forbidden Love
Forbidden Love
First published 1981 · 250 pages
A sweeping, high-stakes voyage of forbidden passion shadowed by the looming threat of a cruel and inescapable marriage.
What it feels like
Reading this classic 1980s historical romance feels like being swept into a tempest of high-stakes melodrama and inescapable desire. The narrative moves with a propulsive, breathless energy, carrying the reader from the claustrophobia of a forced marriage across a restless, tension-filled sea voyage to the New World. The mood is heavily shadowed by foreboding, contrasting the intoxicating, desperate rush of a forbidden love affair with the looming dread of a cruel, sadistic husband waiting on the horizon. The prose leans fully into the intense, earnest emotional registers of the bodice-ripper era, delivering sweeping declarations and perilous stakes. It is a perfect match for readers who devour vintage romances where passion is a matter of survival and every stolen glance is fraught with danger.
- Mood
- sweeping
- tense
- foreboding
- desperate
- Tone
- melodramatic
- passionate
- intense
- earnest
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- forbidden desire · inescapable duty · perilous journeys · cruel captivity
- The writing
- Highly emotive and dramatic, leaning into the sweeping, breathless conventions of vintage historical romance.
- The arc
- Moves from the despair of a trapped, unwanted marriage to the overwhelming intensity of forbidden passion, shadowed by looming dread.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave the high-stakes melodrama, intense forbidden passion, and darker villainy characteristic of classic 1980s bodice rippers.
Content notes
- forced marriage
- cruelty and sadism
- infidelity themes
About the book
Bella is seventeen years old when she is tricked into marriage with a man she has met only once. Edward Sutton makes her his wife and then orders her to follow him to the New World, where he has bought a tobacco plantation.
It is on the long restless sea voyage to Virginia that Bella meets Adam Tarrant — the man she knows at once she will love for the rest of her life. Despairingly she tries to resist the passionate desire which flares between them, knowing that on the other side of the world a husband awaits her whose dark good looks hide a cruel and sadistic nature — and that he will never let her go.
Description from Open Library.
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