Love, Thunder, and Locked Doors
Heathcliff on the moors looking for Catherine
There is a definite raunchy vibe to today’s romance writing, but the darker side was there at the beginning and should not be denied.
Let’s take a little turn down the shadowed lane of the romance genre, shall we? Candle in hand, skirts brushing the cold stone floor, possibly a ghost rustling the drapes. The heart still pounds, but this isn’t the ballroom. This is the moor.
It’s easy to forget, amid the dizzying heights of romantic fiction today, that some of our greatest literary love stories came out of storm clouds – not sunshine. The Romance period wasn’t all about swooning heroines and gallant gentlemen. It had a dark heart. It brooded. It lingered in ruined abbeys and stared down into locked attics. And for writers, this is where things get very interesting.
Take Wuthering Heights. It’s less a love story than a fever dream – more gothic howl than happy ending. Cathy and Heathcliff don’t exactly model healthy relationship dynamics, but their bond is volcanic. They destroy each other and everyone around them, and yet their story has never faded. Why? Because it taps into something raw, something elemental. There’s a wildness to it, a refusal to tame love into something polite. As writers, it dares us to ask: what happens if we take the lid off? If we let the story breathe without moral tidying?
Then there’s Jane Eyre. Dark corridors, a mysterious laugh from the attic, a brooding employer with secrets and a very questionable fire safety record. On paper, it’s all red flags. And yet, readers are drawn back to Thornfield again and again. Jane’s strength isn’t in her compliance, but in her resistance. She walks through fire (literally, almost), refuses to be anyone’s ornament, and still gets the kiss at the end, but not before demanding respect on her own terms.
There’s something deeply seductive about that moral complexity, that darkness. And it’s an absolute gift to writers. The romantic and gothic traditions give us permission to linger in the liminal spaces, between sanity and madness, love and obsession, reality and dream. They give us weather: stormy, oppressive, or eerily still. They give us haunted houses, troubled men, sharp-witted women, and the ever-present question: should I trust this desire, or is it going to ruin me? These stories understood that love isn’t always a comfort. Sometimes it’s a haunting.
Sometimes it’s the locked door you’re warned not to open – and sometimes you open it anyway, because that’s where the story is.
For writers, the darker side of romance is where character becomes dangerous, stakes become personal, and atmosphere becomes everything. It’s where emotion sits uneasily in the chest, and choices have real cost. And frankly, it’s where some of the most delicious writing happens. There’s nothing like writing a slow-burn scene in a crumbling manor house, candlelight flickering, and the unmistakable feeling that someone is watching.
So if you’re plotting a romance, or just re-reading the classics with a cup of tea and a sense of dread, don’t skip over the shadows. Embrace them. Let your heroine wander the corridors. Let your hero have a few scars, visible or not. Write the storm, the ache, the locked room. The happy ending doesn’t have to be saccharine. Sometimes it’s enough just to survive the fire and walk out with your head held high.
After all, as Jane herself would say, ‘I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will. Which, let’s be honest, is one hell of a mic drop,