Australian Love Stories

The words `love story' suggest the kind of story beginning with a glance and ending with a sunset or an aisle.

What such stories celebrate is the harnessing of desire in the service of the social order: the dangerous forces of sexuality are contained within the family.

But reflections on Cathy and Heathcliff, Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Desdemona, Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas introduce mythic lovers who could not be further from the happy stereotype most people hanker after and achieve.

This anthology has both kinds of stories - and others as well.

Most Australian love stories confront or subvert the happy-ending stereotype or the tragic-lovers myth.

Distance, hardship, and the particulars of history have all played this transformation of gender roles and desire.

Like Jennifer Strauss in her highly successful Oxford Book of Australian Love Poems, Goldsworthy sticks with romantic, sexual love.

Among the writers included in her anthology are such canonical authors as Clarke, Lawson, Richardson, Stead, White, Wright, Astley and Jolley.Successive generations of urban sophisticates are represented: Helen Garner, Murray Bail, Frank Moorhouse, Robert Dessaix, Peter Carey, Carmel Bird, Lily Brett.

Also represented are younger writers such as Beth Yahp, Delia Falconer, and Tim Herbert.

Goldsworthy contributes a general introduction, and the stories are arranged in chronological (published) order.