Valentine’s

Tragic and romantic classics tagged for Valentine’s Day, from every section.

Valentine's Day stories from the darker side of the classics. The ties come from the stories themselves: Dracula's general release on Feb 14, 1931, Andersen's letter about The Little Mermaid three days before Valentine's Day 1837, and the insult cards Victorians sold for the day.

Others are love and marriage tales whose first versions end badly, like Perrault's Bluebeard and Red Riding Hood. One story checks where the romance of the day really starts.

8 stories

Valentine's Day: a vampire's devotion, in the Feb 1872 installment
Carmilla Before Dr. Hesselius
Turn to page 434 of the December 1871 issue of a little London monthly called The Dark Blue and Carmilla begins at once, in a young woman's voice, in a castle in Styria, with no doctor and no case file in sight. That was 25 years before Dracula, and its first readers met the vampire cold.
Valentine's Day: Dracula's release, Feb 14, 1931
Dracula Dodges Friday the 13th
Dracula was due to open on Broadway on Friday the 13th in February 1931, until Universal moved it up a day because its director, Tod Browning, "goes in for superstition." The Valentine's tagline everyone repeats, "the strangest love story," is harder to pin down, since the only 1931 trade-paper ad we found with those words is for a different Universal picture.
Valentine's Day: the tower romance the Grimms kept rewriting
Rapunzel’s Tight Dress
In the Grimms' first Rapunzel (1812), the witch finds out about the prince because Rapunzel innocently complains that her little dresses are getting too tight. A few pages later she gives birth to twins in the wilderness.
Valentine's Day: Andersen's letter of Feb 11, 1837
The Little Mermaid Gets No Wedding
Three days before Valentine's Day 1837, Hans Christian Andersen wrote to a friend about his new story, The Little Mermaid. Letting a mermaid win a soul through a man's love, he said, was "bestemt galt" (decidedly wrong). So he wrote one where the prince marries someone else, she is handed a knife to kill him, and she turns to foam instead.
Valentine's Day: a marriage tale with two morals
Bluebeard’s Two Morals
Perrault's 1697 Bluebeard has a room of murdered wives, a key that will not stop bleeding, and a sword raised over the heroine's head. Then it ends with two morals. The first scolds her curiosity. The second says relax, this is a tale of olden days: husbands are not like that anymore, and these days it is hard to tell which spouse is the boss.
Valentine's Day: Perrault's warning about charming wolves
Red Riding Hood’s First Ending
In the first printed Little Red Riding Hood (Paris, 1697), nobody comes to save her. The wolf eats her, the story stops, and a rhyming moral explains that the most dangerous wolves are the gentle, charming ones who follow young ladies all the way home.
Valentine's Day: Victorian insult cards, sold beside the lace
Vinegar Valentines, the Victorian Hate Mail
In the 1880s you could walk into a stationer's in February and buy, for pennies, a printed card calling your neighbor a drunk, a nag or an ass, then mail it unsigned, and newspapers complained that millions of people did exactly that.
Valentine's Day: where the romance really starts
Valentine’s Day Starts With Chaucer
Every February, explainers trace Valentine's Day to a Roman fertility festival and to a martyred priest who signed a love note "From your Valentine." The earliest text that ties St. Valentine's Day to choosing a mate is a Chaucer poem about birds from the 1380s. And what is often called the oldest surviving English valentine letter, from 1477, was written by a young woman worrying about her dowry.

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