Read a 19th-century guide to writing a Valentine's Day card

In Victorian England, cards were sent to paramours and crushes, but they were also sometimes sent to people the sender disliked and would belittle them for their occupations or appearances. It was also expected that anyone who received a Valentine's Day card would send one in return, so there was a subgenre of responses, including rejections for unwanted suitors.

In the 1380s, the "Canterbury Tales" author wrote "The Parliament of Fowls," a 700-line poem about birds that choose their mates on St. Valentine's Day. The poem argued that romantic love—for fowls and humans alike—was an ideal, and linked the holiday with that sentiment.

Hallmark helped popularize (and commercialize) the holiday in the early 20th century, largely through its greeting cards. This digital collection includes cards from the 1910s through the 2000s, allowing you to see how the holiday—and our popular understanding of romance—has evolved. Below is a card from the 1930s.

The earliest known use of the phrase, a stock romance form used in greeting cards, is in Edmund Spenser's "The Faery Queen" from 1590 (excerpt below). By 1785, Joseph Ritson updated the verse and connected it to Valentine's Day, creating a cliché that's still used today.

In 1849, Howland launched her card business, the New England Valentine Company, in her home, staffing an assembly line with her friends, who'd piece together the intricate valentines. The cards were elaborately decorated, with silk, lace, and romantic verse. Howland's annual sales eventually grew to $100K and helped popularize the holiday in the US.

Valentine's Day is a holiday all about romance, but the way that's expressed differs depending on where the celebration takes place. This list breaks down some interesting takes on the holiday from across the globe, including mass weddings in the Philippines and Japan's gender-specific chocolate exchanges.

In 1845, Congress voted to slash postage rates, paving the way for larger swaths of the American public to send and receive mail. This convenience was capitalized on by paper and stationery sellers who sought to profit from the holiday. Esther Howland's New England Valentine Company was the first major commercial producer of valentines in the US, but Hallmark followed a few decades later.

Historian Elizabeth Nelson notes that companies sought "to turn holidays into opportunities for selling things from candy to flowers to magazine advertisements" in the 1900s. Hallmark, founded in 1911, pushed the holiday toward elementary students, who aimed to collect cards from as many classmates as possible.

The holiday began as a feast to celebrate the decapitation of a third-century Christian martyr, or perhaps two. So how did it become all about love?

That might include dinner, flowers, or something even more romantic. The most popular gift is candy, with 56% of people celebrating the holiday by purchasing sweets. That's about $2.5B in sales.

Valentine, which means "powerful" or "worthy," was a popular name in the Roman Empire. Considering that, it's no surprise that there's more than one St. Valentine. In fact, three different men named Valentine were martyred on February 14, and none of them, despite some unproven legends, were ever associated with love or romance.

It may seem like an odd combination—a holiday centered on love and a film genre dedicated to fright—but the hyperspecific subgenre thrives on the apparent juxtaposition, along with some campy send-ups of an overly commercialized holiday.

In 1847, a Boston pharmacist invented a machine that automated the production of his pharmacy's medicinal lozenges and then formed the New England Confectionery Company, which later became part of the company now known as NECCO. By the late 1800s, they were producing cookies with Valentine-themed messages and eventually brought the romantic messages to their smaller lozenges, which they later called Sweethearts.

Art historians are identifying previously unknown works by Nicholas Hilliard, Elizabeth I's court painter, whose thumb-sized watercolors on vellum served as love tokens, diplomatic currency, and status symbols. They were believed to be passed secretly between courtiers and monarchs.

Many long-form stories written in English were originally considered "romances," a term derived from the Old French word for "the speech of the people." But changes in medieval culture, triggered by a number of 12th-century church reforms, led to a new interest in what we now consider romantic love, including a new view of marriage as a pursuit of love rather than a transaction. Those new perspectives were then reflected in the period's popular stories, including stories in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales."

The medieval poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” includes a description of a New Year’s party where women are planning on giving “New Year’s gifts” to men. Scholars say it’s implied that the “gifts” are kisses.

The 1740 novel will likely strike modern readers as odd, to say the least. Its titular character, a 15-year-old maidservant, is harassed by her boss, who finally changes his ways and asks for her hand in marriage, which is presented as a happy ending. As this analysis of the text makes clear, though, "Pamela" established a template for the romance genre, even if contemporary writers have been happy to break it.

Classics with a capital "C" probably doesn't bring to mind erotically charged diss poetry. Gaius Valerius Catullus would like to change that. Instead of mythical epics, Catullus wrote poetry about his personal life as part of the 1st century BCE's "new wave" of Roman poets embracing the lyrical and everyday. The focus of his poetic work ranges from serenades to spiteful insults.

This guide breaks down romance's most prominent tropes, or narrative patterns, used by romance writers and adored by their fans. After you learn about "friends to lovers," "marriage of convenience," and "forced proximity," you'll start to see your favorite romance reads in an entirely new light.

In this interview from 2022, romance novelists Helen Hoang (author of the "Kiss Quotient" series) and Emily Henry ("Beach Read," "People We Meet on Vacation," and more) discuss both loving and subverting the conventions of the genre.

Journalist and novelist Ross Barkan argues that a crushing political system and alienating technology have led people to become more interested in the offline, analog world and the beauty of nature and emotion. In this essay, he defines this as "the new romanticism," and predicts it will come to define the culture of the 2020s.

The writer was known for lambasting popular writers of his time, including Jane Austen and Robert Louis Stevenson. One of his most famous takedowns is “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences,” an essay that simultaneously mocks Cooper’s popular adventure tales and satirizes the pretentiousness of literary criticism. Remarking on Cooper’s novel “The Deerslayer,” Twain wrote, “its conversations are—oh! Indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.”

Diane Winston, a media scholar at the University of Southern California, argues that romance novels have remained popular because they've historically offered women shame-free ways to explore their identities and sexualities. She notes that's even more true today, with contemporary romance novels, from romantasy bestsellers to "Heated Rivalry," more willingly explore social dynamics.

The festival, which took place in mid-February, featured Roman priests sacrificing a goat and using its hide to lightly slap women and the land, believing it would bring fertility. Some believe that the Catholic Church repurposed the pagan holiday as a Christian one by attaching it to a saint, but scholars are not certain that this is true.

Following an old cookbook, one woman makes meatballs, pastries, potatoes, and spinach over her fireplace. The springtime dinner is taken from a 1778 book titled The Art of Cookery, which remained a bestseller throughout the 1820s.

This visual essay, compiled using 65 years of industry data, is an entertaining trip through the history of pop music, exploring whether or not music has grown less romantic. But, at its heart, this isn't about the Billboard charts—it's about the many different ways we define romance.

In 2025, readers discovered AI prompts in three writers' texts, with one even instructing the AI bot to make a passage sound more like another romance writer. This Futurism piece digs into the scandals and how it's contributed to readers' skepticism about the genre's more prolific writers.

The review of "The Beautiful and the Damned" might have been comedic, but it was also illuminating, allowing Zelda to acknowledge her husband's tendency to use material from her diaries in his fiction and interrogate the way female characters were often portrayed in novels written by men.

In the 1800s, the postcard was a relatively new phenomenon, as was the post office. In the burgeoning system, recipients of mail had to sometimes pay prohibitively costly fees to receive it. So to get around the fees, a system of placing stamps on the envelopes in specific ways to communicate—a simple yes or no—was devised by clever mailers and expanded and codified by postcard companies into guides. Learn about the fascinating system here.

Although the novelist is sometimes dismissed as a romance writer, her stories feature pointed societal critiques, especially of women's limited options and challenged popular notions that women were subservient and passive.

Latvian Ed Leedskalnin moved to the US shortly after his teenage fiancée ditched him. He quickly began work building a romantic tribute to this tragic episode via massive oolitic limestone. Working mostly at night, the Latvian cultivated an air of mystique as bystanders grew curious over his methods. Today, the castle stands as a bittersweet monument to unrequited love.

In order to demonstrate their love for a woman, some young Englishmen would stab themselves in the arm and mix the blood into their wine. They'd then toast the object of their affection and drink to their honor.

Wedding website The Knot's internal study found that Christmas is the most popular day to propose. It also kicks off "proposal season," a monthslong season from Christmas to Valentine's Day that's a popular time for lovers to pop the question.

The poet's many correspondences were dashed with playful arrangements of text, offering her pen pals surprises once they opened their envelopes. Jana Dambrogio and Daniel Starza Smith explain how Dickinson even creatively used the 19th-century security technique of letterlocking in poetic ways.

The American writer was not a fan of the book, finding it shallow. In an 1867 review, he wrote, "There is no heart. No feeling—it is nothing but glittering frostwork."

Much of Dickens' fiction concerns Victorian London and its people. This tour of the city, led by Dickens biographer Simon Callow, walks you through significant sites, like the place where Dickens' parents were married, the shoe-blacking factory where he worked as a boy, and the place where he created his first magazine.

A lot has changed in the romance genre over time, a fact that's clearest in the way that the books are marketed to consumers. This interactive data visualization surveyed decades of romance book jackets, finding that raunchy, realistic paintings of scantily clad models have largely been replaced by vibrantly colored illustrations, often with the characters drawn as cartoons.

Overwhelmed by the task of writing many holiday letters, Sir Henry Cole commissioned artist JC Horsley to design a festive card he could send to friends and family in 1843—creating and popularizing the first mass-produced Christmas card.

The movement emphasized the beauty of nature and human feeling. It was inspired by reactions against classical traditions, social injustices, technological change, and the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Although the movement spanned literature, visual art, music, poetry, and architecture, some of its most recognizable works are paintings.

Edgar Allen Poe is one of the central figures of Gothic and Romantic literature of the 19th century, penning famous short stories like "The Tell-Tale Heart" and the long poem "The Raven." This digital library collects over 130 of his works in one...

Dalí pursued commercial work throughout his career. In 1948, Hallmark released a set of Christmas cards designed by the artist. A decade later, he created images for additional holidays, including Valentine's Day, Easter, and Mother's Day.

Jonathan Swift’s 1729 essay suggested that the starving Irish could stave off poverty by selling their children as food. Although it’s funny—albeit rather dark in form—it’s a classic example of Juvenalian satire, as it so pointedly criticizes the indifference of English elites.

Cupid is the Roman god of desire, and was often depicted in ancient mythology as both childlike and violent. In the 1800s, however, American advertisers eager to appeal to a younger demographic leaned into the less threatening versioning, portraying him as a cherubic child.

While many readers love Austen's novels for their characters and their romantic plots, Chi Luu argues that many people (including literary luminaries like Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, and Ralph Waldo Emerson) underestimate how her adept wordplay, sense of irony, and memorable turns of phrase are what have made readers fall in love with her fiction for centuries.

The site invites users to submit unsent letters to people, pets, or moments, which are then published anonymously for strangers to read. Every post is moderated, and the design of the site—no likes or replies, just words—feels polished and somber.

As the literary genre expands, so does the network of romance-specific stores. Romancing the Data keeps track of the rise of romance bookstores across the globe. This article not only shows how quickly the trend is taking off but also explains how brick-and-mortar shops are simply catching up with audience demand.

Dickens planned to write a treatise on the day's social issues and had a particularly dry working title: "An Appeal to the People of England on behalf of the Poor Man's Child." After a week, though, he decided to rework the ideas into a fictional story, working at a quick pace so it could be released in time for Christmas. It worked: The story was published on December 19, 1843.

Ever the ironist, Twain claimed to have “ no liking for novels or stories.” Obviously, that was untrue: He read widely, devouring books by Charles Dickens, slave narratives, and texts on astronomy. He also loved John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” which he called “something everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

Just because something's considered a "classic" doesn't mean it's universally loved. Even the world's most respected writers don't agree on what defines great literature. Look no further than this list of writers criticizing canonical texts, like Charlotte Brontë deriding Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" or Virginia Woolf on James Joyce's "Ulysses." The most succinct might be Aldous Huxley on Jack Kerouac's "On the Road": "I got a little bored after a time. I mean, the road seemed to be awfully long."