A five-seminar series with the author, critic, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn, following the theme of unrequited love in works by Homer, Sappho, Dante, Goethe, Jane Austen, W. Somerset Maugham, Marcel Proust, and more.
“Thou lov’st me not, / And never wilt! Love dwells not in our will. / Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot, / To strongly, wrongly, vainly love thee still.” So writes Lord Byron in Love and Death, describing a phenomenon that (alas!) most of us have experienced—and, more to the point, that has inspired some of the most brilliant and wrenching works of literature. In this five-part season of NYRSeminars, we will be examining the phenomenon of unrequited love as a subject in Western literature. We will begin with the classics, examining texts by Homer, Sappho, the tragedians, and the Latin love elegists, and then move to the Middle Ages and early modern period, reading works by Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare in which the poets address themselves to cruelly unresponsive women. From there we will segue to the novel, which takes over as the preeminent vehicle for examining hopeless love: from Goethe and Jane Austen to W. Somerset Maugham and Marcel Proust.
The seminars, to be conducted online, will meet weekly. We are offering memberships at two levels: Full Members will have the opportunity to discuss the work with the seminar leader during the live sessions, while Auditors will be able to listen in on the discussion. Both membership levels will have access to our online discussion platform, which also features supplemental materials, as well as recordings of every session.
The first seminar in the series, “The Classics: Homer to Ovid,” will consist of four weekly sessions beginning Wednesday, September 2, 2026.
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