No. 5. Bertha Mason and Edward Rochester from Jane Eyre
Spoiler alert!
Clearly not a successful marriage. Bertha is insane, can’t be divorced and has pyromaniac and suicidal tendencies. Certainly she has her own story to tell (as imagined in Wide Sargasso Sea). It can’t help a marriage when wife number two is waiting in the wings before wife number one has left the stage. For any of those reading this who are in a similar situation and looking for advice, may I suggest that if you have to lock your spouse up in the attic and deny his/her existence you need marriage counselling at best and fire-fighters on hand 24/7 at worst. But remember that bigamy is never an ideal solution. Why isn’t this marriage higher on our list? Presumably it began as a happy relationship and neither party wanted it to go the way it did. There’s worse to come.
The Long Victorian
Worst couples in literature – The complete list
No. 11. Charlotte Lucas and Mr. Collins from Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
No. 10. Rosamund Vincy and Dr Lydgate from Middlemarch (George Eliot)
No. 9. Lydia and George Wickham from Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
No. 8. Dorothea and Edward Casaubon from Middlemarch (George Eliot)
No. 7. Arabella Donn and Jude Fawley from Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy)
No. 6. Anna Karenina and Alexei Vronsky from Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
No. 5. Bertha and Edward Rochester from Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
No. 4. Madeline Bray and Arthur Gride from Nicholas Nickleby (Charles Dickens)
No.3. Laura Fairlie and Sir Percival Glyde from The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)
No.2. Angel & Tess and Alec & Tess from Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)
No.1 Heathcliff and Catherine from Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
The Long Victorian 