The Story of an Untold Love

The Story of an Untold Love is a short novel by Paul Leicester Ford, published in 1897. It belongs to the romantic fiction side of Ford’s career and is one of his shorter and quieter popular novels.

The book is structured as a manuscript or journal kept by the narrator, recording his long unrequited attachment to a young woman who has never known the depth of his feeling. The conceit allows Ford to handle a particular romantic situation that direct third-person narrative would have made harder to manage with the same emotional precision. The narrator can record what he felt without having to externalize it through dramatic action.

Ford was working in a vein of late-nineteenth-century American romantic fiction that valued restraint and indirect emotional treatment over the more openly dramatic romance that other popular writers of the period produced. The unrequited love story has a long history in European fiction and Ford’s contribution to the American version draws on his reading in the broader literary tradition. The book has been compared to Edmond Rostand’s contemporary Cyrano de Bergerac, with the same basic situation of devoted but undeclared love handled in a different national literary mode.

The writing is careful and the emotional handling is honest. The narrator does not flatter himself, does not exaggerate his sufferings, does not turn his unrequited attachment into the kind of theatrical performance that lesser writers of the period would have produced. The result is one of the more affecting short American novels of the late nineteenth century, though it has been largely forgotten outside specialist readers of Ford and of the period’s popular fiction.

Ford’s commercial success rested mostly on The Honorable Peter Stirling and The Great K. and A. Train Robbery, both of which had larger sales. The Story of an Untold Love sold reasonably without ever becoming a major hit. Its qualities are quieter than the more openly commercial work and reward readers willing to give a short book careful attention.

The novel runs under two hundred pages and reads in an evening. It pairs with Ford’s other shorter fiction and with the broader late-nineteenth-century American romantic short novel tradition.