‘This is a love story,’ Phoebe Waller-Bridge announces at the start of the second season of Fleabag. But what is a love story? This class will encourage us to rethink our assumptions about what it means to love another person, how love is articulated and expressed, and the ways in which ‘love’ is a useful category as both the overarching theme of our readings and a way of relating to our own work as a site of curiosity, excitement, intimacy, and passion. We’ll read across a range of genres and time periods, with a particular focus on the nineteenth century (an era unfairly castigated for being prudish and unerotic) and contemporary fiction. Along the way, we will reflect on our own writing practices and examine the formal strategies writers use to answer the following questions: what is a love story? And how do you write about love?