Top ten gleeful adulterers in literature

Eliza Kennedy attended the University of Iowa and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. After graduation she served as a law clerk for a federal judge, then practiced litigation for several years at a prestigious Manhattan law firm. I Take You is her first novel.

One of Kennedy's top ten gleeful adulterers in literature, as shared at the Guardian:

Ada Vinelander in Ada or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov

You don’t tend to think of Ada and Van, the lovers at the centre of this novel, as adulterers, because their affair began when they met as children, cousins spending a summer on the family estate. Turns out that they’re actually (whoops!) brother and sister, and their father’s discovery of the affair causes them to break it off. The romance is rekindled after Ada is married, and they plan to run away together, until her husband discloses that he has tuberculosis. Still, love triumphs in the end – if you consider siblings having hot sex into their 80s a triumph. Which, in Nabokov’s hands, it is.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Ada or Ardor is among Kate Kellaway's ten best love stories in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue