Unlike the broader histories of emotions and of sexuality, scholarship on the history of love is still at a nascent stage. Evolutionary and psychoanalytic models frequently posit romantic love as universal and transhistorical. And yet there is an acknowledgment within most histories of the ‘long twentieth century’ that the institutions often associated with love (such as marriage and family life) as well as sexual mores and social and cultural manifestations have profoundly shifted during the period. In this symposium we want to bring together the leading scholars in this emergent field to promote further research into the power, knowledge and pleasure of love in the early twentieth century. How ‘modern’ was love in this period? Was it oppressive or liberating for women? For men? How influential were new psychological understandings of sexuality in framing romance? How much continuity was there in this period with Victorian affection? How much did economic, class, taste and regional factors condition desire and feeling? Did changes in sentiment allow for new expressions of non-heteronormative romance? And how did newer cultural forms for the articulation and expression of love respond to, or precipitate these changes? In asking these questions we hope to evince a richer picture of the forms of love and romance in modern Britain before the sexual revolution.