20 Famous Historical Breakups That Prove Heartbreak Never Changes

The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo learned that her husband, the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, was sleeping with Kahlo’s younger sister, Cristina. In 1930s Mexico City, Kahlo’s world fell apart. She left Rivera and cropped her hair in protest. They divorced in November 1939, and Kahlo memorialized her pain in Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair. About a year later, they remarried, under new rules.

Henry VIII married a German woman named Anne of Cleves, having been promised her beauty by her portrait, and because England needed her family’s support. Henry met her in January of 1540 and found absolutely nothing to love about her. Within six months, he sought an annulment. Anne did not resist, accepting money and estates as a settlement. She was given the honorific “the King’s Beloved Sister,” and the two ate dinner together as friends for years after their marriage had been declared invalid.

In 1919, Zelda Sayre, an Alabama heiress, jilted her fiancé, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was struggling as an aspiring writer. She had called it quits because his advertising salary couldn’t support the kind of life she wanted. The brokenhearted Fitzgerald resigned from his job, returned to his parents’ house in Minnesota, and transformed an early, unpublished manuscript into This Side of Paradise. When the novel became a bestseller the following spring, Zelda agreed to marry him after all.

Marie Curie’s personal life was marred by scandal when she embarked on an affair in Paris with married physicist Paul Langevin, a former student of her deceased husband. Five years after Pierre Curie’s death, Langevin’s wife, who had been living apart from him, sent their love letters to the French press, leading to mob protests outside Curie’s house. Langevin and Curie eventually broke up, but Curie went to Stockholm to receive her second Nobel Prize.

Emperor of the French, Napoleon Bonaparte continued to love his wife, Empress Joséphine de Beauharnais, but she had failed to give him an heir to his crown. They divorced in December 1809 at a ceremonial divorce, where they both cried and read speeches. Napoleon gave her the Château de Malmaison, settled all of her debts, and allowed her to retain the title of Empress, maintaining a warm relationship until her death in 1814.

The romantic English poet Lord Byron broke off the tumultuous relationship with aristocratic novelist Lady Caroline Lamb, who was married to William Lamb, in August of 1812 because he was exhausted by her public scenes. But Caroline wouldn’t let it go. She wrote him more letters, posed as a pageboy to get near him, and burned his effigy and letters in a bonfire. In 1816, she published a revenge novel called Glenarvon, in which Byron is portrayed as a villain.

Charles Dickens, the famous Victorian novelist, began having an affair with 18-year-old actress Ellen Ternan. Even before the legal separation, he had a partition built between their beds. After his wife, Catherine Hogarth, found a bracelet meant for Ternan, he forced a legal separation from her. He wrote a notice in his own magazine accusing her of being an unfit and unstable mother, which helped alienate her from most of their ten children.

While Ernest Hemingway was still legally married to his first wife, Hadley Richardson, his friend, fashion writer Pauline Pfeiffer, secretly began an affair with the American novelist. After a strained summer vacation in 1926 where the three of them stayed together, Hadley decided that the situation could no longer continue as a threesome. She suggested that Hemingway and Pfeiffer spend 100 days away from one another and, if they still wanted to marry after that time, Hadley would agree to a divorce. Hadley granted him a divorce in January 1927, and Hemingway and Pfeiffer married soon after.

The Irish dramatist Oscar Wilde was serving a two-year prison sentence over his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, a young aristocrat known as Bosie, who lived comfortably abroad and showed little concern for Wilde’s ruin. While in Reading Gaol, Wilde wrote a 50,000-word letter that was later published under the title De Profundis. He detailed Bosie’s vanity and financial exploitation, and described how their bond had ended in “ruin and public infamy.”

Abraham Lincoln was the then-unknown young Illinois lawyer who would eventually become president. His relationship with Mary Owens, a woman from Kentucky introduced to him through a common friend, never caught fire. In August of 1837, Lincoln wrote Owens a letter that suggested their marriage would be wretched, which he hoped would prompt her to decline the offer. Owens responded by saying no, and she later told a relative that Lincoln “was deficient in those little pleasantries which a lady expects.”

The Roman general and politician Julius Caesar divorced his wife Pompeia in 62 BCE, when a young nobleman named Publius Clodius Pulcher allegedly sneaked into Caesar’s house wearing a dress to attend an all-female festival, supposedly to see her. Pompeia was never officially charged with any misconduct, but Caesar nonetheless chose to divorce her, saying, as the biographer Plutarch later recorded, “his wife must be above suspicion.”

Eleanor of Aquitaine, the wife of France’s pious and gentle king, Louis VII, was the wealthy and influential duchess of Aquitaine. It did not take long for their ill-matched marriage to break down, but things got even worse when the couple set off on the disastrous Second Crusade. On March 21, 1152, their marriage was annulled because they were too closely related, but Eleanor quickly took another husband, Henry of Anjou, who was soon to become King of England, and transferred a huge chunk of France into English hands.

In 1523, a young maid of honor at the English court named Anne Boleyn entered into a sort of informal engagement with Henry Percy, the future Earl of Northumberland. But then Henry VIII’s principal advisor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, took action to safeguard some other arranged marriages among the nobility, and Percy’s father was pressured into calling off the match. Percy was married to someone else, and Anne was dismissed from the royal court, an experience she never forgot and one that turned her against Wolsey.

The English writer Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) had a child with an American businessman, Gilbert Imlay, in Paris in the mid-1790s. He later became uninterested and continually put off returning due to business affairs. Wollstonecraft even traveled through Scandinavia on business for him in an attempt to win him back. When she returned to London, she found him in a new relationship. She wrote him one last letter: “This is an eternal farewell.”

As Queen Elizabeth I’s favorite and longtime suitor, Robert Dudley was a real romantic prospect for her. Everything changed in September 1560, when Dudley’s wife, Amy Robsart, died suddenly. While an inquest declared the death accidental, possibly linked to illness, whispers flew. The taint of scandal rendered marriage with Dudley politically untenable for the monarch, so instead she remained single and ruled as the “Virgin Queen,” with Dudley at her side as counselor to the end. He died in 1588.

American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was stifled by the institution of marriage in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, and he began to fall in love with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, a client’s wife. In October 1909, he left his wife, Catherine Tobin, and their six children, escaping with Cheney to Europe, a scandal that became front-page news. He wouldn’t return. He built his home, Taliesin, in Wisconsin for her.

English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley married Harriet Westbrook in 1811, but by 1814 he had grown distant from her. After meeting the 16-year-old Mary Godwin, who would later become famous as Mary Shelley, he left his pregnant wife and fled to Europe with Mary. He invited Harriet to live near them as a “sisterly” friend, which she refused. She drowned herself in the Serpentine lake in London in December 1816.

Franz Kafka, the Czech novelist behind The Trial, practically wooed Felice Bauer, a businesswoman from Berlin, via the written word alone. He sent her hundreds of letters and asked her to marry him twice. Both times, he worried that marriage would destroy his writing solitude. They called off the engagement the first time after an awkward meeting at a Berlin hotel in July 1914. They re-engaged in 1917, but Kafka broke it off for good that December after coughing blood from tuberculosis.

The Polish composer Frédéric Chopin was with George Sand, the pseudonym for the French author Aurore Dupin, for nearly a decade until resentment arose regarding her 1846 novel Lucrezia Floriani, which depicted Chopin as a needy invalid dependent on her. Their final quarrel was when Sand argued with her daughter Solange over Solange’s marriage, and Chopin took the girl’s side. Enraged, Sand broke off the affair in July 1847, and they never saw each other again except for one encounter prior to Chopin’s death in 1849.

The French philosopher Peter Abelard was employed to teach a brilliant young woman named Heloise d’Argenteuil in Paris. They fell in love, and Heloise gave birth to Abelard’s child, and they secretly married. To protect Heloise from the wrath of her uncle and guardian, a high-ranking church official named Fulbert, Abelard sent her to a convent, which Fulbert took as desertion. As payback, Fulbert’s thugs broke into Abelard’s chamber and castrated him. Both then entered monastic life, corresponding in letters of lament for decades.

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