ILLUSTRATION BY ROMAN MURADOV

“He said things that I could never have thought, or at least said, with the same assurance, and he said them in a strong engaging Italian.” So thinks Elena Greco, the heroine of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, about Nino, the young man she is just then beginning to fall in love with, in “My Brilliant Friend,” the first book in the series. Nino doesn’t have her best friend Lila’s “capacity to make everything fascinating,” Elena observes coolly, but he is well informed, and when he discusses issues like poverty, he sounds less like a teen-ager than a man, speaking “not generically, in sorrowful accents . . . but concretely, impersonally, citing precise facts.” He also writes for magazines, which impresses Elena, who is herself an aspiring writer.

The four Neapolitan novels cover a period of sixty-odd years, and one of the strengths of the relationship that Elena goes on to have with Nino is the encouragement he gives to her own work. When, as a mother of two young children in her early thirties, she has largely abandoned her writing, he successfully urges her to take it up again. Nino praises her generously: “What I envy most is your ability as a narrator,” he tells her. Because Elena believes in Nino, in his judgment, his admiration has weight.

For a time, anyway. Over the course of years, Elena’s estimation of Nino’s abilities wanes. His ideas become predictable; she finds his desire to be “politically surprising” distasteful. She sees the careerism and pettiness underneath his charming exterior: “He seemed . . . sensitive to the approval of those who had authority and ready to catch out, or even, at times, humiliate out of envy, those who did not yet have enough of it.” These observations coincide with the lessening of her once-overpowering love for him. Even his praise leaves her cold: “I summarized a plot and characters that I was sketching out and he said, Great, very intelligent. But he didn’t convince me, I didn’t believe him.”

This type of attention to a lover’s intelligence—and to those facets of character that fall under the auspices of intelligence and factor into respect, such as fairness, integrity, magnanimity, and sensitivity—is consistent with the way women novelists have long written about love. For as long as novels have been written, heroines in books by women have studied their beloveds’ minds with a methodical, dispassionate eye. The ideal mate, for Jane Austen’s heroines, for Charlotte Brontë’s, for George Eliot’s, is someone intelligent enough to appreciate fully and respond deeply to their own intelligence, a partner for whom they feel not only desire but a sense of kinship, of intellectual and moral equality.

A link between love and respect hardly seems like a unique or daring proposition—until we consider that so many male authors have tended to think about love very differently. Straight male authors devote far less energy to considering the intelligence of their heroes’ female love interests; instead, they tend to emphasize visceral attraction and feelings. From Tolstoy, whose psychological acuity helped to redefine what the novel is capable of, to unabashed chroniclers of sex like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth to contemporary, stroller-pushing, egalitarian dad Karl Ove Knausgaard, men have been, in a sense, the real romantics: they are far more likely than women to portray love as something mysterious and irrational, impervious to explanation, tied more to physical qualities and broad personal appeal than to a belief—or hope—in having found an intellectual peer.

In literature, the desire to find an equal, and the belief that love in its ideal form should comprise a meeting of minds as well as bodies, appears to be a much greater psychological driver for women than it is for men. This abstract difference ripples through the novels that men and women write in all sorts of ways.

Consider “Anna Karenina,” a novel that is, rightly, seen as groundbreaking in its insight into romantic relationships. Tolstoy defied the tradition of ending his novel with the hero and heroine’s happily-ever-after marriage; instead he methodically charted the course of two very different romances—the affair between Anna and Vronsky and the relatively strong marriage of Levin and Kitty. More than a century later, Tolstoy’s sensitive and shrewd depiction of Levin and Kitty’s relationship continues to be one of literature’s best portrayals of marriage. It also reveals what one of fiction’s greatest psychological minds believed about the basis of love.

When the novel opens, Levin is passionately in love with Kitty and devastated when she initially rejects his marriage proposal. Nevertheless, once they are married, he is not as happy as he expected. He wants more time to himself to work and read and think. He finds Kitty clingy and irrationally jealous; he is disappointed that she cares greatly about things he considers petty, like her trousseau and matters of housekeeping. These decidedly gender-typical disappointments feel realistic, and they are rendered with great sympathy to both Levin’s and Kitty’s points of view. But they also speak to the kind of marriage Levin and Kitty entered into and the nature of their love for each other.

Levin was drawn to Kitty because of her beauty and innocence and social suitability. (She is from an aristocratic background similar to Levin’s.) “All the members of this family, and especially the feminine half, seemed to him as though wrapped in some mysterious poetic veil,” Tolstoy tells us. Levin briefly imagined himself in love with each of Kitty’s older sisters, but they wed other men before he was old enough to think seriously of marrying. When he is in his early thirties, Kitty becomes his object. He develops a passion stronger than any he’d felt before. “It was the childlike expression of her face, combined with the slim beauty of her figure,” he muses. Her smile “always transported [him] into an enchanted world where he felt softened, and overflowing with tenderness as he remembered feeling on rare occasions in his early childhood.”

Levin also attributes to Kitty a sort of generalized goodness, which he sees in her “gentle, calm, and truthful eyes.” This is sweet—but it is worth noting that these adjectives might as easily be applied to the eyes of a loyal dog. Beyond a certain requisite baseline—Kitty is intelligent enough not to embarrass Levin—neither her intelligence nor her conversation is something Levin spends much time worrying about. (“He could not help knowing he was more intelligent than his wife,” Tolstoy notes casually after they are married, without imbuing the fact with much more significance than he might in reporting that Levin was taller than Kitty.) For a wife, Levin, the existential seeker, looked not for a thinker like himself but for what is traditionally feminine, what is “wifely.” Kitty is intuitive and empathetic, better attuned than he to many practical realities of domestic comfort. Levin comes, in time, to value these attributes and resigns himself to living with her neediness, her irrationality, her trivial demands. They are, we are supposed to feel, happy, as happy as it’s reasonable to expect to be in a heterosexual marriage, given the realities, according to Tolstoy’s world view, of masculine and feminine nature.

As persuasively and sensitively as Tolstoy renders Levin and Kitty’s relationship, it is nonetheless a very particular type of marriage, one between a thinking man who sought not an intellectual partner but a complement, a yin to his yang—a lovely young wife, a “good” woman—only to find that coexistent with such goodness are desires of her own. Tolstoy treats this kind of complementary marriage as a given: what a sensitive but also sensible man like Levin would naturally seek.