To paraphrase Jean de la Bruyère, the French 17th-century moralist, “We love only once in our lives: the first time. The loves that follow are always less involuntary.” He may be right. When young, our love is irreducible and absolute. We don’t know how to hide it, how to speak it, or even where we’re heading with it. We just want.

La Bruyère’s maxim appears in an epigraph to Olivia by Dorothy Bussy, who was born Dorothy Strachey (James and Lytton’s sister). It is the tale of the awkward and muffled love between Olivia, a pupil in an all-girls boarding school in France, and her headmistress. The tension of silent, knowing glances and mutual attraction is built ever so delicately, until it explodes one night when the headmistress is heard lingering outside the young pupil’s bedroom. No one knocks or opens the door, and nothing ever happens or is said between them. And yet they are both entirely aware of the indelible feeling of what might have been.

The tension of mutual attraction explodes one night when the headmistress is heard lingering outside the pupil’s bedroom

Ivan Turgenev’s First Love – probably autobiographical – captures every young person’s exploration of adolescent love. Vladimir is 16, and has a crush on Zinaida, who is 21 and surrounded by a group of young suitors. Again, nothing ever happens between the two, but the final revelation leaves Vladimir feeling distraught. He discovers that none of her suitors was taken seriously, because the one who truly mattered to Zinaida was Vladimir’s father.

But the novel that best captures first love is The Princesse de Clèves, by Madame de Lafayette. This is the story of Mademoiselle de Chartres who is 16 and destined to marry the Prince de Clèves. He is madly in love, she is not. He is fully aware of this, she is too young to know. But as soon as she spots the Duke de Nemours she is as taken by him as he is by her. There are so many obstacles thrown between them that they hardly ever speak. Besides, they are always in public, seldom alone, and yet they are constantly reading each other’s moves and motives, always intercepting signals that shout their love – which is never consummated.

Another great unconsummated passion is described in Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë’s novel tells of the obsessive, destructive love between Heathcliff, a foundling, and Catherine Earnshaw, the daughter of the man who brings him home one day. Whatever blossoms between them starts when they are children growing up together in the same household. “He’s more myself than I am,” says Catherine. There was never a more direct way of describing chaste, adolescent love.

And then, of course, there’s Romeo and Juliet. In all these stories we relive the first love we glimpsed but had to let go. Always slightly unreal yet, as a memory of desperate yearning, it exerts a pull that never loses its intensity.

• André Aciman’s will appear at Hay festival on 3 June. hayfestival.com.

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