A young man walks into a village, falls in love with a woman promised to another, and finds that the world's beauty only deepens his anguish until feeling itself becomes fatal. Published in 1774, this epistolary novel ignited a sensation across Europe so intense that young men dressed in the hero's blue coat and yellow waistcoat, and some, horrifyingly, imitated his end. The prose trembles with a new kind of subjectivity: nature reflects the lover's mood, every landscape is a mirror, and reason offers no shelter from the storm of the heart. It is the foundational novel of Romanticism, the book that taught a continent to feel without apology and to recognize in private suffering something approaching the sublime.