Love played an important role in Wolff and Deken’s 18th-century bestseller, The History
of Miss Sara Burgerhart. The attitude to the feelings allowed the reader to get to know the
novel’s characters thoroughly. That how they talked about love and made love helped in
the reconstruction of their character drawing. Sara – the title character of the novel – went
through a development that also changed her conception of love: from the irresponsible
teenager who enjoyed the company of various, sometimes rowdy boys, she gradually
became an ideal wife and mother, with whom the sincere love prevailed. In this
contribution, several models of love in the Sara Burgerhart epistolary novel were
contrasted: the French-tinted, sentimentally colored libertine love game with the calm,
reasoned feelings in the Dutch way. The result of such contradiction is easy to guess.