10 True Titanic Love Stories That Will Make You Forget All About Jack and Rose

Written by historian Hugh Brewster, Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage invites readers into the complicated lives and relationships of the first-class passengers aboard the ship, including some of the most notable socialites from the Edwardian era, such as John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, Dorothy Gibson, the Countess of Rothes, and many others.

Rumored to have inspired the characters played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in the film, Elizabeth Kaye's Lifeboat No. 8 follows the romance between Roberta Maioni, maid to the kind and elegant Countess of Rothes, and Jack Phillips, the Titanic's wireless operator. Though Roberta was able to escape on a lifeboat with the Countess, Kaye's story illustrates the young woman's attempts to save the man she loved who was still aboard the ship.

In Gill Paul's Titanic Love Stories, he follows 13 true tales of honeymooning couples — from first-class passengers to third-class emigrants — aboard the Titanic, with each chapter reflecting the story of their relationship, their status on the ship, and what happened to them once the ship met its demise.

June Hall McCash's A Titantic Love Story traces the life of Ida Straus, the owner of Macy's and a member of congress, and his wife Isidor, an intelligent and capable matriarch. You may know them better as the old couple in the movie holding each other in their bed as the water takes over, but McCash's book goes into the background of the Straus' relationship and what happened in the hours leading up to their deaths aboard the ship.

Lindsay Gibbs's Titanic: The Tennis Story follows the strangely intertwined lives of Dick Williams and Karl Behr, two tennis pros who — two years before they faced each other in the quarterfinals of the US Nationals — boarded and survived the Titanic as strangers, with Williams hoping to pursue his tennis career in America and Behr chasing after Helen, the love of his life.

Made up of texts of letters, postcards, diary entries, and memoirs that were written before, during, and immediately after the Titanic's sinking, George Behe's On Board RMS Titanic: Memories of the Maiden Voyage tells the story of the passengers in their own words, providing a firsthand description of the events that occurred during the five days that Titanic was at sea, as well as the last communications some of the ill-fated passengers ever had with the family and lovers they left behind.

Award-winning historian Frances Wilson's How to Survive the Titanic: The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay focuses on the story of the ship's owner, using Ismay's letters written to the beautiful Marion Thayer — a first-class passenger with whom he had fallen in love during the voyage — to make sense of what happened and why Ismay ultimately made the cowardly decision to jump into a lifeboat filled with women and children to escape.

In Christopher Ward's And the Band Played On, he tells the true story story of his grandparents: Jock, a 21-year-old Scottish violinist who played on the deck of the Titanic until it went down, and Mary, Jock's fiancée, who was pregnant at the time with Ward's mother and who was still back home waiting for Jock to return.

In A Rare Titanic Family: The Caldwells' Story of Survival, Julie Hedgepeth Williams follows the epic story of college sweethearts Albert and Sylvia Caldwell and their infant son, Alden, one of the few lucky second-class families that survived the sinking of the Titanic together only to find themselves at odds with the Presbyterian church and unable to escape their ties to the doomed ship.

In The Titanic's Last Hero by Moody Adams, the love story is between a man, his family, and his faith. It tells the little-known story of widower and Baptist pastor John Harper, a man who sacrificed his own life in order to make sure his beloved six-year-old daughter and his sister were put on a lifeboat, and who also preached the Gospel until the very end in order to bring comfort to those around him.