In my novella The Husband Gamble, Hythe and Rilla get to know one another while playing chess. What could be less romantic? Chess, after all, is a game of war, a game of logic. Yet, both chess and love are filled with passion and excitement. Both chess and love require the players to focus on one another, tensely wondering what the next move might be, and watching for clues.

In long centuries when society frowned on such a close focus between a man and woman, dancing and chess has allowed interested couples to meet. Chess allowed them to spend hours in one another’s company, talking and getting to know one another better.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, chess was used both to facilitate courtship and as an allegory of courtship, as can be seen in paintings, carvings, and tapestries of the time. Likewise with literature of the time, where the language of chess and the language of seduction merge.

The queen was not in the original Persian and Indian game. She replaced the vizier, whose moves were limited. Our modern day queen, with her expansive sweeps, may have arisen in medieval Spain at the time of the powerful Queen Isabella. Certainly, the new movements were first described in a Catalan poem called “Love Chess”, although the vizier lingered on in some places until the early 18^th century.

The connection between love and chess continued. In 1801, in her book Belinda, the novelist Maria Edgeworth wrote:

O, you novice at Cupid’s chess-board! Do you not see the next move? Check with your new knight, and the game is your own.

Chess even made it into Victorian valentines:

‘My little love do you remember,
Ere we grew so sadly wise,
When you and I played chess together,
Checkmated by each others eyes?’