My first love was well over 150 years old and had "a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance" when I fell for him. No Eamon Dunphy jokes please -- I was a tender-hearted 13-year-old and this was serious.

Never mind that Mr Darcy had seduced generations of young girls before me. He had me at hello. Or rather, at the first mention of his "fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien" in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

If he had a bit of a puss on him, that was acceptable: at least he had some gravitas. When your real world is populated by teenage boys for whom seduction is twanging bra straps in class, a man with sophistication and the ability to grow impressive sideburns can turn a girl's head.

I take it quite personally that Mr Darcy (first name Fitzwilliam, but best not to dwell on that) has not topped a new list of the most romantic literary heroes as voted by Mills and Boon readers. That spot went to Mr Rochester, keeping wives in attics since 1847.

I understand that taking umbrage over which 19th century figment of the imagination fills his fictional breeches better is a bit like debating whether Spandau Ballet or Duran Duran was the finer band of the '80s. They were both a bit ridiculous, if we're honest.

Nonetheless, the first literary hero you take under the covers with you, reading by torch when your mother yells up the stairs to turn out the light, is special. Edward Rochester was not a man you would want to be alone with in a darkened room.

In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, he was dismissive of his daughter, uncharitable towards his wife and menacing towards Jane. Reader, I despised him.

At one point, when Jane refuses to become his mistress (because that's what she would be, what with the first Mrs R still wearing a hole in the floor upstairs) he threatens that he may not be able to control his passion. "His voice was hoarse; his look that of a man who is just about to burst an insufferable bond and plunge headlong into wild licence," wrote the breathless Bronte. An implicit threat of rape -- hardly the stuff of fairytale romance, is it?

Mr Darcy was not without his faults but the whole attraction was that he repented and changed his ways through the love of a good woman. The words leopard and spots had yet to become linked in my very limited lexicon of love. Rochester, I seem to remember, needed to be blinded and crippled before he came to his senses.

Darcy is loyal and constant but misunderstood. As the book progresses, we are dropped little tidbits about his discreet kindnesses. We are made to fall in love with him much as Lizzie does. He ignores his family's protests that she is socially inferior, fulfilling our teenage fantasies that we are all Cinderellas just waiting for someone to see past the rags/acne/lack of status to the princess within.

In truth, I wonder how much of my crush on Mr Darcy would remain were the image of a wet-shirted Colin Firth not burned on my brain. Firth became the definitive Darcy in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in 1995, emerging damp and magnificent from a lake into which he had dived to quench his unvoiced passion for Lizzie Bennett. He was everything I had imagined he would be -- and more. Purely for research purposes, I looked up the scene on YouTube this week and can confirm that it remains what might politely be termed, a knee-trembler.

I will also admit to being influenced by Robert Redford and Mia Farrow at their most ethereally beautiful in the film version of The Great Gatsby, which I saw just before I read the book.

Blinded by Jay and Daisy's physical perfection, I wanted their champagne lifestyle, debauched and doomed though it was.

Rochester, by contrast, is merely terrifying as played by William Hurt in 1996 or, bizarrely, almost too handsome and suave in the hands of Timothy Dalton in the 1980s miniseries.

On the other hand, Wuthering Heights has somehow seen Heathcliff and Cathy's doomed passion recast as epic romance in screen versions. It helps with the bosom-heaving that he has been portrayed by the very beautiful Laurence Olivier and Ralph Fiennes. I have a suspicion that although we're all meant to be feminists now, the adolescent attraction to unsuitable bad boys lingers. Heathcliff -- so singularly demonic that he doesn't even have a last name -- is mad, bad and dangerous to know. Yet there is not one girl-child of the 1980s who has not looked wistfully out her bedroom window, practising her best Kate Bush wail: "Heathcliff, It's me, It's Cathy, I've come home ... "

As with most formative experiences, it's often a case of meeting the right romantic hero at the right time. Theodore 'Laurie' Laurence is a heart-throb as the wealthy, orphaned neighbour of the March sisters in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. But his appreciation of the qualities of bookish, headstrong tomboy Josephine was encouraging for those of us who spent teenhood hiding behind a book.

And sometimes there is just no accounting for taste. My biggest teenage crush, less literary than pulp fiction, was Kit Fielding, a jockey-slash-detective from the Dick Francis series of potboiler books. One scene in which he ravishes a lucky lady on some dustsheets in a renovated house and then heads off to ride seven winners at an evening race meet sticks in my mind, and I really wish it wouldn't.

I'm not alone. When I asked women of my acquaintance what literary heroes kept them turning the pages as teens, I got some interesting feedback. Heathcliff made it, of course, and Mr Darcy but also Adrian Mole, he of the secret diary and unrequited crushes, and Holden Caulfield of JD Salinger's Catcher in The Rye.

Another mentioned The Fat Controller, but I hope she was joking. A lust for Heathcliff might be so wrong it's right, but some passions are just, well, wrong.

Irish Independent