Warming winter drinks to go with your favourite classic reads

Black tea and a slice of lemon with Pride and Prejudice

The classic drink for a classic tale – host your own tea party with Elizabeth and her sisters as you join them on their adventures through love, social gatherings and self-discovery. Let the tea brew, slice the lemon thinly and make your way through the entire pot as you learn that pride, prejudice and first impressions are often the only things in the way of a great love story. 

Traditional hot toddy with Wuthering Heights

For one of the darkest and most bitter ventures on the Yorkshire Moors there is only one drink that can keep you sustained – a traditional hot toddy. Spirits, water, honey, herbs and spices make for the most satisfying, soothing and slightly numbing winter drink, which makes it the perfect accompaniment as you endure the heartache of Cathy and Heathcliff. Just as the two lovers were made for each other, their souls made of the same stuff, so is a dark winter’s night made for a hot toddy and this wild yet wonderful love story.

Spiced gingerbread latte with Great Expectations

Pip and Estella each have a part to play in Miss Havisham’s frozen world, a place that’s the stuff of fairy tales, especially when Pip’s life is transformed from that of an impoverished orphan to a grand gentleman. Fill your mug to the brim with this fairy-tale inspired gingerbread latte, add a dusting of ginger spice for warmth and top with a gingerbread man. Sip tentatively, while you follow the breadcrumb trail from the chilling Kent marshes to Miss Havisham’s wedding breakfast…as she begins to manipulate the unassuming Pip and Estella.  

Smooth cappuccino with The Pursuit of Love

“Always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair they loved or they loathed, they lived in a world of superlatives.”

Reading a Nancy Mitford novel is rather like sipping on a cappuccino. It’s comfortable, warm, with all the sweetness and richness of a frothy, fluffy mountain of steamed milk, but the longer you sip, the more you notice the edge of that shot of espresso, providing all the ups and downs that come with any caffeine hit worth the name. So it is with The Pursuit of Love. Populated by a comfortable upper-class family in grand surroundings, it doesn’t take much to crack the smooth veneer and find bitterness beneath.

Toasted marshmallow hot chocolate with Jane Eyre

Follow Jane from the frosty corridors of Lowood School all the way to burnt-out Thornfield Hall with a toasted marshmallow hot chocolate clutched in your hand. Deeply sweet, memorable and yet somehow defiant, this is the perfect match for one of literature’s most notable heroines. Wallow in the heart-rending twists and turns, hot chocolate in hand, knowing that, like this luxurious drink, the ending for Jane Eyre is sure to be sweet.