Through close readings of a selection of European novels and novellas written between 1340 and 1827 this study of analytical fictionexamines how unconsummated love stories probe the frailty of selfknowledge. Tracing elements of what the French call the roman danalyse in the works of Boccaccio Marguerite de Navarre Cervantes Marie de Lafayette Samuel Richardson Jane Austen and Stendhal Adele Kudish discusses how the metaphor of unconsummated love is deployed to represent a fundamental lack of insight into the self. Rather than depicting the mind as transparent analytical fiction deals in the opacity of the mind. Narrators and characters are faced with deception misprision doubt and confusion leading to selfdeception jealousy and crises of self. The European Roman dAnalyse reads such epistemological failures as symptoms of a more fundamental preoccupation with the human psyche as unchartable and bizarre. In this way the authors of romans danalyse enact a larger philosophical project an anatomy of the psyche wherein we are unableor unwillingto know ourselves.