Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels has already been reviewed by Sarah Frantz over at Dear Author but I thought I'd offer a few of my own thoughts here.Katie Dickson, in her review, describes Beyond Heaving Bosoms as "an authoritative text that will undoubtedly help many a scholar in his or her romance research in the days to come; I should dearly love to see BHB cited in an article over on GoogleScholar" and Sarah F states that it is "invaluable to the academic romance field we’re working so hard to build."1 However, although Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan exhort their readers to "break out your red pen and your English degree! While it's undeniable that romance novels are great fun, they should absolutely be subject to rigorous examination. We lit nerds say so" (7) they also add the caveat that while "There are [...] some excellent academic examinations that subject the genre to a long-overdue analysis. Us? We're here to throw a party for the genre" (1). Thus, although their book contains many serious insights into the genre, these are expressed in a less than academic style (for examples, see the excerpts on their website).
Beyond Heaving Bosoms focuses on issues related to sexuality and gender (although the authors do tackle a number of other issues).2 In this the book perhaps reveals the influence of Sarah Wendell's early interest in the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick:
Sedgwick was, in short, holy shit amazing with critical analysis of gender relations in text. [...] Personally speaking. Segwick was part of the reason I long thought that romance novels ought to be held up to critical analysis, and also part of the reason I ran screaming out of grad school, never to return. [...]It is perhaps because of this focus on sexuality that although Wendell and Tan devote a chapter to "A Brief History of the Modern Romance Novel," in this history the authors
When my paper [on "the novels of Jude Deveraux and Judith McNaught in particular, notably those that featured love triangles, competitive twins, and similar storylines"] was rejected by the professor on the grounds that I’d chosen an “unsuitable subject matter” for my analysis, I realized it was time to get the hell out of dodge. I left short of attaining my Master’s degree, and gave up any desire to get a PhD.
Sedgwick changed the way I looked at heterosexual relationships within the courtship rituals of romance novels.
cut right to the chase and talk about the clearest predecessor we can find for the modern romance novel: The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss.They note that
The Flame and the Flower was first published in 1972, and it's one of the most famous in the bodice-ripper tradition. (11)
"sweet, savage love" serves as a neat encapsulation of the older style of romances. The turmoil and violence, they runneth over in torrents as mighty as the hero's seed. And speaking of mighty torrents of heroic seed, it was well-nigh de rigeur for the heroine to be raped by the hero in those novels. (12)and
The Old Skool, very roughly speaking, ran from the late 1970s through the '80s, while the New Skool started sometime in the late 1980s and continues to the present, but as with any attempts at categorization, there were some books published in the '80s that were in the New Skool mode, and Old Skool-style romances are still occasionally published. (13)Clearly the distinction between "Old Skool" and "New Skool" romances, and the portrayal of ripped bodices and rape in the former, are important subjects to discuss. However, a history of the genre which begins in the 1970s is incomplete at best, and extremely misleading at worst. Even if one doesn't want to discuss older precursors of the modern genre, including Richardson's Pamela, the novels of Jane Austen and Jane Eyre (to name just a small sample of classic novels which meet the RWA criteria for a romance, namely that it feature "a central love story and an emotionally-satisfying and optimistic ending"), the modern genre did not suddenly come into existence in 1972. And if one's taking a look at romances in which the hero rapes the heroine, why not at least mention E. M. Hull's The Sheik (1919)?
At least one romance by Georgette Heyer, whose first novel was published in 1921, is named later in Beyond Heaving Bosoms, but not in this chapter, and I didn't spot even one mention of: Mary Stewart or other authors of modern "gothic" romances; pre-1945 Raj romances; any of the early authors of inspirational romances including Augusta Jane Evans (whose St Elmo I've discussed in two posts at Teach Me Tonight) and Grace Livingston Hill; or Barbara Cartland. Nor is there much mention of authors of romances in languages other than English, such as Corin Tellado.3 Given the chapter's very tight focus on "Old Skool" and "New Skool" romances, it might have been more accurate to label the chapter something other than "A Brief History of the Modern Romance Novel."
Although I've mentioned the focus on gender and sexuality and spent considerable time pointing out omissions from the chapter on the history of the genre, many other topics are touched on in Beyond Heaving Bosoms. Wendell and Tan
- discuss how readers relate to the protagonists of romances e.g. are the heroines placeholders? does the reader explore "more 'masculine' elements of her personality" (75) via her relationship with the hero? does he represent "the Jungian shadow archetype" (76)?
- note the way in which "The hero's occupation often forms a short-hand to his character" (91)
- examine some "cringe-worthy plot devices we know and love" (99)
- explore a few of the "romance trends we've known and loved (and loved to hate)" (107)
- suggest some reasons why "romance [is] so often and so frequently denigrated" (126)
- take a look at "the covers, and the reasons to snark them" (168)
- list and give some details concerning "controversies, scandals, and not being nice" (190) in which they "have a look at our dirty laundry: minorities and gays in romance, plagiarism, and the pressure of the Be Nice culture in Romancelandia" (190)
- attempt to predict "the future of the genre" (274) and
- make the interesting observation that
the direct descendant of the romance-novel rape may not merely have changed genre [from historical to "paranormal and erotic romance"], but changed form. The involuntary change, in which the heroine is transformed into a vampire or superpowered being or three-toed weresloth, usually with copious amounts of blood, trauma, and sex, uses much of the same language and framework as rape in Old Skool romances. (146)
Wendell, Sarah, and Candy Tan. Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009.
1 Sarah rather sneakily embedded a link in there to the new website for IASPR. It's still under construction at the moment, so there's not a lot of text to read there, but you can see the logo (which includes a speech bubble incorporated into a heart, which I think informs the viewer that IASPR and JPRS are about romantic love and popular culture).
2 I should perhaps note at this point that I was rather gratified to see myself cited on pages 156-57 and 159 (with the quotes taken from a 2006 blog post I wrote about romance as sex education).
3 Wendell and Tan do mention "Littattafan Soyayya," "written in the local Hausa language, [which] 'extoll the values of true love based on feelings, rather than family or other social pressures.'" (131).
There are more extras (bits that didn't get into the book) here (about the International Consortium of Heroes) and more excerpts here (about villains), here (a reading from part of the book about sexual myths) and here (includes illustration of Mavis, the "stereotype of a frumpy cat-lady romance reader" and a link to the Romance Plot Flowchart (pages 14 and 15 in the book) which enables the reader to tell if a romance is "Old Skool" or "New Skool")
ReplyDeleteNice discussion Laura. My own sense of this book is that it is not well researched at all, and you give some good examples of why.
ReplyDeleteSmart people can write fun books that do have good information and insights without us having to hold them up to academic standards.
Thank you, Laura, for making the observation about the genre beginning before the 1970s. I know why people make that mistake but it does bug me to no end when they do. I'm planning to get the book and will probably enjoy it but you're the first person to mention this and I'm glad I'm forewarned. ;)
ReplyDeleteWell...I have a mixed response on the history question. On the one hand, of course the genre is much older than "The Flame and the Flower." My course starts with "The Sheik," and could conceivably start with "Daphnis and Chloe" (3rd century A.D.). On the other hand, when we reach the Woodiwiss, as we're doing this week, something does shift in the class. It's as though we've passed through some kind of time warp, and are approaching the present at an ever-increasing velocity. That book does make something new happen in the genre--several new things, in fact--such that there's a good case to be made for "modern romance fiction" (or at least a whole mess of it) beginning there.
ReplyDeleteWhether or not I'd consider it "well researched" would depend very much on what I thought the authors were trying to write. If they'd intended to write an academic guide to romance novels then yes, I'd completely agree that it would not be "well researched." The only academic secondary sources I remember being mentioned in Beyond Heaving Bosoms are
ReplyDelete* Pamela Regis's A Natural History of the Romance Novel* Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (the "thirteen-item plot summary for the ideal Old Skool romance formulated by Janice Radway in Reading the Romance, published in 1982" (19-20) is given, but the book is not included in the list of works cited)
* Amber Botts's essay in Romantic Conventions* Kay Mussell's Fantasy and Reconciliation and
* the Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women volume.
Of course, the DMAW volume, while published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, isn't exactly academic either, although I'd consider some of the essays in it to be academic ones.
But Wendell and Tan weren't claiming to have written an academic introduction to the genre, so it would be unfair to expect them to have cited lots of academic secondary texts. I do think it would have been nice if they could have included page references when they quoted from books, but perhaps their publisher thought that would look too academic, and therefore be off-putting to readers looking for an amusing guide to the genre.
I was deliberately not "hold[ing] them up to academic standards" because they were quite clear that they weren't writing an academic guide to the genre. That said, I did think it might be of interest to those of us who might want to use the book as an academic resource, to mention some of the areas it does and doesn't touch on, particularly as Sarah Frantz had described the book as being "invaluable to the academic romance field".
As you say, a book doesn't have to be academic in order to offer "good information and insights" and, as with some of the posts at AAR and on romance blogs, romance readers and authors do have a lot of expertise. I know there are a few things in Beyond Heaving Bosoms that I'm planning to quote in my work, because Wendell and Tan are good at summarising trends and/or giving them catchy names which are easy to understand e.g. the Wang of Mighty Lovin' (credit for inventing the term "Glittery HooHa" (although Wendell and Tan have changed it to Hoo Hoo) has to go elsewhere (but the page where it was explained that it came from the Television Without Pity boards seems to only be available now via Google Cache).
you're the first person to mention this and I'm glad I'm forewarned. ;)I'm really glad to have been of help, Bev. As I was trying to say in my last comment, I think how one views BHB may depend in part on what one expects it to be, and I'd hoped that my post might help shape some of those expectations so that people who read TMT and were thinking of buying BHB in the expectation of getting a wider history of the genre wouldn't end up feeling disappointed.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, when we reach the Woodiwiss, as we're doing this week, something does shift in the class. It's as though we've passed through some kind of time warp, and are approaching the present at an ever-increasing velocity.Eric, I wonder to what extent all of us have our perspective on the genre shaped by where we live. In my local library system, for example, there are no copies at all of The Flame and the Flower but there are a great many copies of novels by Georgette Heyer. It struck me, when reading the discussion of romance covers in BHB that it was mostly applicable to the US (and maybe Canada?). Certainly I'd never seen any of those lurid clinch covers with mulleted men and heroines showing off their flowing locks and smooth legs until I started looking at US romance sites. That's because romance in the UK has been so dominated by Mills & Boon, and they have only rarely had covers with the semi-naked clinches. When American single-title romances do make it across here (which some do) they're either imports shelved in tiny romance sections (and many bookshops don't even have a romance section) or they're given new covers specially for the UK market (as is the case for Loretta Chase's novels, J. R. Ward's and probably others that I haven't seen).
Along with the scarcity of romance single titles, it's worth noting that while the US has the "Romance Writers of America," the UK has the "Romantic Novelists' Association." "Romantic fiction" is much more broadly defined than "Romance" and there are plenty of novels published in the UK which are "romantic fiction" but not "romance." In fact, it can be difficult to find romances which aren't Mills & Boons.
I have the impression romance, and even "romantic fiction" aren't as popular in the UK as they are in the US. Certainly BHB describes romance as the best selling genre of genre fiction, but I don't think this is the case in the UK. As reported in The Independent in 2006:
The gritty forensic novels of American writers such as Patricia Cornwell and James Patterson have gained popularity in British libraries, compared with previous years when romantic fiction dominated the charts. More than half of the most popular titles borrowed in the year to June 2005 were crime tales or thrillers, according to the latest Public Lending Right statistics.
The most borrowed adult fiction book last year was Blow Fly by Patricia Cornwell, the 12th in the series featuring Kay Scarpetta, who is now a private forensic consultant.
The list of the top 10 most borrowed authors still has its love interests, with titles from the likes of Josephine Cox and Joanna Trollope, but figures indicate a major shift towards crime and thrillers compared with five or 10 years ago, when Catherine Cookson ruled supreme.
In both 1999-2000 and 1994-1995, Cookson had written nine out of the top 10 most borrowed books, but she has dropped out of the top 10 for the first time since records began in 1984.And Cookson, of course, isn't a "romance" author by the RWA's definition anyway.
More recent statistics seem to show that this preference for crime fiction over romantic fiction has continued, and is particularly strong in Scotland.
I also suspect that attitudes towards sex and relationships differ in different countries, so something that strikes a strong chord in the US may not necessarily do so elsewhere, or it may strike a chord but for somewhat different reasons. In the case of romance, there's been quite a bit of work done on how Harlequins are translated out of English, and it can often change them quite significantly.
So while you may well be able to make a good case for the US that The Flame and the Flowerdoes make something new happen in the genre--several new things, in fact--such that there's a good case to be made for "modern romance fiction" (or at least a whole mess of it) beginning there.I'm not so sure that this would be true if one's looking at the history of the romance genre elsewhere in the world.
That's a very good point, Laura! I suspect that we US-based romance scholars tend to assume that the genre is more or less the same in the UK, and clearly it's not. To borrow terms from An Goris, not only are the available texts quite different, but the metatextual elements are different (covers, for example) and so are the paratextual ones (shelving, marketing, the names given the genre and its author organization). This book is written about the US version of romance fiction--its history, its marketing, its tropes--much more than about "romance fiction" in any global sense. Very useful for those of us who want to teach it here; indeed, I've adopted it as a course text already. But for readers elsewhere in the world, it's more likely a guide to the US situation than to the genre per se.
ReplyDeleteInteresting points, Laura. I'm in a very weird position, in that I lived in South Africa until I was 14, imbibing Heyer and Austen, and watching my mother read Stewart and Lucilla Andrews, and then moved to the US in 1988, just as the change-over between Old Skool and New Skool was gaining momentum. So I've got an idea of the history and background of the romance, but I've also been steeped in the US romance culture, which I would say is, yes, very different from UK/commonwealth culture of romance.
ReplyDeleteSo I find BHB historically accurate for the modern US romance. And I think it's well-researched for what it's trying to be. Us Americans tend to have blinders when it comes to the rest of the world, and I'd have to say that this book suffers from that.
But as a thoughtful, insightful, funny introduction to the genre that neither apologizes for it, nor sneers at it, BHB is invaluable, especially in undergrad classes, but in grad classes, too. In the US, at least.
The thing is, Eric, I absolutely do not disagree that the historical romance phenomenon of the 1970s made the genre "exploded" in terms of publication numbers - at least in the US (nod to Laura :D). What gets under my skin is when authors, readers and even academics tell the story of romance as if that's when the genre began. Period. And they do it all the time.
ReplyDeleteI grew up reading romances published before that period and, yet, I don't know how many times over the last ten years I've spoken up online whenever this topic comes up to say, gently and sometimes not so gently, "But, you know, there were romances before 1970 and I don't mean Jane Austin. I mean category and single title type romances."
People, readers and sometimes even authors, are usually amazed, curious and hungry for information. The Internet is a wonderful thing for helping them see a bigger picture, though, because you can point them directly to websites about some of those old authors. ;)
Oh, I agree! And one of the tasks before us as scholars is to fill in the gaps in that history, whether it's before 1972 or simply before the twentieth century. (jay Dixon starts in 1909, but it's clear from her work that this isn't the start of the genre--simply of the Mills & Boon part of the story.)
ReplyDeleteYeah, but then you have someone like Grace Livingston Hill who actually started publishing single titles in 1877. Many, many titles and if that alone doesn't earn her a place in romance history I don't know what does. ;)
ReplyDeleteOf course, I've never been quite sure how to classify her books. Inspirationals, yes, and romances for the most part, but by the standards today only barely. Then again, by the standards today, Jane Austins would only barely be romance in some ways. And around we go.
I also know from personal experience that publishers built off her success to sell other later authors "as romance authors" because that's how I found Emilie Loring and then later a little known author called Glenna Finley, who was billed as a successor to Loring. Both of those authors featured mysteries along with their romances, which oddly enough was an element in some of the later Hill books.
I suspect there are continums like that throughout the genre that have nothing at all to do with "bodice-rippers" if we would only look for them.
In my comment, I should have started my second sentence with "I agree with you, Laura, that.." or ended it with "as you indicate in your review, Laura."
ReplyDeleteI did read your post. I am sorry that my comment made it seem otherwise.
I've just finished reading Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (London: Pocket, 2006) and it made me think a bit more about some of the things Wendell and Tan wrote in the chapter of BHB about why romance is denigrated:
ReplyDeletemystery novels are socially and culturally acceptable reading material; they are not victim of the "scribbling for silly women" reputation that romances endure. Moreover, because mysteries are often about violence, crime, murder, and bloodshed, they're acceptable. Romances, which feature and focus on sex, emotions, happiness, and love, are not as acceptable. (123)
Given that sex is depicted in genres other than romance, could it be that it's the way the romance genre ties sex to love and commitment that makes romance particularly prone to being denigrated by people who have no problem valuing other genres which include the depiction of sex?
Obviously people who are opposed to the depiction of sexuality in fiction will not like romance, because so many romances include sex scenes. But romance also seems to be scorned by people who would find depictions of other kinds of sex quite acceptable.
Wendell and Tan write that
Sarah regularly gave subscriptions to Playboy to two of her husband's friends as a holiday gift, and they kept multiple back issues on their coffee table for guests to read. No shame, there. (134)
They suggest that the reason why "vehicles for women's sexual pleasure" (including romance) would not be displayed in this manner is because "Women's sexual pleasure and the education of women on the means to that end are simply not accepted or even celebrated" (134). Levy's book seems to be suggesting that women's sexuality is acceptable if it's a particular kind of sexuality, a raunchy, commitment-free kind where sex isn't an expression of love, and hoohas glitter but don't tame (or want to tame) wangs of mighty lovin':
the fantasy Manhattan of Sex and the City was a sphere in which sex was just another commodity, something to be acquired rather than shared, so sexual encounters often ended with someone feeling a conqueror and someone feeling compromised. Rather than the egalitarianism and satisfaction that was feminism's initial promise, these sexual market-places offer a kind of limitless tally. (174)
Levy also suggests that "somehow we don't think twice about wanting to be 'like a man' or unlike a 'girly-girl'" (108). Could it be that sex that's accompanied by love and commitment seems like a "girly-girl" sort of female sexuality, whereas the commitment-free sexuality of some of the protagonists in Sex and the City (and elsewhere in fiction) might perhaps be seen as acceptable because it's female sexuality, but a kind of female sexuality which is thought of as being "like a man's"?
Or could it be that in a "heavily sexualized culture" but one in which "it's consumerism and sex rolled into one" (196), there has to be a consumer and a consumed, a winner and a loser, whereas, as mentioned in the description of the Princeton Romance Conference, sex with love is rather different:
The first half of our conference title derives from the influential 1994 essay of the same name by African American scholar, poet, and activist bell hooks. As hooks—a self-acknowledged romance novel reader—explains in the essay’s concluding paragraph: “The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom” (Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge 1994), 250).Since I haven't ever watched Sex in the City, or had much exposure to "raunch culture," (to me, the idea of giving Playboy to my husband's friends seems really, really odd. In the US, how usual is it for women to give their husband's friends subscriptions to Playboy?) and bearing in mind that Levy's book, like BHB is US-centric, I don't feel I can really assess how accurate Levy's description of "raunch culture" is, so I thought I'd mention her book, and Wendell and Tan's ideas, and see what those of you who are in the US made of the juxtaposition.
Hmm. Sometimes my formatting seems to be going strange. I'm sorry. I'm not sure why it does that, because it looks OK in the preview.
ReplyDeleteAnd Jessica, re the missing words, I'd worked out what you meant. I would never, ever, assume that you'd commented without reading the post carefully!
Re: starting with Woodiwiss instead of going earlier: I thought we addressed it with this paragraph on page 11: "The romance tradition goes all the way back to the oldest myths and we could wank on and on about medieval courtly love, the rise of the gothic tradition (which marked some of the first popular novels written by and for women), and the influence that people like the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen have had on the various elements of romance, but that could easily take up a book in and of itself. We're just going to cut right to the chase and talk about the clearest predecessor we can find for the modern romance novel: The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss." Given the way this discussion frames the last sentence of the paragraph, and the statement that "a history of the genre which begins in the 1970s is incomplete at best, and extremely misleading at worst," I think BHB's quick-n-dirty summary of the history of the genre is being slightly misrepresented here. We had a pretty clear methodological statement, and we do explicitly acknowledge that "the modern genre did not suddenly come into existence in 1972" (and reading Bev's comments, it sounds like she's expecting us to make that sort of claim). Tracing the roots of a genre is almost as tricky and complicated as tracing the evolutionary history of animals; if I could pull a nerdly science analogy out of my ass, what we did in this book was make a statement along the lines of "The closest predecessor of the common housecat is Felis s. libyca," while acknowledging in quick passing the miacids, feliform carnivores and felidae in general, because really, we're mostly interested in talking about the physiology and morphology of modern housecats.
ReplyDeleteI do completely agree with you that BHB is incredibly US-centric, and it doesn't explicitly acknowledge its bias. I also agree that it's not a particularly good academic guide, though it has some academic-esque bits.
Aw, man, sorry for all the unclear referents in the above post. Please feel free to ask for clarification.
ReplyDeleteI think BHB's quick-n-dirty summary of the history of the genre is being slightly misrepresented here. [...] what we did in this book was make a statement along the lines of "The closest predecessor of the common housecat is Felis s. libyca," while acknowledging in quick passing the miacids, feliform carnivores and felidae in general, because really, we're mostly interested in talking about the physiology and morphology of modern housecats.The reason I don't think I was misrepresenting you is that I disagree that The Flame and the Flower is "the clearest predecessor" of "the modern romance novel." As I explained in later comments I made in response to Eric, the genre and its history can appear somewhat different from a British perspective. But it can also seem different from the perspective of someone like BevBB.
ReplyDeleteObviously you're free to think otherwise, but I think of Heyer as one of the clearest predecessors of the "trad regency" and even of many of the historical, Regency-set romances, because she's been such an inspiration to many modern authors. Even if the trad regency is now more or less gone, it was where current authors like Mary Balogh and Jo Beverley started out. And she's been an influence on Jennifer Crusie and, I suspect, many other modern romance authors.
I think of Barbara Cartland as one of the popularisers of purple prose. She didn't actually write sex scenes, but the way she writes kisses, you might be forgiven for thinking they were orgasmic. Her heroes are almost always alpha rakes who need to be saved spiritually/emotionally by the extremely young and virginal heroine. That's not dissimilar to the "Old Skool" romances. There isn't the rape, of course, but then, we don't have much rape now, and we still have plenty of alpha rakes and innocent heroines. And Cartland did continue writing for decades, and she only died in 2000, so she was part of the modern genre, as well as being influential in shaping at least a segment of the genre in earlier decades.
Mary Stewart and others who wrote gothics were writing what I'd think of as the clearest predecessors of the modern romantic suspense sub-genre.
Grace Livingston Hill and others were writing the clearest predecessors I can think of the modern inspirational romances.
E. M. Hull's The Sheik was a huge hit, was turned into a movie and really sparked off the vogue for "sheik romances" as well as having one of the first romance heroines to be raped by her hero.
Mills & Boon was founded in 1908 and concentrated more and more on romance. In 1971, the year before the publication of The Flame and the Flower M&B had merged with Harlequin. I find it very difficult not to think of the earlier M&Bs as the predecessors of the modern Harlequins and Mills & Boons.
So while I understood why you skipped over the Brontes etc in a desire to "cut right to the chase and talk about the clearest predecessor we can find for the modern romance novel," I did think that if I were cutting to the chase and talking about the clearest predecessors for the modern romance novel, I'd start rather earlier than Woodiwiss.
The main problem I found with the book was how much of it was essentially wasted on the take-off of the "write your own ending" children's books that kids get from Scholastic and other presses from about 4th through 6th grades.
ReplyDeleteThe authors could have done much more of substance if they had eliminated that entire section. In some ways it was a rather funny parody of the HP lines, but didn't have any real relation to the majority of romances on the market.
Virginia, do you mean the section called "Choose Your Own Man Titty," covering pages 208-257?
ReplyDeleteApart from the options which have non-romance endings (Option 4 could be a romance ending, but it isn't given a parodic title), this chapter does have some sections which parody the HP virgin secretary/tycoon boss type pairing ("The Boss's Virgin Boardroom Mistress" (214)), but then there are also options which lead to a romantic suspense scenario ("The Man of Your Dreams" (227)), historical romance ("To Tame the Dissolute Duke" (234)), historical pirate romance ("Captive of Your Heart" (244)), and then a section which seemed to parody paranormal erotica rather than paranormal romance, since the sex scenes go on in a loop ("The Licking Fucking Sucking Dripping Drumming Darkness" (257)).
That was followed by the colour by numbers section, which parodied historical romance covers and the next major section, on "Write Your Own Romance" and which covers pages 262-272, gives options for "paranormal romance," "regency romance," and "vampire romance."
So yes, quite a significant chunk of the book is devoted to parodies/games.
Laura Vivanco said...
ReplyDeleteVirginia, do you mean the section called "Choose Your Own Man Titty," covering pages 208-257?
Yes, that was the section I meant.
Oh, god, Barbara Cartland. I have this tendency to completely blank her out of my mind. But, yeah, I read some of hers in my early, early days of reading romances. So, while I always convince myself I wasn't exposed to historicals until much later, i.e. well after the bodice-ripper craze, it isn't true. (rolling eyes)
ReplyDeleteAnd, Candy, the point is that I had no expectation at all about the book in that respect, one way or another. I wasn't expecting you two to detail the entire history of romance novels to begin with. If anything, I was probably expecting you to focus on the last few decades. So, Laura's clarification was simply a good thing for me and I was simply expressing how frustrated I get over how misinformed most people are about the history of the genre regarding the last century plus. A lot of people simply do not know about how much romance was published in the first decades of the Twentieth Century.
And are amazed when they do find out about it.
I think one interesting facet of the history of romance question you're debating here is how we define "modern". I mean, the word itself refers to no specific time period, and as we move further and further away from the early 20th century, "modern" will take on new meanings, and those books in the 1970s really will be the "history" where everyone who is not writing an exhaustively long guide will probably start.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think this leads to another question, which is how long will it be before the entire genre of Romance becomes too much for individual academics to master and it becomes either periodized or fragmented into different areas?
Most of Barbara Cartland, I admit, was very silly. However, when as a teenager I read her Black Panther (1939, republished as A Lost Love, I think, later on), I was rather impressed both by her handling of the reincarnation idea and her forthright admission of the high level of anti-Indian prejudice in England.
ReplyDeleteLaura Vivanco quoted:
ReplyDeleteWendell and Tan wrote in the chapter of BHB about why romance is denigrated:
mystery novels are socially and culturally acceptable reading material;
This sentence in BHB made me suspect that Wendell and Tan are very young. From the 1920s well into the 1950s, mystery novels were mainly considered pulp fiction. People who read them were pretty much as defensive as a lot of romance readers are today. The same was true of science fiction then.
In our public library (Columbia, Missouri), the hardcover novels of Georgette Heyer and D.E. Stevenson made it out onto the general "new fiction" display tables, but certainly even the hardcover versions of Leslie Charteris' Saint novels (remember Simon Templar? - I adored him), Dr. Fu Manchu, or L. Sprague DeCamp did not get off the genre shelves.
how long will it be before the entire genre of Romance becomes too much for individual academics to master and it becomes either periodized or fragmented into different areas?
ReplyDeleteI think it already is, in some ways, because there are so many sub-genres, and so many romances published in each sub-genre, and it's a genre that's been around for so many decades already. Certainly it would already be a major undertaking to write a really comprehensive history of the genre. And I think most of us are already specialising in one way or another; I wouldn't dare claim to have "mastered" the whole genre.
Hopefully we'll all be able to maintain an overview kind of the whole genre, while we specialise in the particular areas that interest us most.
her forthright admission of the high level of anti-Indian prejudice in England.
She also opposed racial prejudice in more concrete ways:
In the early 1960’s she campaigned for the rights of gypsies' to have a permanent place to live which resulted in an act of Parliament. One of the first gypsy camps was opened by Barbara Cartland in 1964 and called Barbaraville and there are now 14 in Hertfordshire. This has meant thousands of gypsies and their families have a place to call home and their children can be educated in their local area.
I mean, the word itself refers to no specific time period, and as we move further and further away from the early 20th century, "modern" will take on new meanings, and those books in the 1970s really will be the "history" where everyone who is not writing an exhaustively long guide will probably start. Oh, they already are to some extent. One of the most recent instance of me getting into one of those "but there were romances before the 1970s" made me realize that because the questioner was someone in their early 20s, possibly even younger. She was refering to the 70s books as the "old type romances". And she meant old. Real old. Like ancient. ;)
ReplyDeleteKind of takes one by surprise. ;p
And might be kind of what the anonymous poster is getting at because that discussion isn't the only time I've come across that type of comment. It was just the most jarring to my, ahem, middle age sensibilities. :D
It's all a matter of perspective, after all.
"This sentence in BHB made me suspect that Wendell and Tan are very young. From the 1920s well into the 1950s, mystery novels were mainly considered pulp fiction. People who read them were pretty much as defensive as a lot of romance readers are today. The same was true of science fiction then."
ReplyDeleteI'm 31, and Sarah is, I think 2 years older, so we're young-ish. And I'm fully aware of the various genre ghettos, and how they've existed historically, but you gotta admit, the ghettos for mystery and SF have been significantly gentrified. Our statement regarding "respectable reading material" refers to genre ghettos as they exist today. Romance hasn't been gentrified, which is something interesting to ponder.
Laura: I understand better now what you're saying now re: romance predecessors, and you're right about Heyer being the direct predecessor of Regencies (and the Regency historical) and M&B's role in shaping category romances. I'll cop to the fact that the book is historical romance-centric (especially in the American mode) and single-title centric in general. I got defensive because the way the sentence was isolated made it seem as if we didn't acknowledge (even in passing) the other influences that helped shape the genre.
I got defensive because the way the sentence was isolated made it seem as if we didn't acknowledge (even in passing) the other influences that helped shape the genre.
ReplyDeleteOh dear. That was because, for once, I was trying to slim down my quotes. When I wrote the bit about "Even if one doesn't want to discuss older precursors of the modern genre, including Richardson's Pamela, the novels of Jane Austen and Jane Eyre" I was trying to acknowledge what you'd both written about
The romance tradition goes all the way back to the oldest myths, [...] medieval courtly love [...] the rise of the gothic tradition [...], and the influence that people like the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen have had on the various elements of romance, but that could easily take up a book in and of itself. (11)
So in my sentence I was trying to express my understanding of why you wouldn't want to discuss all of those influences at length. As you say, it "could easily take up a book" and quite possibly more than one book and I agreed with you that these weren't "modern" romances or even the direct predecessors of the romances being written in the 21st century.
I'm sorry if in my eagerness to plunge into the discussion of what constitutes "modern romance" I lacked finesse and came to my conclusion too speedily, leaving my readers not entirely fulfilled and enlightened as to the context you'd provided. Hmm - I'm not anywhere near as good as you two at introducing double entendres into my writing.
Count me among those who would characterize Hull's The Sheik as the first modern Romance novel. Violet Winspear's Blue Jasmine is an AMAZINGLY faithful retelling of the story, too (some might call it a replication), but its pattern has been repeated overandoverandover in many subsequent sheik Romances.
ReplyDeleteOkay, I admit it. I wasn't familiar with the book version of The Sheik so I had to go look it up (on Wikipedia, no less) but the film version did ring a bell. Which made me think of Zorro for some odd reason.
ReplyDeleteAnd before everyone starts squawking about it not being romance, I'm not saying it is or was. What I am thinking about is all those old pulp fiction novels that were produced around the same time, though. Because we're talking at about the same time or earlier than The Sheik. Many of which had strong romances in them.
Or does it only count as romance if they were written by a women and starred the woman? (eyebrow raised)
I've heard of The Sheik, but I haven't actually read it. Hmmm, Summer Project ahoy! Sheik Romance education.
ReplyDeleteCandy, I don't know if you've come across it, but an edition of The Sheik is available online/for download via Project Gutenberg.
ReplyDeleteOr does it only count as romance if they were written by a women and starred the woman? (eyebrow raised).
As far as I'm concerned, the sex of the authors and protagonists don't matter when it comes to defining a romance.
If a novel's got "a central love story and an emotionally-satisfying and optimistic ending" (RWA) then I've got no problem with thinking about it as a romance. Well, as long as the emotionally-satisfying and optimistic ending involves the central pair being together. If they optimistically went their separate ways and didn't plan to get together, that wouldn't be a romance, I don't think.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "starring the woman" but if it means that there's a romantic side-plot rather than a "central love story," then I wouldn't think of it as a romance.
How do the rest of you feel about The Scarlet Pimpernel? I've put a link in there to an online version, and there's a synopsis of the entire plot at Wikipedia for anyone who hasn't read it and doesn't mind reading spoilers about almost everything. I've only read the first novel (1905), and I think the Scarlet Pimpernel's further adventures wouldn't be classified as romances, but that first one does, I think, have a central romance which goes through all the stages outlined by Pamela Regis in her book.
Oh, of course The Scarlet Pimpernel is a romance as far as I am concerned. It was the first time I read it and it still is. It's a truly magnificent book.
ReplyDeleteThe sequels are more like Richard Harding Davis' various adventure stories.
Laura: Thanks for the lead, but I don't have any kind of e-reader, and the library has copies, so I get to read it for free(ish) anyway, woot!
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure exactly what you mean by "starring the woman" but if it means that there's a romantic side-plot rather than a "central love story," then I wouldn't think of it as a romance.Primarily I was thinking of as opposed to something like Zorro, which is romantic, but where the man is the central character for most of the story. I couldn't think of a better example then but The Scarlet Pimpernel is excellent. The first book is definitely focused on the romance while at the same time is mostly his story. Although, she has her moments. ;)
ReplyDeleteLet me try again. You completely distracted me with the Pimpernel from explaining fully. ;)
ReplyDeleteI guess what I'm getting at with "starring the women" is the opposite of something like Jane Austin's work which focused on the female's side things but are still considered to be loves stories/romances and the prototype of romance because they're "by women, for women".
Zorro has almost as many scenes between Diego and (oh, goodness, what was her name?) well, his herione. It's simply action-oriented and about him, but just as much a template for many romances today as any medieval ballad. That's the kind of thing I'm getting at.
Can you tell it's another pet peeve of mine that the adventure & male side of the romance heritage tends to get short changed a lot in the retellings, too? :D
You completely distracted me with the Pimpernel from explaining fully. ;)
ReplyDeleteAh, that damned elusive Pimpernel! He's so very distracting, particularly when one has to seek him here and there and decide which genre he's in ;-)
Can you tell it's another pet peeve of mine that the adventure & male side of the romance heritage tends to get short changed a lot in the retellings, too? :D
It's sort of ironic, because for a long time adventure stories were called "romances" (whether or not they included a love-story). Robert Louis Stevenson, in his essay, "A Gossip on Romance" (which is "romance" in the sense of adventure, since he gives Robinson Crusoe as an example of the kind of story he's describing) wrote something which reminded me of the placeholder-heroine theory:
It is not character but incident that woos us out of our reserve. Something happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves; some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realised in the story with enticing and appropriate details. Then we forget the characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale in our own person and bathe in fresh experience; and then, and then only, do we say we have been reading a romance.
His The Black Arrow (1883), though, is a romance in both the adventure and RWA definition senses (synopsis at Wikipedia and whole online edition available from Project Gutenberg). I remember loving it when I read it as a child. I wasn't so thrilled with Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) because I thought the hero chose the wrong heroine. But he did want the insipid one, so he got the HEA he wanted.
The Wikipedia entry for Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902) describes it as "Ostensibly a love story" which is an interesting way of putting things. Makes me wonder if whoever wrote that phrase would have preferred it if Wister had omitted the love story. I haven't read it all yet, but I'm planning to, and being an end-reader I know it ends up with an HEA for the hero and the woman he loves.
Candy,
ReplyDeletebooks from Project Gutenberg download as text, so you can read them on your computer screen, in a Word file, if you prefer. Which I like, because I can highlight chunks of text that I want to use later in an article, etc.
Laura Vivanco: The Wikipedia entry for Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902) describes it as "Ostensibly a love story" which is an interesting way of putting things. Makes me wonder if whoever wrote that phrase would have preferred it if Wister had omitted the love story. I haven't read it all yet, but I'm planning to, and being an end-reader I know it ends up with an HEA for the hero and the woman he loves.Legend has it that ZANE GREY read Wister's The Virginian and had this typical novice novelist moment "I can write these!" and "I can do it better!" -- and went to write his 30+ western romances, almost all of which feature "a central love story" and "an emotionally-satisfying" romance HEA ending. As to the hero/heroine POV/leads dynamics, Grey did write both. For instance, Light of the Western Stars is the heroine's story, how she learns to love not just the "West" (New Mexico) but the rugged cowbow with whom she has a bit of very typical romancy "Big Mis" & "wrong leg"/mistaken identity/character start.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know that about Zane Grey, Kara. I'll have to keep an eye out for his novels and see if I can find one of them in the library or any of the second-hand book shops near me.
ReplyDeleteMy younger brother owned every novel by Zane Grey back in the 1950s, having moved on from the Hardy Boys. Some are what I would think of as wholly romance with a western setting, such as Majesty's Rancho.
ReplyDeleteThere's also social critique. He was very anti-polygamy and several feature the cowboy hero saving the heroine from a forced marriage into a Utah Mormon household. He deals with rancher/farmer rivalries. He deals with class distinctions -- especially the one with the wealthy young man and Molly Dunn. I forget the title of that at the moment.
Oh, lord, Zane Grey. My father was crazy about Zane Grey and got a lot of his books in one of those publisher collections. So, that's another author I grew up reading. No wonder I'm such an oddball romance reader. ;p
ReplyDeleteAnd, yeah, talk about a certain "romance formula" one came to expect in his books. Even though it might not get a large number of scenes, it still played a strong role in the overall plot.
And definitely influenced the way I look at Western romances today. Like being leery of them, which I had never actually thought of until right this moment. That he could be the cause, I mean.
Huh.
I also had a brother-in-law who read Louie L'Amore and I hated those things. (I also ended up hating the b-in-l which has nothing to do with hating the books. Maybe. ;D) People always talk about L'Amore's books being better than Grey's. They might've been better Westerns but I always thought Grey's books were more fun. I think maybe, looking back now, they had more open true romance. Odd though it might've been at times. ;)
Some are what I would think of as wholly romance with a western setting, such as Majesty's Rancho.You know, I'd forgotten just how much of an active romance thread his books had in them. Even when the hero and heroine weren't together.
ReplyDeleteIs it Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage which as the "closing of the pass" scene that is echoed so much later and in a different genre in Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword?
ReplyDeleteYes. Riders of the Purple Sage (1912). Jane and Lassiter. Chapter 23. The Fall of Balancing Rock.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.online-literature.com/zane-grey/riders-of-the-purple-sage/
The whole book's there. The prose is a bit purple, but . . . Okay, I still love it.
Molly Dunn, her brother Slinger, and Jim Travis as hero are in The Drift Fence (1933). It was made into a movie in 1936.
ReplyDeleteSee:
Arthur G. Kimball, Ace of Hearts: The Westerns of Zane Grey (Texas Christian University, 1993)
p. 246
for a summary. It's available on google.books. Use Zane Grey and Molly Dunn Slinger as your search keywords.
Oh, yeah, Riders of the Purple Sage. My dad's old books are packed up - I'll have to rectify that - but I'm pretty sure that was one of his favorites if not THE favorite of Grey's. 'Cause I remember him talking about it so much.
ReplyDeleteHe's the one who gave me my love for reading and romances. Reading Westerns and watching old swashbucklers and fantasy movies together with the occasional mystery tossed in for good measure. ;)
Certainly not my mother, who was interested in almost straight non-fiction and biographies. She does like the rare cozy, though. Is it any wonder I cringe whenever I hear "by women for women" used almost as a battlecry within the genre?
Pul-lease.
I have successful passed to my own children that love of reading and romance in all it's forms - to the amazement of their father who is basically a non-reader. It's that non-reader that I think accounts for quite a lot of the problems with the reputation both romance and most popular fiction has. A lot of people just don't read, much less read for entertainment. They never learned how to.
I vividly remember the one and only time I tried to read one of my romances to my then husband and his reaction that "Hey, there's a story there."
I was like, what in the world did he think I'd been reading all these years? I honestly do not know. I don't think he knew. Because he's not a snarky type person about books or other people's choices. He was honestly and sincerely amazed that there was an interesting story there because he never read for entertainment.
I think the Scarlet Pimpernel falls between categories. I'm tempted to classify it as adventure, except that we do see so much of their romance (and the fact that I've read a romance novel -- Christina Dodd's My Fair Temptress -- based on it).
ReplyDeleteThat said, I think it's fascinating how 19th century adventures, like those by Stevenson, can both skirt close to and be so far from what we consider "romance novels" today. Like, for example, Mayne Reid's western The Scalp Hunters which features a hero whose two desires are to scalp the indians and "conquer" the 13-year-old daughter of a rancher via marriage -- a word she doesn't even know the meaning of. In my academic work, I write about Reid and other similar authors as adventure novelists, but the romance genre is always around the corner, albeit in often creepy ways.
and "conquer" the 13-year-old daughter of a rancher via marriage.
ReplyDeleteThat does sound very creepy. Does the context present this as an understandable thing for the hero to want to do or does the author suggest in some way that it isn't right?
I think the Scarlet Pimpernel falls between categories. I'm tempted to classify it as adventure, except that we do see so much of their romance.
I suspect that my view of novels like this might well be a little bit skewed by the fact that I've always had a preference for the romantic/relationship elements in novels, so when they appear perhaps they seem a lot more important/significant to me than they might to someone whose focus is on the historical or adventure side of novels of this kind.
My personal scale on judging how much "real" romance is there is how much time the hero and heroine actually spend together developing their relationship - the same way I do with regular romances. The Scarlet Pimpernel rates fairly highly in that regard. The entire secret identity formula is first and foremost one that's about identities and relationships before it's about action or adventure. Always has been. Otherwise, why the disquises? ;)
ReplyDeleteMany of Zane Grey's novels used the word "romance" in the subtitle. Here's something from his foreword from To the Last Man. I think it's relevant to the question about The Scarlet Pimpernel, too, as to where the line between romance and adventure might be drawn. The "war" in this case was WWI:
ReplyDelete"In this materialistic age, this hard, practical, swift, greedy age of realism, it seems there is no place for writers of romance, no place for romance itself. For many years all the events leading up to the great war were realistic, and the war itself was horribly realistic, and the aftermath is likewise. Romance is only another name for idealism; and I contend that life without ideals is not worth living. Never in the history of the world were ideals needed so terribly as now. Walter Scott wrote romance; so did Victor Hugo; and likewise Kipling, Hawthorne, Stevenson. It was Stevenson, particularly, who wielded a bludgeon against the realists. People live for the dream in their hearts. And I have yet to know anyone who has not some secret dream, some hope, however dim, some storied wall to look at in the dusk, some painted window leading to the soul."
Thanks for the quote, Virginia. Clearly I need to put Zane Grey on my to-read list.
ReplyDeleteLaura, the author in question presents falling in love/lust with a 13 year old as perfectly understandable. He also actually ended up marrying a 15 year old girl when he was 35, so I think we're seeing his personal preference more than anything else. He is a much creepier example than others I could have used.
Here are original dust jackets for Zane Grey novels, many with couples and some even with clinches.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.feedbooks.com/author/255
Not all of Zane Grey's books were romances. Some were pretty much straight historical fiction with slight romance elements (Betty Zane; The Spirit of the Border). Most of his juveniles were straight adventure stories. Some of his adult books, such as The UP Trail, definitely tilted to the adventure side of authorship.
ReplyDeleteHowever, in his adult titles, Grey never created a hero so troubled that he couldn't be straightened out by the love of a woman. His HEA's were very firm, although his writing life was so long that in the late 1930s, he was presenting the adventures of the sons and daughters of some of his early h/h couples, who sometimes by then were deceased. I know a lot of modern romance readers would object to that.
Grey's heroine is always a good woman, and if not strong at the beginning she develops into a strong and capable woman, but she is not necessarily "good" by the standards of Victorian propriety.
He is a much creepier example than others I could have used.
ReplyDeleteIt's good to know they're not all quite that creepy, Sarah.
I really enjoyed looking at the covers, Virginia. Thanks! There was only one that I imagine Candy and SB Sarah would have fun writing cover snark for, and it's this one. There's a phallic cactus in the background and in the foreground the heroine seems to stare in horror as tiny model cowboys come to life.
It looks as though all of these are downloadable in a range of different formats, including pdf for those of us who don't have an ereader.
Is this link:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.feedbooks.com/author/255
working for everyone? Because I've tried it several times in the last few days, thinking might've been down or something, and I'm still getting nothing. I even tried the base domain and nada.
Yes, it's working for me. Here's a link to the version cached by Google. Can you see that one?
ReplyDeleteUh, actually, no. The place where it's supposed to show the screen shot is completely blank. Weird.
ReplyDeleteYou know I had the same problem a couple of weeks ago trying access Wendy's (SuperLibrarian) site. Not sure if I can get it even now. It's like it's just not there for me. At all.
And as far as I know I don't have any filtering on that should be causing this odd problem.
"I find BHB historically accurate for the modern US romance."
ReplyDeleteI haven't read the whole book, but I'm not finding the history accurate for *my* experience of the modern US romance, which I think reflects that it's really two fans' reading memoir but called a history. Much of the modern genre in the US *has* been category romances--and for a long time they were British and Australian categories at that. So in a broader history of the genre, part of the US experience might not look as dramatically different from the British experience as it does through the SBTB lens. Eric says, "we US-based romance scholars tend to assume that the genre is more or less the same in the UK, and clearly it's not", but I think that for quite a while, for category readers it *was* the same.
From the book and the SBTB site, it doesn't appear that either Candy or Sarah has read many categories that date to before the current wave of Hqn Presents billionaire sheiks, which makes it difficult to compare directly. For example, their list and table of US/UK category differences don't reflect my category reading from just a few years earlier. The US column looks like what I used to read in the British/Australian Harlequins. It makes me wonder whether US category romance is 10 years behind British/Australian category romance in its themes because American categories got a later start.
Of course my experience isn't the universal experience either, but I think it says something that the several major library systems I've used in the US have all carried extensive category romance collections but not Old Skool single-title historicals. (What bodice-ripping I read was in the sci fi/fantasy aisle--Anne McCaffrey et al.) So with that kind of library base, there must be quite a few other readers in the US who took a less historical-centric path through the genre.
"In the US, how usual is it for women to give their husband's friends subscriptions to Playboy?"
Um, not usual. Though the interviews in the magazine are pretty good :)
I'm sorry you're having all these problems seeing particular sites, Bev. I'm very glad you can still see TMT, though.
ReplyDelete"their list and table of US/UK category differences don't reflect my category reading from just a few years earlier."
In the column for "English/Australian Category Romances" it says "Fetishizes swarthy men, but only if they're rich (Italians, Greeks, sheikhs) and stripped of most of their cultural trappings, with the exception of their accents and their machismo."
However, as Juliet Flesch's From Australia with Love makes very clear, romances about the outback have been part of the Australian romance genre for a very long time, and there are still quite a few Australian and UK category romance authors writing about the Australian equivalent of cowboys (i.e. people living and farming in the outback), as well as a variety of other non-tycoon and non-doctor heroes.
According to the table, "American Category Romances" "Fetishizes redneck men, but only if they're rich (cowboys with their own ranches, NASCAR) and stripped of most of their class trappings, with the exception of their accents and their machismo." This doesn't reflect the large number of US category romance authors writing about Greek tycoons, sheiks, etc. I suppose if by "American category romances" one means the Harlequin American Romance line, then perhaps it would be a little bit more accurate since it might be difficult to fit a sheik into a line "about the pursuit of love, marriage and family in America today" but even so, the line's definitely not fixated on cowboys.
The table is headed "Key Differences between Category Romances in the American Mode vs. Category Romances in the British/Australian Mode" so perhaps it could be argued that some US authors write in the "British/Australian Mode" and many British and Australian authors write in the "American Mode" but given that the Australian mode's always had space for romances set in the outback, and British category romance has always included British heroes (and not just "swarthy" ones), the definitions themselves can't be considered at all accurate.
It seems to me that the table's really intended as a bit of fun and wasn't intended to be taken at all seriously. At least I hope so. If anyone took it seriously they would be very much misled by it.
Oh, I absolutely realize the table's meant as fun. At the same time, I think it's characteristic of the book (at least, the parts I've read so far). But it probably didn't make one of my points well; perhaps SB Sarah's series on discovering category romance would have been a more directly relevant link.
ReplyDeleteRtP brings up a good point, though. One "category" that isn't mentioned at all is medical romances. And they were a hugh market. I know I ran across them pre the era of bodice rippers because that's usually all the public library would have at times. I'm just wondering if they actually were reprinted/transplanted Mills & Boons since some (a lot) of them had American heroines who were traveling/studying/working in Europe and ended up married to doctors. We're talking about books from the, um, late fifties through early 70s? Maybe even earlier than that. At this point I can't pin down in my memory the "when" exactly they were.
ReplyDeleteIt's possible some of them were even set in the US. I just don't remember any. Except Emilie Loring and she was in a class of her own and that wasn't medical romance.
Side question: do ya'll have a feed for comments?
Medical romances: "We're talking about books from the, um, late fifties through early 70s?"
ReplyDeleteThey actually go back well before the Second World War in Mills and Boon in the UK, and quite possibly before the Great War - I have mislaid my copy of jay Dixon, so can't check. I mentioned in another thread that Mary Renault's first novels were contemporary doctor/nurse romances, published in the late 30s and in the 1940s.
I thought I remembered medical romance that were definitely wartime stories. On both sides of the ocean. The thing is I also remember a completely different type (?) of them, as it were, that featured young women on the continent, usually at university hospitals.
ReplyDeleteAnd for some odd reason, it sticks in my head that a lot of those were set in Northern Europe. Why that would be, I have no idea, but Denmark and Scandinavia keep coming to mind whenever I think of medical romances. Not necessarily England. At least not the ones we ended up with here.
"perhaps SB Sarah's series on discovering category romance would have been a more directly relevant link"
ReplyDeleteI've mostly read category romances from the 1990s onwards but I have sampled a fair number from the 70s and 80s. Despite that, I wouldn't feel confident writing a history of them, because I don't think I've read nearly enough of them to be able to do so. Maybe Sarah and Candy didn't feel they'd read enough categories to discuss their history in Beyond Heaving Bosoms? Of course, given that categories are a rather important proportion of the genre, it's not possible to write a comprehensive history of the genre without mentioning them.
Bev, according to Paul Grescoe (in The Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance) Mary Bonnycastle, wife of the original owner of Harlequin,
remarked on how popular the nurse-and doctor romances were. She went to the local branch of the public library and looked through a number of books that all shared the imprint of an English firm. They were medical romances, they were decent, and, of their kind, they were quite enjoyable. (38-39)
So in May 1957 Harlequin wrote to M&B saying they were
looking for light romances dealing with doctors and nurses for publication in our Harlequin line of paper-covered pocket-type books, and wonder if the Canadian reprint rights for any of your books of this type might be available to us (40)
They were, of course.
Mills & Boon definitely weren't the only publishers of this sub-genre. Rachel Anderson (in The Purple Heart Throbs: The Sub-literature of Love) has got a chapter on medical romances and she says that
The National Health Service started in July 1948, and it was following this, during the fifties, that the hospital romance established itself as a definite genre in its own right. Of course, nurse love-stories have been popping up here and there since the 1900s (226)
Anderson's book was published in 1974 and she writes that
Today the production of hospital romances is a flourishing and highly specialised business. Most of them are issued only by those publishing houses which specialise in romance, (John Gresham, Hurst and Blackett, Robert Hale, the Romance Book Club, Mills and Boon, Arrow, Fontana), in special library editions. (228)
She was writing mostly about UK romantic fiction, I think. I don't know how many of these publishers sold rights or had offices in the US and Canada. I'm also not sure if there were other publishers, just based in the US, who published medical romances. It does seem likely, though, given how popular they seem to have been in this period.
The conclusion I'm reaching is that we need a lot more, and a lot more comprehensive, histories of the genre! I mentioned on the other thread that Pamela Regis is currently "at work on the history of the American romance," and I'll be very interested to read it.
Side question: do ya'll have a feed for comments?I don't think we have a "feed" (although I'm not an expert in the correct terminology for this kind of thing) but when you're typing in your comment, you have various options down below the box (under the heading "Choose an identity"). Most of the choices have little circles in front of them, but for the Google/Blogger option, there's a sub-option with a square tick box which allows you to choose to have follow-up comments sent to your email address.
Those quotes you cited were interesting, Laura. Medical romances were always a fascinating "form" of the romance novel to me. In an odd sort of way, whenever I read people talking about chick lit, I'm almost always reminded of those books. Different careers, different eras, but in many ways very similar styles of narration.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I honestly and truly can't remember if they were first person so I have no idea why I get that feeling.
Oh, and there isn't a check box for having comments emailed.
Off to check out that other thread because I lost track of it while involved in that discussion over on that other site. ;)
"Oh, and there isn't a check box for having comments emailed."
ReplyDeleteThat's strange. If I've got a black dot in the circle for "Google (Blogger)" in the "Choose an identity" section (just below the comment box) then I always see the little box and the option to "Email followup comments to .... "
Are you sure your computer hasn't developed a mind of its own and decided that it wants to stop you getting emails from here and is completely opposed to the idea of you downloading any Zane Grey novels online? ;-)
In an odd sort of way, whenever I read people talking about chick lit, I'm almost always reminded of those books. Different careers, different eras, but in many ways very similar styles of narration.
Although I honestly and truly can't remember if they were first person so I have no idea why I get that feeling.
I'm not sure if they were first person. I don't think they were. But if they weren't then they'd probably have been heroine-point-of-view only, which can give a similar feel, in the sense of knowing exactly what the heroine's thinking but not knowing so much about what the hero thinks (except that as the reader, you generally understand better than the heroine, who takes ages to work out that he's in love with her). And as you say, there's the woman-with-a-career angle, and from what I've read of them (and the few I've read from that period), there were quite a lot of details given about the career.
Yeah, and the heroines weren't always in the medical field although most of the time they were closely related to it, i.e. secretaries and assistants and such. Very obsessed with fashion all those other things, though.
ReplyDeleteOf course, some of that may have just been the era they were written in, but, still, when the chick lit books first came out and people started describing them as being all new and innovative, I had this really weird and strong sense of deja vu.
Like, oh, really? What's old becomes new again. Never fails. ;p
Oh, and I think I've figured the comment thing out. You have to be signed in already for the email box to show up. Except for some reason, this blog keeps dropping the sign in on me. So the box isn't there until after a comment is posted. Which is no help unless I want to commment twice in a row. Or happen to comment on two different post quickly.
I haven't run into the same problem with other blogs that use the Google id.
Just figured out how to do it. The sign in thing at the top of the blog recognized me. Why just coming to the pages doesn't work when it does on other blogs, I have no idea.
ReplyDeleteSorry this is a bit off topic but I couldn't find the post I remembered-- faith and romance where I believe Mr. Selinger was asking for book recs? 1986 Sharon and Tom Curtis (Laura London) Sunshine and Shadow. A Hollywood director and an Amish woman.
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