A snippet of romance history

This is probably not very interesting, but since I came across it, I thought I might as well share, since it provides some insight into romance publishing in the 1970s and (possibly, since this is very outdated) some suggestions about how writing romance can help improve other types of writing. It's the opening paragraphs of

Reid, Joy. 1995. "Developing ESL Writing Materials for Publication or Writing as a Learning Experience." Material Writer's Guide. Ed. Patrica Byrd. New York: Heinle & Heinle Publishers. 64-78.
https://archive.org/details/materialwritersg0000unse/page/64/

My initial experience with book publishing came not with my first ESL [English as a Second Language] composition textbook but rather with two “pristine” romances. I was teaching a continuing education literature course when one of the nontraditional students approached me and suggested that we should write a book together. She was interested in the romance genre, which I had never read. So I read a dozen, and I thought, “Shucks. I could write one of these.” The eventual result was Orchids for Hilary, a manuscript we mailed (under our pseudonym, Shannon Sayer), uninvited, to the top publisher, Harlequin Romances. Three months later we received a letter indicating that Harlequin would accept the manuscript. Because we had visions of a long and lucrative career as romance writers, we began to write a second romance. Several months passed and we heard again from Harlequin; this time we were informed that there had been a change of editors and a change of mind — our heroine was too competent, the letter stated. Depressed, my coauthor dropped out. In some desperation, I investigated Literary Marketplace, the reference book that lists and describes publishers alphabetically. I mailed Orchids to Avalon Books (the first potential publisher I encountered), and then completed Summer of Pearls. Both manuscripts were published; I never saw either galleys or page proofs — the little, Nancy Drew-like hardbacks simply arrived. The wealth and fame I had anticipated evaporated, and I discovered that sitting alone in my living room, without the pleasures of collaboration, trying to think about what my characters were eating and wearing, was really boring work.

In retrospect, my coauthor and I should have sought out an agent to market and negotiate for us; unlike authors in the world of textbooks, most first-time fiction authors work through an agent. In addition, we should have fired off an immediate reply to the new editor’s letter, asking for specifics about how to revise our manuscript in order to fulfill her expectations. But we didn’t know enough about publishing to do that, and so the opportunity passed. Occasionally I receive a small check when one or the other book is translated into Swedish or used by a British soap opera; otherwise the books served only as a learning experience, particularly about my own writing and about the teaching of academic discourse. Writing “recipe” romances, for example, forced me to reexamine my own prose: to eliminate semicolons (successful romance writers do not use them), to embed short strings of descriptive adjectives (difficult for an academic writer), to be alert for “the less I know, the more I write” syndrome, and to recognize my tendency to use multisyllabic words when inspiration (and clear, short vocabulary) evade me. As a result of what I learned about my own prose, I found that in my native English speaker (NES) and ESL classes I was better able to analyze discourse, audience, and genres in ways that made my teaching of the processes and products of academic prose clearer. (64-65)

Orchids for Hilary was published in 1978 and can be found online here. I haven't read it to see what the second Harlequin editor considered to be "too competent."

Romance and Quantitative Literary Studies

Katherine Bode's review article titled "Why You Can’t Model Away Bias" (2020) is about Ted Underwood's Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change (2019). Neither are about romance, but I thought some readers might be intrigued by part of Bode's article which uses romance to rebut one of Underwood's claims:

In chapter 4 Underwood employs a data set derived from HathiTrust to identify a decline in the proportion of English-language fiction by women from around 50 percent of titles in the late nineteenth century to roughly 20 percent by 1970 before a reversion to a bit under half of all titles at the end of the twentieth century. Noting that elite university and public library collections may have simply collected more books by men than by women, Underwood seeks to test whether this bias influenced his results by comparing the proportions of male and female authors in HathiTrust to those in manual samples from four years of Publishers Weekly listings. Because the Publishers Weekly samples indicate an even more dramatic fall in women’s writing, Underwood claims that the comparison “addresses . . . doubts” about “how well . . . those collections represent the wider world of fiction” (135). While Publishers Weekly incorporates a great deal of popular fiction that does not figure in academic collections, it indexes almost no titles by even the most prominent and prolific popular romance fiction publisher of the twentieth century, Mills and Boon. Women authors predominate in this genre, and its heyday—the 1950s to the 1970s—corresponds with the most dramatic decline in the proportional representation of women authors and characters in Underwood’s results.

To explore how much the exclusion of romance fiction may have influenced his results, figure 1 amends Underwood’s figure 4.9 (134), using data on Australian women’s novels from 1945 to 2000. If American and British women wrote romance fiction at levels similar to that recorded in the Australian context, then rates of fiction by women would remain relatively flat through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, at levels equivalent to that found at the turn of the twentieth century. There would be a decline in women’s fiction in the 1970s, but a less dramatic one than Underwood reports, and the general trend across the twentieth century would be fairly stable or growing. The Australian data thus undermine Underwood’s conjecture that the decline in female characterization was due to a decline in women authors of fiction, and expose the fragility of inferences based on literary data sets that have not been adequately historicized. I am not saying that my results show what actually happened; I am using them here as another sample. My point is that comparing two—or three or four or five or however many—samples cannot rule out similar biases in them, nor can it define the degree or limits of bias introduced by sampling methods.

I'm not qualified to give any opinion on the methodology used by either Bode or Underwood but I was a little perplexed by Bode's statement that the "heyday" of romance fiction was "the 1950s to the 1970s." Certainly as far as the US market is concerned, The Flame and the Flower (published in 1972) is credited as starting a new era in popular romance.

Also, Bode refers to Mills & Boon, but I think that Publishers Weekly is an American publication, so I would imagine that if Mills & Boon were going to be included there, they'd have been published by Harlequin. Was Bode unaware that Mills & Boon novels were published by Harlequin in the North American market? Or is Bode correct in identifying a lack of romance in the data and PW didn't include Harlequin romances?

Anyway, it's always wise to be aware that there may be problems with data (e.g. as discussed with regards to bestseller lists here).

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Katherine Bode; Why You Can’t Model Away Bias. Modern Language Quarterly 1 March 2020; 81 (1): 95–124. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-7933102