Location, location, location

Over on the listserv we've been discussing settings and whether they affect sales. Location, as we all know, is very important when buying and selling property:

"Location, location, location," is a common and almost hackneyed phrase in real estate literature. Your agent may even throw it at you when you ask for advice about buying a home. However, what does "location, location, location," actually mean? Why repeat it three times?

Mostly, "location" is repeated to emphasize that it is extremely important to the resale value of your home. The idea is to buy a house that will appeal to the largest number of potential future homebuyers. A careful choice of location can minimize potential negative influences on future resale value, and maximize positive influences.

Writers, particularly writers of historical romances, have definitely been getting the message that the sales value of a novel set in Regency England (preferrably a desirable location in London, with easy access to Tattersall's, Bond Street, and Gunter's) is the most likely to appeal to the largest number of potential historical-romance buyers. Is it that other locations have fewer 'positive influences' than those provided by the lady patronesses of Almack's?

Our discussion began when Eric posted a notice about a conference to be held next year:

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF ITALIAN STUDIES
Colorado Springs 3-6 May 2007

We seek proposals for our panel on “Venice in the Literary Imagination” for the upcoming American Association for Italian Studies conference, taking place in Colorado Springs from 3-6 May 2007.

"Venice has loomed large in the imagination of writers from the medieval period to postmodernity. Papers which examine the city's literary significance might explore such areas as aesthetics, gender, identity, leisure, politics, or travel, or representations of the libertine, libro d'oro, Carnevale, political prisoners, the Rialto, or the terra firma. We welcome research on authors of all periods and genres." (more details on the panels proposed for this conference can be found here)

On the listserv we did come up with some examples of historical romances set, or partly set, in Venice, including Lydia Joyce's The Music of the Night, Claire Thornton's The Defiant Mistress and Susan Wiggs' Lord of the Night. I also found some pictures of Venice for those who'd like a closer look at the real estate in question, from the Royal Collection's online exhibition of Canaletto's paintings of Venice.

It's still the case, though, that settings such as Venice remain relatively rare in romance. All About Romance, for example, has a page devoted to 'special settings', and while they include Venice, they don't include Regency London, which is, presumably, all too common. There seem to be a variety of reasons why this might be the case. Is it that readers prefer the familiar setting of Regency London? Is it that, particularly for the writer of historicals, it's more difficult to find the source material on other locations (in a readily accessible language) in order to carry out the research? Is it that publishers think that historicals set in more exotic locations won't sell? Harlequin Mills & Boon have been acquiring Roman-era romances recently, however, so clearly some publishers are willing to take a chance with a more unusual location for a historical. Is it that some settings have negative connotations for readers? Hsu-Ming Teo's article, 'Romancing the Raj: Interracial Relations in Anglo-Indian Romance Novels' suggests that:

these love stories were symptomatic of British fantasies of colonial India and served as a forum to explore interracial relations as well as experimenting with the modern femininity of the New Woman. With the achievement of Indian independence in 1947, British interest in India as a locus for romance rapidly declined, thus demonstrating that these novels were never concerned with India but with British lives and British colonialism. [...] The colonial order was necessary for the production and sustenance of romantic fantasies. With its demise, the Anglo-Indian romance genre withered. These romances were never primarily about India but about the Englishness of love and the racialization of romance whereby white love stories were cast into dramatic relief against the background of an Orientalized India.

It's certainly true that some locations provide a touch of the exotic, whether it's the desert in sheik romances (and plenty of the kingdoms over which the sheiks rule are entirely fictional, as illustrated by this map), or, for Harlequin readers living in Eastern Europe in the immediate post-Cold War era, romances set in American locations, since for them America was 'a place which symbolizes the possible wealth and affluence that the capitalist system has to offer':

The novels are fantasies of the ability to transcend economic class, a world where women enjoy working in privileged positions in the economic system of capitalism and men are the masters of this system, the power figures who take care of those less wealthy than themselves. Lack of money is never a problem in the world of Harlequin romances, and romance itself is inseparable from an abundance of wealth and possessions. The appeal of such fantasies to readers living in emerging capitalist markets like Poland and Russia is obvious.(Darbyshire 2000)

I suspect that there are many factors affecting the popularity of certain settings, but it does appear that there is a greater variety in the settings of contemporary romances than in the historicals. As we've mentioned before, Harlequin Presents 'are set in sophisticated, glamorous, international locations', and there are certainly plenty of contemporary romances in settings from Ireland to the Australian outback.

Do you have any ideas about why the locations are more varied in contemporary romances than in historicals? Do you find certain historical settings and eras offputting?

• Darbyshire, Peter, 2000. ‘Romancing the World: Harlequin Romances, the Capitalist Dream, and the Conquest of Europe and Asia’, Studies in Popular Culture 23.1.
• Teo, Hsu-Ming, 2004. 'Romancing the Raj: Interracial Relations in Anglo-Indian Romance Novels', History of Intellectual Culture, 4.1.

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

This subject seemed appropriate given today’s date, and maybe it was inevitable that I’d eventually work my way round to a discussion of death, given my academic background, but I’d been reading romances and not thinking about it at all when suddenly I realised that I’d read quite a few romances recently where characters are recently bereaved and/or still dealing with the effects of bereavement, and where the consequences of bereavement are dealt with in much more depth than the ‘our heroine is an orphan because that narrows down the cast-list and makes her vulnerable’, the ‘our heroine is a virgin widow’ or the ‘our hero’s wife died but only after she’d made him cynical about all women’ plotlines. I’m not saying that these plots are bad, simply that they don’t dwell in any depth on what it’s like to deal with a bereavement. There are, however, plenty of romances in which the effect of the death of a loved one is dealt with in considerable detail.

When the deceased was the hero or heroine’s spouse, he or she sometimes appears as a ghost or vision, as in Linda Lael Miller’s Wild About Harry. Here the heroine’s dead husband suddenly makes his presence felt:

“If I’m not one can short of a six-pack, how come I’m seeing somebody who’s been dead for two years?”
Tyler winced. “Don’t use that word,” he said. “People don’t really die, they just change.” (2000: 12)

He urges her to remarry:

“Harry’s the man for you.”
“You were the man for me,” Amy argued, and this time a tear escaped and slipped down her cheek.
[...] “That was then, Spud,” he said, his voice gruff with emotion. “Harry’s now.” (2000: 13)

The approbation of the much-loved, but now deceased spouse doesn’t always occur in such a dramatic fashion. At the end of Karen Templeton’s Swept Away, just after Carly, the heroine has agreed to marry the widowed Sam, he winks at his daughter, Libby, and when Libby ‘looked over at her mother’s photo on her desk, she could have sworn she saw Mama wink, too.’ (2006: 249).

Not all romances dealing with this issue include a sign from beyond the grave which signifies the deceased’s approval for the match. In Elizabeth Bailey’s Seventh Heaven the heroine had an arranged first marriage, which though not unaffectionate, was never loving. There is, nonetheless, a short discussion of how the heroine’s first husband would have felt about her remarriage. She jokingly suggests that she must marry Septimus, the hero, because he, a poet, requires a patron:

“A poet needs a patron, does he not? And it is high time you ceased to waste your very considerable talent on – on gruesome tales or whatever it is.” [...]
“And do you suppose Mr Shittlehope [Louisa’s first husband] would have approved of your sponsoring the arts?”
“Well, he liked me to play the pianoforte,” Louisa offered.
“Then that is settled. You may marry me with a clear conscience!” (296-297).

Clearly this particular example of a discussion about the deceased and his/her wishes is lighthearted, but it nonetheless shows the characters’ need to consider the possible feelings of the deceased. Even in cases such as Louisa’s, the assumed approval of the deceased gives a certain extra legitimacy to the new relationship and demonstrates that the dead are not forgotten.

Given that romances not infrequently suggest that there is one Mr or Ms Right, with heroines often waiting, in a virginal state, for the one man who can ‘awaken’ them, the situation of a hero or heroine who has had one true love, and is now embarking on a second marriage, with a second true love, raises questions about fidelity. Perhaps some readers would feel that a remarriage is a form of disloyalty, infidelity, or an indication that the first marriage was not one of ‘true love’. The widowed father of the heroine in Templeton’s Swept Away says of bereavement after the death of a spouse that ‘I’ve never really bought into the idea that staying lonely somehow honored the person who’d gone on’ (2006: 113), but the idea itself is implied to be one which is prevalent in society and it’s one which seems to trouble a fair number of romance widows and widowers. The supernatural approbation of the deceased is, therefore, clear evidence of the rightness of the new marriage, removing all possibility of guilt or shame on the part of the new couple.

In Claire Thornton’s Raven’s Honour, the characters receive no supernatural sign, and for a time Major Cole Raven, the hero, is wracked by guilt because he’d loved Honor, the heroine, for years, despite the fact that she was married to one of the soldiers under his command. Although he never let her know his feelings, and despite the fact that he did all he could to keep Patrick O’Donnell alive, he nonetheless feels guilty about Patrick’s death. Honor, not knowing how Cole feels about her, mentions the story of Bathsheba and King David, and Cole's responds angrily:

‘You think I’m the kind of man who could order another man to his certain death – just so I could take his woman?’ Raven demanded, his voice low and throbbing with outrage. [...] The Old Testament story of the King’s sinful action had never been far from Cole’s mind over the past few weeks. So Honor’s accusation had cut like a whiplash across his already tormented conscience, laying bare his guilt. (2002: 63-65)

In this biblical story King David’s guilt derives from the fact that he was responsible for the death of Bathsheba’s husband, but guilt can also arise from the feeling that one is benefiting from another’s death, or from the bereaved spouse’s sense that they should remain faithful to the deceased’s memory. The presence in romances of the deceased, who appear as spiritual or supernatural presences, perhaps remind us of the words of Jesus when asked about the status in the afterlife of a woman who during her lifetime had had seven husbands:

Therefore in the resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven? for they all had her.
Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.
For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. (Matthew 22: 28-30)

The dead cannot marry or be married, and therefore the living spouse is not committing adultery when he or she begins a new relationship. For those to whom no supernatural beings or signs appear, they must find other ways in which to come to terms with the past and assuage their guilt. In Raven’s Honour, for example, it becomes clear to Cole, and to the reader, that Patrick married Honor to protect her, and in his final words to Cole, ‘Take care of Honor, sir’ (2002: 34) he passed that responsibility on to Cole. In the novel it is demonstrated that Honor and Cole need feel no guilt, because neither betrayed Patrick. Rather, Cole is respecting Patrick’s final wishes by caring for Honor, and Honor, by returning home to ‘make peace with your mother’ (2002: 38), as Patrick had asked her to do, and laying out his corpse for burial does ‘ “Her last duty”, said Joe. [...] “No one could have asked more of her than that – not Patrick O’Donnell, at any rate”’ (2002: 40). Among Patrick’s final words to Honor were ‘You’re a good wife’ (2002: 38). By giving us these details about Patrick and Honor’s marriage, and showing Honor and Cole behaving honourably with regards to Patrick’s wishes, Thornton convinces the reader, and allows the hero and heroine to become convinced themselves, that they need not feel any guilt. It is also noticeable that Patrick continues to be mentioned throughout the book because he’s an integral part of Honor’s life, and Cole cannot understand Honor’s past without learning more about Patrick.

While the remembering of the dead is not emphasised in Raven’s Honour, it is an important theme in many of the books I’ve read recently. For example, in Karen Templeton’s Swept Away the hero, who’s been a widower for three years, explains his feelings about his dead wife:

“You still miss your wife too, don’t you?”
Sam took his time before answering. “One day, I realized I’d gotten through a whole hour without thinking about her. And at first I thought something was wrong with me, that somehow, it didn’t seem right not to hurt, not when you loved somebody as much as I’d loved her. Then, when the hour stretched to two, then sometimes even half a day, it finally began to sink in that missing somebody implies a vacuum of some kind, a hole in your life where this person used to be. And I thought, hell – after all those years we’d had together...’ He shook his head. “All these kids, each one of ‘em reminding me of her in some way. [....] It was Jeannie’s idea, painting the walls all those bright colors. The snowball bush out front, the lilac over there in front of the kitchen window, the row of cherry trees over there ... all her doing.”
With a gentle smile, he turned to Carly. “I suppose some people would find all those reminders painful. But I find ‘em a comfort. After all, it’s kinda hard to miss somebody who’s everywhere I look.” (2006: 69)

Unlike the dead characters in Sartre’s Huis Clos, condemned to Hell and to be forgotten by those who had once known and loved them, in romances the memories of the beloved dead are cherished and kept alive. In Miller’s Wild About Harry, Tyler’s mother says that ‘When you love someone, they leave a lasting imprint on your world’ (2000: 175). In Marion Lennox’s Princess of Convenience, the heroine’s son died of leukemia just three months before the beginning of the novel:

‘You don’t recuperate from a child’s death,’ she whispered, and she couldn’t stop the sudden flash of anger. ‘But that’s what they all said. You go overseas and forget, they told me. Start again. How can I start again? Why would I want to?
‘Like me,’ he said softly and her eyes flew to his. ‘Only harder.’
‘What ... what do you mean?
‘I believed them,’ he told her, his voice gentling. ‘Or maybe, like you, they just wore me down by repeating their mantra and I hoped like hell they were right.’ [...]
‘You’ve lost someone, too?’ she whispered, though she already knew the answer.
‘My twin. My sister. Lisle.’ (2005: 66)

In the course of the novel, however, they do both recuperate, and in part this is because they realise that recuperating does not have to involve either forgetting or starting again. In the final scene, the family gather together in the kitchen garden, while a priest says a blessing over the ashes of Dominic (the heroine’s son) and Lisle (the hero’s sister):

This kitchen garden was no formal garden. It was used every day, by everyone who lived in this castle. Edouard played here with his baby alpacas [....]. The servants gossiped here. Louise and Henri sat and held hands and watched Edouard play. Raoul and Jess sat here in the moonlight. And soon... In not so many months, maybe there’d be a crib out here, where a little one could have a daily dose of sun.
Home. Home is where the heart is, Jess thought dreamily. Home is here. [...]
They lifted their urns and they let the ash drift across the garden on the soft see breeze to land where it would.
The urns were empty. Jess turned and she held her husband tight, and once again she shed tears. But this time there was no desolation.
This was right.
Lisle and Dominic had come home.
With their families. (2005: 186-187)

Romance novels conclude with an ‘Emotionally Satisfying and Optimistic Ending’: often they demonstrate that love triumphs even over death. In the words of Cousin Geillis, a white witch, and relative of the heroine of Mary Stewart’s Thornyhold, writing in a message composed before her death, but delivered after it,‘‘Love is foreseen from the beginning, and outlasts the end’ (1989: 222), or, as Dylan Thomas said:

Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

----

• Bailey, Elizabeth, 2001. ‘Seventh Heaven’ in Elizabeth Bailey: Three Stories in One (Chatswood, New South Wales: Harlequin Mills & Boon), pp. 7-299.
• Lennox, Marion, 2005. Princess of Convenience (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon Ltd.).
• Miller, Linda Lael, 2000. Wild About Harry (Richmond, Surrey: MIRA Books).
• Stewart, Mary, 1989. Thornyhold (Sevenoaks, Kent: Coronet Books, Hodder and Stoughton).
• Templeton, Karen, 2006. Swept Away (Richmond, Surrey: Silhouette Books).
• Thornton, Claire, 2002. Raven’s Honour (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon Ltd.).

Voyeurism?

For all that I said in the last entry about the positive aspects of the depiction of sex in romance, there can occasionally be something that feels a little voyeuristic about the reading experience. It’s not just the sex scenes, because as Jo Leigh said recently at Romancing the Blog:

A reader is hooked when reality shifts. When time in the corporeal world seems to stand still, and the world of the novel takes over. She no longer hears the trample of feet on the stairs or the barking of the neighbor’s dog. Instead, she has become a voyeur of the most intimate kind, eavesdropping on conversations, peeping into bedrooms, opening the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. She’s privy to a world that is complete.

The term 'voyeuristic', though, can be used rather loosely. Here's a legal definition, taken from part of the section on voyeurism in the UK’s Sexual Offences Act 2003:

Voyeurism
(1) A person commits an offence if-
(a) for the purpose of obtaining sexual gratification, he observes another person doing a private act, and
(b) he knows that the other person does not consent to being observed for his sexual gratification.

The book that got me thinking about this topic in relation to sex scenes, was Barbara Delinsky’s Through My Eyes. The title may suggest that the reader is looking through the heroine’s eyes, and what occurs is therefore not voyeurism, since the reader is vicariously a participant not a voyeur. Nonetheless, the heroine, as the title suggests, retains a distinct identity which is separate from the reader’s. Her eyes remain hers, not those of the reader. This is a story told in the first person by the heroine, Jill. When she returns home after a trip to New York where she’s had sex with the hero, Peter, she thinks, during a conversation with her friend Swansy:

I didn’t really want to tell Swansy that Peter and I had spent the better part of our time together in bed, because I was afraid she’d get the wrong idea.
Then again, it wasn’t the wrong idea. It was exactly what we’d done. But what Peter had taught me about lust would burn Swansy’s ears.
Then again, maybe not.
But where a man and a woman were concerned, some things were sacred. (1989: 195)

Given that Jill is addressing the reader directly, it’s disconcerting that she can tell the reader things that she won’t tell her best friend. If something is sacred and, as Jill seems to imply, should therefore remain secret, why has the heroine previously narrated the sexual encounters in considerable detail to the reader? This passage raised the issue of voyeurism because the heroine is explicitly stating her right to privacy. And yet, not many pages before, and not many pages later, she describes her sexual activities, in the first person, to the reader. I have to admit that I wasn’t particularly engaged emotionally anyway by the characters, and this was enough to pull me completely out of the story, thus putting me on the outside, looking on. I finished the book because (a) I usually do finish books and (b) I wanted to blog about that passage, and I don’t like the idea of commenting on a book I haven’t read in full, but it made me feel awkward and self-conscious about what I was reading.

As one romance reader mentions, reading a sex scene in a romance may seem voyeuristic:

Linda Howard is my all-time favorite romance writer, and it is in part because she doesn't skip over the sex and simply have the man and woman wake up together the next day. Linda Howard makes it very plain how the hero and heroine feel about each other and that is what I love to read about. I feel like I miss some of the emotion when I am not 'there' for their physical love. Call it voyeurism if you will.

As this reader notes, however, the romance reader is interested in emotion (though there is often also an element, stronger in some sub-genres than others, of interest in physical acts for their own sake) and this is significantly different from what interests the true voyeur. The voyeur, it seems to me, is watching bodies, whereas the romance reader is given access to the characters’ emotions. In that sense, the romance reader is inside, looking out, whereas the voyeur is outside, and looking on. The difference between the two positions is illustrated in the prologue of Claire Thornton’s The Defiant Mistress. Gabriel, the hero, thinks he knows what he’s seeing:

A spyhole! [...]
the man turned Frances and began to unlace her bodice. She allowed him to remove it and made no protest when he fumbled at the neckline of her chemise. The man exposed her breast and bent his head to lay his mouth against the soft flesh.
Gabriel broke free from his horrified paralysis. He reared up and around, nearly blind with outrage and the pain of betrayed love (2005: 19-20)

The reader, however, knows why the heroine is allowing this to happen: Frances has been made to believe that if she does not, Gabriel will be executed for treason. The reader, then, can 'see' both Gabriel and Frances, and understands what the scene truly means, but Frances does not know Gabriel is there, and Gabriel does not understand why Frances is behaving this way. What Gabriel sees does create strong emotions in him, and what the voyeur sees creates sexual excitement in him/her, but in both cases their experience is unlike that of the romance reader, since their feelings are not based on an understanding of the emotions felt by the person they are watching. In The Defiant Mistress the actual misunderstanding, caused by lies they’ve both been told, is resolved relatively early on in the novel: it is the gradual re-establishing of a loving relationship and of emotional intimacy between the hero and heroine which forms the majority of the novel. This mirrors the way in which sex scenes in a well-written romance are not primarily about the facts of which body-part goes where, but about the emotions the characters feel during the scene, what the scene reveals about their relationship, and how it moves the plot forwards. True understanding doesn't come from observing from the outside, but from understanding what's happening emotionally, on the inside of the characters.

As Rosina Lippi says:

The basic truth is this: any and every scene needs to earn its place in the narrative flow, and sex is no different. No matter how much I love a character and a story, I'm not interested in following them everywhere. The author can safely leave out bathroom visits, cutting of toenails, the phone call about the electric bill, the spilled coffee, the songs on the radio while the character drives to work. Unless something significant happens [...] this stuff doesn't belong in the story. In the same way, you end up with generic, boring, unnecessary sex scenes stocked with color by number orgasms unless there's a compelling reason to include the scene in the first place.
Carefully constructed, thoughtful sex scenes are one good way to show what's right or wrong in a relationship; it's in high tension situations that characters let go, and really, what else is sex about? Where else is character revealed in such a direct way? It's not the only way to do this, but it can be a very effective one.

[In August 2004 Rosina selected a number of sex-scenes and analysed them. It’s fascinating (at least, I found it so) and all the entries can be found via this page. By 2010, Rosina had taken down most of her blog's pages, so they aren't visible any more. However, thanks to the Internet Archive some of the pages are still available: Introduction; Crusie's Welcome to Temptation; Ivory's Untie My Heart. ]

Another difference between the voyeur and the romance reader is that although fictional characters do not generally give consent (though they may do so implicitly if the story is told in the first person), they are not real, and it is the author who gives consent for his/her characters to be observed. However, given the way in which a good author makes the characters come alive, this may seem more like a legal distinction than one which reflects the experience of reading a romance.

Another important distinction is that however good a reader’s visual imagination may be, words are not images, and so a reader cannot truly be said to be ‘observing’ the characters. This point was made in a response to a letter to Salon, when the letter writer had stated that ‘To my mind, there is little difference between romance novels and girlie magazines -- they are both a form of sexual voyeurism’. The response of Salon’s Camille was that:

Porn prose, even by the Marquis de Sade, is slow and linear and will therefore never have the neon impact of a visual image, which hits a different part of the brain with atavistic, animal force.

Despite the distinctions I’d draw between voyeurism and reading a sex scene in a romance novel, there are times when I feel uncomfortable about what I’m reading. Because I don’t like this feeling, I’ve tended to put the book down, so it’s hard for me to analyse exactly what caused me to respond this way to the book, but I think it occurs when the writing is less than engaging, so that I feel as though I’m standing outside, looking in on the activities being described.

Anyone else felt this way? And do you think I’m right in the distinctions I’m making between voyeurism and the processes involved when reading sex-scenes in romance?

---
Delinsky, Barbara, 1989. Through My Eyes (Ontario: MIRA).
Thornton, Claire, 2005. The Defiant Mistress (Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon).

Solidarity Among Novels

Romance readers and authors frequently comment on how little respect there is for their genre, and one way in which authors sometimes subtly counter this is to feature characters who read and discuss romance books. Sometimes the intertextuality is very clear, as when one novel is named and discussed in another. At other times, there is little more than an allusion to the genre of novel the character prefers. Here's one of my favourite examples of a character in a novel defending the merits of another novel (and women's reading preferences in general):

“I never look at it,” said Catherine, as they walked along the side of the river, “without thinking of the south of France. [...] It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho. But you never read novels, I dare say?”

“Why not?”

“Because they are not clever enough for you — gentlemen read better books.”

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days — my hair standing on end the whole time.” [...]

“I am very glad to hear it indeed, and now I shall never be ashamed of liking Udolpho myself. But I really thought before, young men despised novels amazingly.”

“It is amazingly; it may well suggest amazement if they do — for they read nearly as many as women. I myself have read hundreds and hundreds. Do not imagine that you can cope with me in a knowledge of Julias and Louisas. If we proceed to particulars, and engage in the never–ceasing inquiry of ‘Have you read this?’ and ‘Have you read that?’ I shall soon leave you as far behind me as — what shall I say? — I want an appropriate simile. — as far as your friend Emily herself left poor Valancourt when she went with her aunt into Italy. Consider how many years I have had the start of you. I had entered on my studies at Oxford, while you were a good little girl working your sampler at home!” (from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Chapter 14, courtesy of the Republic of Pemberley's extremely useful set of searchable editions of Jane Austen's novels and letters)

In turn, modern romance authors sometimes include references to Jane Austen's works in their own novels and thus subtly lay claim to her as the 'mother of the modern romance novel'. Here's an example of an extended discussion of Sense and Sensibility from Claire Thornton's Gifford's Lady:

'I read your book,' he said abruptly. [...] 'The one you were reading in the lending library. Sense and Sensibility. I forgot to give it back to you the other day.'
'Really?' She looked up at him in suprise. 'Whatever for? I mean, why did you read it? I'm sorry.' She lowered her eyes briefly. 'I j-just wouldn't have thought you'd enjoy such a story.'
'It was ... educational,' Gifford replied. [...]
'Educational?' Abigail reminded him. 'The book, sir?' [...]
'It was,' he said, remembering the mixture of claustrophobia and frustration he'd felt when he read it. 'I'd never considered such a mode of living before,' he continued slowly. 'The boredom I spoke of - we have our petty grievances in the navy - but the trivial pointlessness of the lives that book describes! How can such an existence be tolerable?' He couldn't quite keep the horror out of his voice. [...] 'It was a woman's world', he said at last. 'The men had no substance. Two of them were entirely dependent on the whims of their elderly female relatives [...].' 'Even the men we were meant to view favourably were indecisive, ineffective -'
'You think the author was too harsh towards your sex?' Abigail asked.
'No, no.' Gifford started walking again. He was too restless to stand still. 'I said it was a woman's world. What I meant ... was that we were shown the world through a woman's eyes. If that's what it's like to be a female, I can only thank God I was born a man. [...] You have no choice, no genuine freedom of action. You must wait modestly to see if a man favours you. And if his conduct confuses you, you must appear unconscious and pretend indifference. Unendurable!' (pp.48-50)

Much, much later, Gifford remembers this discussion and finds in it the key to understanding Abigail's behaviour. The implication is that women's novels make sense of women's experiences and if, instead of dismissing them out of hand, a man takes time to read them carefully and respectfully, he may gain a greater understanding of women's lives and aspirations.

Eloisa James' latest romances are full to the brim with intertextual references:

the literature professor in me certainly plays into my romances. The Taming of the Duke [...] has obvious Shakespearean resonances, as do many of my novels. I often weave early modern poetry into my work; the same novel might contain bits of Catullus, Shakespeare and anonymous bawdy ballads from the 16th century. (from here)

and the implication is clear: romance readers (and authors) are not stupid and semi-illiterate, and they can and do appreciate the great classical authors. Her quotations from the love poetry and romantic comedies of the past also serve as a call for respect for modern romances which are, in many ways, their prose equivalents in their treatment of the power and pleasures of love.

Finally, and unfortunately I don't have any specific examples here, so I'm hoping I'll get some comments on this, there are instances where romance authors include references to works by other contemporary romance authors. I'm sure I recently read of a historical romance where one character is reading a book written by a novel-writing character created by another author. This sort of intertextuality is both an in-joke for readers of romance and an indication of solidarity among contemporary romance authors.

UPDATE: I finally tracked down the book I mentioned. On her webpage, Julia Quinn says of her novel, Romancing Mr Bridgerton that she includes, via:

Lady W's columns: Michael Anstruther-Wetherby, brother of Honoria, the heroine of DEVIL'S BRIDE by Stephanie Laurens!

and

In the first chapter, Penelope is reading a book called MATHILDA by S.R. Fielding. This is from DREAMING OF YOU by Lisa Kleypas, one of my all-time favorite romance novels! The heroine is a novelist, and MATHILDA was a huge bestseller.

[In case anyone's wondering why there's a deleted comment in the comments section, it's because I was playing around with blogger. I couldn't get the formatting I wanted when I put the quotes in a comment, and then I realised it would be simpler just to update the original post. But now, of course, it looks a bit odd to have a deleted post. Of course, I realise it also looks pretty odd to footnote my own post in this way. I'll get to grips with blogging soon, I hope.]