Showing posts with label Joseph McAleer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joseph McAleer. Show all posts

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Magazine and Story Paper Romances



There is, it seems to me, a hierarchy in romances: single-titles are often considered superior to category romances and the various magazine formats (including the romance comics to which Sequential Crush is dedicated) are often entirely forgotten. I was provided with a salutary corrective recently when I bought a copy of a 1960s guide to writing romantic fiction which states that
A good serial will always make a good novel and a good romantic novel will often make a serial. The most obvious difference is in length.
Magazines obtain their serials by two methods. Either they are specially written for the market, or, more commonly, they are adapted by the editorial staff from a full-length novel. Most publishers make a point of submitting manuscripts with a feminine appeal to magazines, in order to sell the serial rights well before book publication. Financially, selling to a magazine is by far the better proposition. Serial rights can bring in two or three times as much - sometimes even more than a publisher's advance. (Britton and Collin 108). 1
They probably weren't overstating the importance of the magazine market in that period; Joseph McAleer, who has studied the publishing history of Mills & Boon, writes that
While Mills & Boon had had a close relationship with the magazines since the 1920s, it was in the 1950s that contact intensified, and the magazines themselves become a kind of extension of the editorial department. By 1948, pre-publication serializations of Mills & Boon novels were fixtures in the top three women's magazines, which together were selling over three million copies per week: Woman, Woman's Own, and Woman's Weekly [...]. This association with the weekly magazines served more than an editorial purpose. Mills & Boon reaped extra publicity when a serial 'sold' well, encouraging readers to seek out the complete novel in the libraries, or other titles by the author. Moreover, selling serial rights - for as much as £1,000 - helped Mills & Boon's cash flow. The firm usually retained between 15 and 25 per cent of the serial fee. (97)
Magazines came in various types and Bridget Fowler has studied in detail
a representative sample of weekly family or women's magazines, selecting those of the most economical design, with the lowest prices [...]. Where possible, the period analysed was July 1929 to July 1930 [...]. Not only was this a time of industrial restructuring and financial collapse, but it was also the last era before the birth of the modern, glossy, mass-circulation women's magazine in 1932. Stories had a much more central place in the older type of magazine and were often the sole diet of fiction for their readers. The affectionate niche they acquired in the lives of their reading-public was attested by many of my respondents with working-class roots, who recalled their mothers snatching brief interludes from heavy domestic labour to enjoy the little luxury of Silver Star or the People's Friend. (51)2
Billie Melman has focused in particular on "The Lancashire romance and the love story set in the Empire" (144) in British story papers of the 1920s. The "mill-girl story had emerged in the 1890s. Its heyday overlapped the decade between the end of the First World War and the Wall Street Crash; its decline and fall coincided with the Great Depression" (121). Indeed, "The Great Depression, which finally ruined the Lancashire cotton industry, also gave the Lancashire romance its coup-de-grâce" (133). This sub-genre does
include some stories of romantic rivalry between a mill-hand and a toff, fighting for the heart and hand of a mill girl. Usually it is the honest, industrious Lancastrian who wins. On the whole, the concept of marriage as a bond that benefits economically or socially one or both of the parties is alien to the spirit of the Lancashire romance. Matrimony is not an economic partnership, or a sanctioned sexual relationship, but a lifelong friendship between two adolescents, an extension of the 'matiness' of the mill. (128)
In sharp contrast to the mill-girl stories, yet existing alongside them, was a type of story whose "brand-mark was nationalism. Its symbol was the Empire. Its main characteristic was the blurring of social differences and the effacement of class consciousness" (134). Melman suggests that "The flowering of a genre that celebrated an imaginary society in which females were scarce and males plentiful may be seen as a response to the anxieties caused by the imbalance between the sexes" (136-37) in the aftermath of the First World War. There
are two patterns of romance. In the first, the emigrant story proper, an Englishwoman, newly arrived from the 'Old Country', finds a mate, a home and purposeful life in the unpopulated wilderness of a British dominion or colony. In the second pattern, the heroine, born of British parents in the 'New Country', is pursued and won by an Englishman. In both these patterns the main emphasis is upon the national and racial identity of the protagonists. The characters must be white and Anglo-Saxon. Their affiliation to race replaces other allegiances - to class, to the community, to occupation and even to gender. (137)
The story papers in which these stories appeared
were printed, on the newsprint pulp paper from which they derived their somewhat derogatory epithet, in a two- or four-column layout. The typical story paper was a weekly [...]. Its potential readers were unmarried manual workers, shop assistants, domestic servants and office workers. Married women in their early and mid twenties formed a distinct group for which a host of periodicals more domestic in outlook than the publications for adolescents catered.
The main component of the pulp weekly was fiction. The relation between the role of magazine fiction and the social status of the magazine-reading public has been noticed. The space given to fiction was in inverse proportion to the class of readers. The 'higher' this class, the smaller the story component. (113)
In addition, "The serial story was peculiar to working-class periodicals. [...] Middle-class publications, on the other hand, had a distinct preference for shorter fiction" (114).

William Gleason takes the study of magazine romances back even further in time, and across the Atlantic, in issue 2.1 of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies. He states that:
The mass marketing of modern romance fiction in North America began not with the emergence of Harlequin Books in the 1950s but during the dime novel and story paper boom of the 1860s and 1870s. Seeking to capitalize on the longstanding appeal of love stories, which had been appearing alongside other popular genres in the weekly family story papers since the mid-nineteenth century, many of the most influential “cheap” U.S. publishing houses—including Beadle and Adams, Street and Smith, George P. Munro, and Norman Munro—began to experiment with more distinctly marked romance series aimed primarily or exclusively at women readers. Several of these series were quite successful, others wildly so. Beadle and Adams’s Waverley Library, for example, which offered both classic fiction and popular romance novels, produced a total of 353 issues between 1879 and 1886 (Johannsen 304, 314). Street and Smith’s Bertha Clay Library, launched in 1900, ran (along with its successor, the New Bertha M. Clay Library) for more than thirty years (Carr 81). And from the mid-1880s through the 1930s popular publishers fought over exclusive rights to publish and republish the works of prolific American romance novelist Laura Jean Libbey, both as stand-alone volumes in various “library” series and as serialized novels in weekly story papers (Masteller 205). These late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century publishing successes laid the groundwork for the mass marketing of popular romance with which we are familiar today.
As for me, I've been dipping into the digitized, online editions of Australian Women's Weekly from 1933 to 1982. Joan Elman's A New Car and a Lady (18 Feb. 1939) features a heroine who drives cars for a living (she works for a car show-room); the first thing she says is "Oh, but this had been a day of days! Three demonstrations since ten o'clock. Careers for women? Ugh!" (5). The anti-heroine from this story is not totally dissimilar, at least initially, to the heroine of This Frail Flower (21 August 1943) who, before the war, was "lovely and loveable, spoiled, useless" (5). She, however, finds a new purpose in life, and her old love, in a factory doing war-work. In Paul Horgan's National Honeymoon (16 Sept. 1950) the heroine manipulates her new groom into appearing with her on a national radio programme which gives prizes to newly-weds in return for them sharing their love story with the nation. Roberta May reveals that she used to work "as a secretary [...] I wanted to keep on, but Gus wouldn't let me" because, as he says, "I can support both of us" (10). Roberta gave up her job rather than lose Gus, but much as the job would have enabled her to "help with payments on the house" (20), their appearance on the show will allow her to have a room in that house refurbished. After the show, however, Roberta is "sorry with all her heart for what they had given away that day [...] their very own love story" (22). Gus tells her that they can get back "the important part of it" by returning all the prizes; "I'll buy what we need, and if we can't afford it yet we'll wait till we can" (22). Yet again, the implication seems to be (a) a man should "support" the couple on his own, without his wife's assistance, and (b) when a wife puts herself into the public arena (as opposed to staying safely at home) she runs the risk of damaging her marriage. The contrast between these last two stories seems to reflect the changing attitudes towards women's work:
At the end of the war, the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor asked women workers about their future work plans [...] most women wanted to keep their present jobs. Immediately after the war, the percentage of women who worked fell as factories converted to peacetime production and refused to rehire women. In the next few years, the service sector expanded and the number of women in the workforce—especially older married women—increased significantly, despite the dominant ideology of woman as homemaker and mother. The types of jobs available to these women, however, were once again limited to those traditionally deemed “women’s work.”(History Matters)

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1The authors of this guide, Anne Britton and Marion Collin, had "both been fiction editors of women's magazines" (dustjacket) so they clearly write from experience when they warn authors of full-length novels that:
If your manuscript is bought as a serial do not be surprised by what happens to it. You may have written about sixty-five thousand words. The fiction staff will have no qualms about cutting it to thirty thousand words if it suits them better that way. You have sold the story and unless you want to kill your market you will be wise not to complain about its new length or its new title, or even to hint that they have cut out your most brilliant passages! The staff who cut are experienced, and it is their job to know what makes a successful serial. (117-18)
I can't help but feel that there are some parallels here with the process of translation and cutting documented by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, which led her to ask "Is this not a new book? And where is the writer in all of this?" ("They Seek").

2 The romance stories themselves are described by Fowler as featuring "plots in which women are shown to be as capable of achieving production targets and intellectual attainments as men. However, in every case the working woman is reintegrated into the domestic world after marriage" (60).

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The covers above, from The Australian Women's Weekly, are for 25 Feb. 1939,19 June 1943 and 14 Oct. 1950. Thumbnails of all the covers can be viewed via a "visual timeline."
Posted by at Thursday, October 27, 2011 7 comments
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Tuesday, July 27, 2010

The Evolution of the Alpha Male


In the introduction to How Well Do Facts Travel?: The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010) Mary Morgan explains that sometimes accepted "facts" are false or unreliable. While the spread of facts is to be welcomed, that of false "facts" is more troubling:
Constraints on the travels of facts may be seriously detrimental to our well-being. Yet the free market may be equally problematic. The internet is such a free market, but one in which - as is well known - it is difficult to recognise trustworthy facts from untrustworthy ones, an age-old problem of open (or free) product markets that has lead to their habitual regulation, for example to prevent the use of poisonous additives to make bread white, or, in the case of travelling facts, to regulate the claims made for the efficacy of medicines.
Chapter 16 of How Well Do Facts Travel?, which focuses on the romance genre's alpha male, is by Heather Schell, and is available online (in a form which does not include the official pagination). That chapter and a recent post by Jessica at Read React Review about evolutionary psychology both emphasise the importance of examining one's evidence carefully.

Jessica's post raises some questions about the methodology used by evolutionary psychologists and was written in response to a recent post about the romance genre by evolutionary psychologist Maryanne Fisher (based on some research I've already analysed). Jessica also adds that "folks might be interested to know that several HQN authors, such as Sharon Kendrick and Penny Jordan, felt very positively about the study" by Fisher. I'm not sure that's an entirely fair assessment of what Kendrick and Jordan reportedly said: Kendrick's comment that "[Their] research into book titles shows that women gravitate towards ones which depict a loyal, fit, rich and sexy bloke. Funny, that! That would be as opposed to a commitment-phobe wastrel who plays around?" certainly isn't devoid of irony, and it isn't an explicit endorsement of the evolutionary psychology underlying the study's conclusions.

Nonetheless, Jordan's mention of
a bedrock instinctive 'feeling' within women that a man who is male and powerful enough to be desired by many women (ie not a stalker type) and who wants to commit himself exclusively, is the gold standard when it comes to the foundations for couple happiness
is not inconsistent with evolutionary psychology, which would explain such a "bedrock instinctive 'feeling'" by reference to the species' evolutionary past.

Schell's analysis of the romance genre's alpha male suggests reasons why some romance authors may find the evolutionary psychologists' approach to the genre attractive. Unfortunately, or perhaps appropriately given that it appears in a book about trustworthy and untrustworthy facts, Schell's account appears to contain some unreliable facts about the genre, including an assertion that "Harlequin [...] owns almost every romance publisher in North America, as well as Mills and Boon." I imagine that "fact" would come as rather a surprise to readers of single-title romances and romances published initially as ebooks.1 Schell states that
Before the early 1980s, there were not many facts about romance novels. [...] Romance novels had not received any of the attention that scholars had begun to direct towards other types of mass culture; there was thus no contention among academics about what these novels meant. Romance writers themselves weren’t engaged in any collective soul-searching about the meaning of their work, either, in part because the conditions of their labour weren’t such as to foster dialogue: Romance novels were written by hundreds of women working in isolation, without agents, connected individually to their publishing houses through correspondence and through the written guidelines to plot and character (i.e., the “formulas”) to which prospective authors had to adhere. The facts about romance novels in the 1970s were limited to industry-generated data about sales and distribution.
That situation changed dramatically in the 1980s, for two reasons: romance writers organised, and scholars began to write about the genre and generate facts about what it meant. First, in 1980, Romance Writers of America (RWA) was founded.
This account appears to overlook Peter Mann's 1969 survey of Mills & Boon readers (unless any information about readers counts as "data about sales and distribution") and any analysis of the genre published during the 1970s, including Germaine Greer's scathing attack on it in The Female Eunuch and a variety of articles about Gothic romances. Schell also leaves unmentioned the rather important fact that
The Romantic Novelists’ Association was set up in 1960 [...].

They wanted respect for their genre. In her inaugural address, Miss Robins said that although romantic novels, according to the libraries, gave the most pleasure to the most people, the writers almost had to apologise for what they did. This had to stop. (Romantic Novelists' Association)
Schell then positions Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women (a volume of essays by romance writers which was edited by Jayne Ann Krentz) as "a multifaceted rebuttal of feminist criticism" of the sort to be found in Tania Modleski's Loving with a Vengeance. At the heart of that rebuttal is the
Alpha Hero. In an essay entitled “Trying to Tame the Romance: Critics and Correctness,” Krentz described alpha males as “the tough, hard-edged, tormented heroes … at the heart of the vast majority of bestselling romance novels.… These are the heroes who carry off the heroines in historical romances. These are the heroes feminist critics despise” (Krentz 1992b, 108–9). Note that Krentz defined the Alpha Hero in two contexts: as he related to romance novels and to feminist critics. Insofar as he would come to be used as the fact that definitively rebutted feminist criticism, the Alpha Hero was indeed the feminist critics’ enemy. She did not take credit for naming this hero, but suggested merely that he was “what has come to be known in the trade as the alpha male” (1992b, 107). In another chapter, Laura Kinsale cited Krentz as the source of the term and quoted an earlier definition of the alpha-male hero: the “retrograde, old-fashioned, macho, hard-edged man” (1992, 39). Kathleen Gilles Seidel, in the same volume, offered a slightly different origin story: “The term ‘alpha male’ came into use, I believe, because some authors were engaged in a struggle with editors about a certain type of hero and needed a vocabulary for the discussion” (1992, 178). Seidel liked the term in part because she saw it as “the only piece of jargon that has originated from the authors themselves” (1992, 178). None of these stories acknowledge the alpha male as a construct originating in a scientific community.
I'd like to quote Seidel in full and in context, because I believe she may be transmitting an unreliable fact. She writes that "what makes romance heroes romantic" is that "They surprise you, they unsettle you, they bring drama and excitement, but in the end they make you feel safe" (163). Her comments about the term "alpha male" appear in a footnote to that statement:
Which aspect of the hero is emphasized the most determines whether he is an "alpha male" or a "wimp." What interests me about this distinction is that, so far as I know, this is the only piece of jargon that has originated from the authors themselves, even though we are a close-knit community with astonishing lines of communication.
I view this lack of jargon as evidence of two things. First is the absolute sincerity with which we view our books. Glib, dismissive jargon does not feel appropriate. Second is that we view each book as unique. What matters to us is how each book differs from the others, something that jargon does not account for.
The term "alpha male" came into use, I believe, because some authors were engaged in a struggle with editors about a certain type of hero and needed a vocabulary for the discussion. (178)
There is, however, an alternative story of the romance genre's adoption of the term "alpha" which both challenges the view that it "originated from the authors themselves" and "acknowledge[s] the alpha male as a construct originating in a scientific community":
Although the modern Mills & Boon romance, tied to a specific formula, did not yet exist in the 1930s, it is apparent that Charles Boon did set down a few ground rules for his authors. Some have survived, and were passed down through the years in the firm by two names: 'Lubbock's Law' and 'the Alphaman'. Both still have an impact today. [...] The 'Alphaman' was based on what Alan Boon referred to as a 'law of nature': that the female of any species will be most intensely attracted to the strongest male of the species, or the Alpha. (McAleer 149-150)
In an earlier essay by McAleer we find the alpha male contrasted with the "wimp" (but note the lack of reference to Charles Boon):
The two main company guidelines for writers (still in use today) are called 'Lubbock's Law' and The Alphaman'. Lubbock's Law endorses the views of the literary critic Percy Lubbock, who argued that stories should be written from the heroine's point of view; that would promote reader identification and increase suspense and interest accordingly. The Alphaman', according to the Boon brothers, is based upon a 'law of nature': that is, the female of any species will always be most intensely attracted to the strongest male of the species, the alpha. In other words, the hero must be absolutely top-notch and unique. The wimp type doesn't work. Women don't want an honest Joe,' Alan Boon said. (275)
If McAleer's facts are correct, then it begins to seem unlikely that Krentz was, as Schell suggests, "the author who introduced the term 'alpha male' to the romance community" and Schell would also be incorrect in stating that "Feminist literary criticism was the original goad that prompted romance writers to seek alternative explanations of romance novels’ appeal, and, via a somewhat indirect path, led to their discovery of the Alpha Hero." Of course, it might be that American romance authors adopted the term entirely independently of any input from the Boons and the editors who'd worked for them at Mills & Boon. It's possible, I suppose, since for quite a long time after Harlequin took over Mills & Boon the company didn't have many US authors.

An earlier date for the adoption of the term "alpha" (whether in the form "Alphaman," "alpha male" or "alpha hero") to describe a particular type of romance hero would not invalidate Schell's facts about the spread of the term in the US around the time of the publication of Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, nor its definition in that context. The Boons' version(s) of the Alphaman, based on their belief that the "laws of nature" which apply to many species of animals also apply to humans, may have differed from the alpha males created by romance authors who, Schell suggests, were influenced by evolutionary psychology, as evidenced by their references to 'cave days' and 'the ancestral hunter' in descriptions of the alpha hero. On the other hand, even if they weren't aware of Boon's term for him, it seems impossible that US authors could have remained unaware of the Mills & Boon "Alphaman" as a character type, since Harlequin had been publishing romances edited in in the UK by Mills & Boon for some considerable time before the publication of Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women.

Schell's focus on evolutionary psychology as the unmentioned source of the "alpha" hero, and her assumption that he emerged in response to feminist criticism of the genre, leads her to conclude that
once the battle with academic feminism was over, there simply was not as much need for the facts about sexual strategies. Even as the animal behaviour model gained ascendancy in American popular culture, the Alpha Hero’s star began to fade within the romance writing community.
and
No longer a staple in mainstream romance, the Alpha Hero survives primarily in the paranormal subgenre, in which, in his dual role of monster and lover, there is no doubt that he is a fantasy character and not a fact.
I suspect that many romance authors and readers would be rather surprised to learn that alpha heroes survive "primarily in the paranormal subgenre." Of course, it depends on how one defines the "alpha" hero. If one assumes an "alpha" hero must be based on cavemen and male hunter-gatherers, then perhaps that's true. But if the term "alpha" is being used primarily as the opposite of "wimp" (i.e. "beta"), or as a shorthand for a range of qualities which make him "absolutely top-notch and unique" then there is room for the term itself to continue to have relevance, even as the heroes to which it refers change over the decades.

I have the feeling, though, that Schell's real interest is in the "facts" of evolutionary psychology, and all the preceding facts (both reliable and otherwise) about the romance genre are given in order to provide background for her analysis of the ways in which evolutionary psychologists have attempted to use the romance genre as proof that their theories are correct:
the truth status of the Alpha Hero facts for evolutionary psychology is based on the facts’ freedom from the influence of human culture. If instead it was clearly understood that the romance community had adopted and perpetuated the Alpha Hero facts, then the heroes of romance novels might cease to embody the facts. The novels would no longer look like “a window into our natural preferences” (Salmon 245) – that is, a clear, transparent, unmediated view of our true selves, untainted by culture. Even if the Alpha Hero facts could survive, they would be messier, equivocal facts, tainted with human intent.
If it was the Boons, rather than Krentz, who popularised the concept of the "alpha" hero, Schell's case is perhaps even stronger, since McAleer provides clear evidence of the ways in which the Boons provided their authors with considerable editorial direction.

Has anyone else got some reliable facts about when or how the term "alpha" came to be used to describe romance heroes? Has the meaning of the term changed over time? And do you think the alpha hero himself is in decline, or has he just evolved quite quickly since the 1980s?
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  • McAleer, Joseph. "Scenes from Love and Marriage: Mills and Boon and the Popular Publishing Industry in Britain, 1908-1950." Twentieth Century British History 1.3 (1990): 264-288.
  • McAleer, Joseph. Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
  • Morgan, Mary S. "Travelling Facts." How Well Do "Facts" Travel?: The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge. Ed. Peter Howlett and Mary S. Morgan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. [Quotations from unofficial version available here (pdf).]
  • Schell, Heather. "The Love Life of a Fact." How Well Do "Facts" Travel?: The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge. Ed. Peter Howlett and Mary S. Morgan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. [Quotations from unofficial copy available here (doc).]
  • Seidel, Kathleen Gilles. "Judge Me by the Joy I Bring." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania P., 1992. 159-179.


1 I also find the following description of single-title romances rather unsatisfactory: "Single-title novels can be longer, sometimes offering Dickensian casts and plots that span generations." It seems to me that if romantic novels contain plots (not simply "casts") which "span generations" they'd be classified as romantic sagas rather than as romances, since romances focus on a central romantic relationship (although they may also depict secondary romantic relationships between other characters).

The image illustrating human evolution came from Wikimedia Commons.
Posted by at Tuesday, July 27, 2010 18 comments
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Thursday, April 29, 2010

Reading, Ideals and Depression

In a post about ethical criticism, Jessica has outlined different possible ways in which to approach the ethical criticism of literature. In her own ethical criticism Jessica herself does not intend to examine the possible 'consequences' that reading may cause, 'for example, causing readers to accept morally salutary or problematic attitudes'. Nonetheless, she notes that

Romance readers talk a lot about the good effects of romance reading on their beliefs, attitudes and desires. They might say reading romance has helped them to be better communicators, to understand men, to demand their due from their partners, to get in touch with their sexuality, etc. That’s cool. But if we are going to do that, we also need to consider whether romances have had any negative effects. In other words, if you are going to play the “effects on readers game” you cannot rule out a priori (for example, by saying things like “Women are not just passive readers, i.e. dopes. We know the difference between fantasy and reality. Don’t infantalize and patronize us.”) any and all claims about negative effects on readers of romance novels.

Consider: how could it be that you only learned good or positive things from romance novels?

There are two options, as far as I can see. (1) Romance novels, the entire genre, only endorse good positive healthy attitudes towards gender, romance, love, sex, and everything else they take as their subjects (however those good attitudes are defined). That seems manifestly unbelievable to me, given my own experience as a romance reader, and given how large and diverse the genre is. That comes close to saying there is only one romance novel – one very morally good romance novel — and it has been written over and over.

Or (2) you know quite well that there is a lot of stuff you wouldn’t endorse in a romance novel, some of it apparently endorsed by the (implied — more on that later) author, but either (a) you don’t read those books, or (b) if you do, you don’t “learn anything” from them, because you filter the bad stuff out. Ok, but then, you aren’t “learning” anything from romance novels. Rather, you are applying a moral framework you already possess to your selection of texts, or to your reading of texts, only letting what you have already decided are “good” messages in. In that case, it would be more accurate to say that your reading of romance novels reinforces or deepens or lends specification to moral beliefs you already hold. I think that is much closer to what is really happening, personally. But if it is, then we have to accept that if a reader holds pernicious moral beliefs, she can find some warrant, some deepening, reinforcing or specifying, of those bad moral beliefs in romance novels, too.

My feeling, as I mentioned in my response to Jessica's post, is that while of course we can try to select books which don't contain material which we'd find particularly distressing and/or offensive, it's likely that we're still going to come across 'bad stuff' in many novels and I'm not at all convinced that we can succeed in filtering all of it out all of the time.

The good effects of the genre have often been described in terms related to depression and its cure:
Alan Boon, the acknowledged genius behind [...] Mills & Boon romance, admitted the restorative quality of the novels which he edited for some forty years: 'It has been said that our books could take the place of valium, so that women who take these drugs would get an equal effect from reading our novels.' (McAleer 1999: 2)
Valium, though, like most other medicines, can have some unpleasant side-effects. In other words, the 'good stuff' may also contain some 'bad stuff'.

If we turn to a recent article by Kira Cochrane about women and depression we can find the following quote from 'psychologist and author Dorothy Rowe, a leading expert on depression':
"There's still this idea that you've got to be a wonderful mother, but you also have to have a brilliant career, and you've got to look attractive all the time," she says. "There is no way that you can maintain that and bring up children. But it's still being presented to women all the time, in every magazine, on every screen, that you should."
In the same article 'The former Scotland editor of the Observer, Lorna Martin, [who] wrote Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown' is quoted as saying that:
"There's massive pressure on women these days to hold down a good, rewarding, fulfilling job, but also to be a good mother, and then to look good, and to look after yourself. I think there comes a point where your body can't take it."
In other words, it's suggested that popular culture may contribute to the creation of depression. Could romance, the 'valium' of popular culture, do this too? I suppose it depends on how much you think fiction can influence readers and whether you agree with Rowe that the depictions of women 'in every magazine, on every screen' (and, presumably, in many books) create or sustain ideals which are difficult for real women to meet, and can therefore contribute to depression. What I think is certain is that there are plenty of romances whose heroines have fulfilling jobs/hobbies/work in their communities, are (or it's implied will be) wonderful mothers, and are beautiful/well-groomed/very attractive to their spouse or partner.

Is it possible that these heroines add to the pressure on women to live up to a particular ideal of womanhood? I think they may. The presence of gender stereotypes in romances between heterosexual protagonists is something that I've seen mentioned as one of the reasons why some women may prefer to read and/or write romances between male protagonists. Unfortunately I didn't keep track of the urls where these comments were made, and I'm certainly not saying this is the main, or only reason, for the popularity of m/m romance. But if at least some readers are choosing m/m over f/m and f/f in order to avoid gender stereotypes about women, then that would be an example of how readers can filter/select their reading material in order to block out what they feel is 'bad stuff'.

Romance heroines themselves, however, rarely buckle under the pressure to succeed. As Sarah at Monkey Bear Reviews has observed,
There appear to be several taboo topics in romance novels. One of these is depression. If we assume it is something we are all likely to experience at some point in our lives, to one extreme or another, it surprises me that it is not an issue which romance authors are prepared to tackle. [...] I’m talking about a story which focuses on the sort of character who is largely ignored and immediately dismissed as dislikeable because they languish on the sofa and require smelling salts. Wouldn’t it be interesting to find out why they are way they are? Don’t they also deserve a HEA?
I think they do.

Which is perhaps why I found Julia Quinn's To Sir Phillip, with Love very difficult to read. I'll leave you with a quote from the prologue and you can decide for yourself if you think it's an example of 'bad stuff'. The prologue gives the reader some information about Sir Phillip's dead wife Marina:
Marina had been melancholy. Marina had spent her entire life, or at least the entire life he'd known, melancholy. He couldn't remember the sound of her laughter, and in truth, he wasn't sure that he'd ever known it.
Nowadays, I'm fairly certain a character like Marina would be recognised as having clinical depression. After Marina has attempted suicide by throwing herself into the lake, Sir Philip thinks
How dare she refuse his rescue? Would she give up on life just because she was sad? Did her melancholy amount to more than their two children? In the balance of life, did a bad mood weigh more than their need for a mother? [...]

"I can't," she whispered, with what seemed like her last ounce of energy.

And as Phillip carried his burden home, all he could think was how apt those words were.

I can't.

In a way, it seemed to sum up her entire life.

The heroine of the novel is not the depressed Marina. She dies and is replaced by the cheerful, competent, intelligent, Eloise whom Sir Phillip finds very attractive and who knows how to manage his rebellious children perfectly.
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The illustration is of a ditch water filter, from Wikimedia Commons.
Posted by at Thursday, April 29, 2010 32 comments
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Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Touring Harlequin's Past: Executive Editor Marsha Zinberg


Harlequin is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year and today we're welcoming Harlequin's Executive Editor, Marsha Zinberg, to the blog. She's here to talk about Harlequin's history.

Harlequin
was founded in 1949 in Winnipeg by a consortium that included Richard Bonnycastle, who had been a lawyer and a fur trader for the Hudson Bay Company before taking a job at an outfit called Advocate Printers. At the start, Harlequin supplied Advocate with product, reprinting British and American paperbacks — romances, westerns, detective fiction — for the Canadian market. In 1957, it became the North American distributor for Mills & Boon. (Gillmor)
In 1958, Harlequin was sold to Richard and Mary Bonnycastle, who altered the course of the company. During the next ten years, they converted the company to a public corporation, changed its name to Harlequin Enterprises, moved it to Toronto, the current corporate headquarters and, most important of all, switched to publishing exclusively romances. (Jensen 32)
Marsha Zinberg's been with Harlequin for over 25 years, and remembers buying some of the "famous firsts" that are being reprinted as part of the 60th anniversary celebrations. The
Harlequin Famous Firsts are the first Harlequin series books by New York Times bestselling authors of today and they are part of our 60th Anniversary celebrations. They include:
The Matchmakers [1986] by Debbie Macomber
Tears of the Renegade [1985] by Linda Howard
Tangled Lies [1984] by Anne Stuart
Moontide [1985] by Stella Cameron
State Secrets [1985] by Linda Lael Miller
Uneasy Alliance [1984] by Jayne Ann Krentz
Night Moves [1985] by Heather Graham
Impetuous [1996] by Lori Foster
The Cowboy and the Lady [1982] by Diana Palmer
Fit to be Tied [1988] by Joan Johnston
Captivated [1986] by Carla Neggers
Bronze Mystique [1984] by Barbara Delinsky.
The original years of publication should be linked to pages showing the original covers. You can take a look at more vintage Harlequin covers in The Walrus.
Covers have always been an integral part of Harlequin’s marketing. They are known for “the clinch”: the heroine being held by the hero, eyes locked in a mutually meaningful stare. [...] All of the early books had illustrated covers, but by the late ’80s, most featured photographs, which are now sometimes treated to resemble illustrations. (Gillmor)
As part of the 60th anniversary celebrations Harlequin is
sponsoring an exhibition of original cover art that will focus not only on the changing shape of desire and fantasy but also on the social meaning and context of these images. THE HEART OF A WOMAN: Harlequin Cover Art 1949—2009 debuts at the Openhouse Gallery in New York City on May 29, 2009, and will be on view until June 12, 2009.

By presenting 60 years of cover artwork, the exhibition offers a unique insight into the profound transformations that have occurred in women's lives over the past six decades. These changes have been captured and reflected on the front of Harlequin novels—from shifts in private desires to shifts in the politics of gender. Although it is the stories of romance that charm the hearts of so many women, it is the artwork on the book covers that offers the first tantalizing hint of the pleasures that await between the covers. (Harlequin Press Release)
The Openhouse Gallery's blog includes photos of the exhibition, close-ups of some of the covers featured in the display (as well as commentaries on them - you can read the commentaries better if you click on the individual photographs to enlarge them), and photos of some of the novels on display. There are some more details about the exhibition (and photos) at the I Heart Presents blog, Smart Bitches Trashy Books, The Globe and Mail and the CNN website.

Laura: I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about the exhibition, Marsha, and in particular what "shifts in private desires" and "shifts in the politics of gender" you've seen in Harlequin cover art?

Marsha: As we look over the art of our covers across 60 years, it is clear to see that women’s ideas of romance and desire evolved with the times they lived in. For example, after the Second World War, when women were returned to the confines of the home after working for the war effort, their romantic desires involved exotic locations where duty, romance and adventure collided.

Heroines were strong and confident, and often pushed the boundaries of traditional female behavior. Nurse/doctor narratives dominated Harlequin romances in the 1950’s and well into the 60’s, possibly reflecting women’s longing for the workplace challenges and opportunities that had been offered to them only a decade earlier during the height of World War II. Also, nursing was one of the few professional opportunities open to women….and it allowed them access to a very desirable hero, the doctor!

Into the 60’s and 70’s, when the women’s movement really began to take hold, the covers displayed women in the foreground, literally and figuratively, with men relegated to the background, where they were mere “accessories” to the story that surrounded the newly-empowered women, perhaps depicting that women were beginning to understand their own place in the world.

By the 80’s readers were being treated to visually complex covers made famous as “bodice rippers”. Men’s bodies were becoming objectified by their lack of clothing and hyper-masculinity. At a time when women were reaching unprecedented positions of power in the workplace, these covers were more romantically nostalgic than in any previous decade, perhaps indicating a dichotomy between personal success and personal desires.

The 90’s showed even further objectification of the male form, with women often appearing “on top” and in control of the romantic tryst.

As we move into the new century, the man as an object of desire has progressed. The woman is still seen on the covers, but the half-naked hyper-masculine man continues to take centre stage and the romantic themes run into the erotic. The desirability of the hero seems more linked to his beautifully developed body than to other signifiers of his wealth, accomplishment or occupation. Women have fully embraced their sexuality and their specific desires. It’s a far cry from the desires and gender roles of 60 years ago – and to study that evolution through our cover art is quite remarkable.

Laura: Most of the Famous Firsts date from the 1980s. It was an interesting decade for the genre, and for Harlequin:
In 1981, when Simon & Schuster launched Silhouette Books to challenge Harlequin's domination of the market for short, sweet romance novels [...], most forms of the romance genre derived from British models and most writers hailed from Great Britain or the Commonwealth. Harlequin [...] did not at that time publish its own books at all. Instead, its entire list of paperback romances consisted of reprints of novels that were originally acquired, edited, and published by the British firm of Mills and Boon. [...] Before the publication of the first Silhouette Romances, Harlequin had very little competition as a publisher of category romances in North America. (Mussell & Tuñón 1)
Harlequin also had little interest in publishing romances by American authors:
According to American writers who tried to break into the market in the late 1970s, the firm showed little interest in recruiting writers from North America or in expanding the typical settings of their books into North American locales. (Mussell & Tuñón 2-3)
Silhouette took a rather different approach: "Silhouette's first editor in chief, Kate Duffy, handled the [...] manuscripts by American writers that Harlequin had rejected" (Grescoe 161). The "War of Love," as Grescoe terms it (153), had begun and:
by the mid-1980s the competition was especially keen, with Harlequin, Silhouette, Dell's Candlelight Ecstasy line, Berkley's To Have and To Hold and Second Chance at Love, and others all vying for the same market. Harlequin entered the contest with its own series of Harlequin American Romances, with American authors and settings, to compete directly with Silhouette. In 1984, however, Harlequin bought Silhouette Books from Simon and Schuster, thus ending the most intense competition in the market. (Mussell & Tuñón 5)
Laura: What was it like working at Harlequin during this period? Could you tell us a bit more about how some of the Famous Firsts were acquired and the early careers of some of these authors?

Marsha: I began at Harlequin in 1983, and was hired as an assistant editor on the Superromance line, which had in fact been publishing longer romances by North American authors since 1980, when the line first began and was envisioned as a “longer Harlequin Presents”. At that time, they were often over 90,000 words long, so we really were trying to give the reader a substantial story!

Mills and Boon, which was responsible for our original Harlequin Romance and Harlequin Presents lines, was bought by Harlequin in 1972, and so their original material for us, some written by North American authors, in fact dated from the 70’s! In addition the Harlequin American romance line, when I began with the company, there was a special project underway, which had a code name: I think it was called Project 229---and that became the Temptation line!

They had begun to acquire manuscripts with more sensual content---though of course, by today’s standards, those books are pretty tame. I do remember that both Barbara Delinsky and Jayne Ann Krentz, as well as Vicki Lewis Thompson, were very early contributors to that line, and while Barbara and Jayne went on fairly rapidly to establish mainstream careers, they continued to write series romance for us.

As I moved up the ranks at Superromance, I acquired a number of Vicki Lewis Thompson titles for Superromance as well. Stella Cameron was also quite an early contributor to Superromance, while Debbie Macomber and Linda Lael Miller were establishing themselves with the Silhouette series. Debbie wrote for both houses, Harlequin and Silhouette, for quite a while, as did many of the authors, and often with different pseudonyms for each house. We always had to know who wrote under which name for what house…authors had multiple identities as a matter of course in those days!

Many of the authors in the Famous Firsts collection date the beginnings of their careers to about twenty-five years ago, which is when there was so much excitement and growth in our industry. As a newbie, I didn’t actually appreciate all that activity and competition then as I do now, when I can look back on it nostalgically. We were all madly acquiring then, with few constraints. We couldn’t get enough product out there to satisfy the voracious market, it seemed!

Laura: I know some new trends we've seen lately have been the rise of paranormal romance and erotic romance, and millionaires seem to be evolving into billionaires. Anne McAllister recently wrote that twenty-five years ago, "Kids were not thick on the pages of books," which made me want to ask you about that. When did secret babies become so popular? How do you think the genre's continued to change and what's remained constant since the Famous Firsts were written?

Marsha: Anne is quite right that “kids were not thick on the pages of books” twenty-five years ago, but I do think the secret baby theme has been a classic for quite a while. It’s just that the focus shifted. The children in the plotlines came into the forefront more, as the plots more and more reflected contemporary society, which was dealing with the reality of single mothers, blended families and the baggage that heroines now routinely carried with them.

As the heroines aged, it was logical that a protagonist in her late twenties or early thirties was likely not a virgin, and likely not alone in the world. She had responsibilities and obligations, and they figured into her ability to commit to a relationship. So the family became more entrenched in certain plotlines…often serving as the main external conflict…and it was the stumbling block the hero and heroine had to resolve in order to have their happily-ever-after.

I do recall that as we discovered that women were actually drawn to babies and young children on the cover, we began to write about that aspect of the story in the back cover copy, to assure them that the children were part of the story…secret or not. And of course, when we discovered that the sight of a strong, handsome man cradling an infant or tenderly interacting with a young child melted female hearts, that element became another “classic” that has endured into romances of today.

Plotlines continue to reflect contemporary society, but I would be foolish not to mention that an alpha hero is still very appealing to a lot of modern women, and I can’t see that appeal vanishing any time soon.

Laura: The "1st Annual Romance Writers of America Conference was held in June 1981" (RWA) and Alison Kent's stated about the RWA that
I learned everything I need to know about writing fiction from workshops, articles, conferences, contest feedback, networking, critiques . . . none of which I would have received on the outside. I wouldn’t even have known where to go to find the information I needed on craft if not for RWA. Granted, this was prior to the days of Google, but I still believe RWA can give anyone a master class in writing fiction.
Has the RWA and the way it's worked to teach authors the craft of writing had an effect on your work as an editor?

Marsha: Certainly as this industry has matured, there has been a decided uptick in the professionalism of the authors, and that includes both their technical abilities and the attitude to and knowledge about the business side of publishing. The hands-on, one-on-one work I do with an author has not been affected by the RWA, but the quality of the work that’s being submitted, the format in which it is submitted, and the author’s participation in the selling/marketing of their work through their own P.R. efforts has definitely improved over the years, and I can’t help but imagine that all the information and networking providing by RWA has helped that process along.

Laura: And finally, since this is a blog which approaches the genre from "an academic perspective," how do you feel about some Harlequin romances being studied as literature rather than being seen as "a quality product, a kind of guarantee of an easy, thrilling, and satisfying read with an obligatory happy ending" (McAleer 2)?

Marsha: I think it’s great. I have a master’s degree in English and always thought “literature” would be my life. Luckily, my views have broadened enough to know that literature contributes a segment to my pleasure reading, which is an important part of my life, but Harlequin romances are a very successful and beloved example of a genre, and there is a lot to be learned from any kind of genre writing—mystery, thriller, Western, paranormal--because it teaches discipline, adherence to certain agreed-upon parameters, and creativity in presenting a set of circumstances in a fresh, appealing way. There are only a certain number of archetypes in story-telling, “literature” or genre fiction, and creating compelling characters and an engaging plot line is not circumscribed by the type of fiction you are trying to create. Good writing is good writing….we can all learn from it, and we can and do all enjoy it!

Laura: Thank you very much for visiting Teach Me Tonight, Marsha!

If you'd like to read more about the stories behind the creation of the "Famous First" novels, you might want to visit the other stops in Marsha's blog tour:

June 1 --- BookBinge (what "prompted the ideas for their books")
June 2 --- Plot Monkeys (changes in technology have affected editors and authors)
June 3 --- Blaze Authors blog (on differing writing processes)
June 4 --- Romance Junkies (more on writing processes)
June 5 --- Romancing the Blog ("the real person behind the story")
June 8 --- Dear Author ("flux and constants in the romance industry")
June 9 --- Cataromance ("a few interesting facts and viewpoints")
June 15 --- The Good, the Bad and the Unread ("the books that [...] turned them on to romance")
June 18 --- Pink Heart Society ("how they marked [...] the sale of their first book, and their first placement on national bestseller list")
June 22 --- The Misadventures of Super Librarian (Summing up readers' comments to the posts on the tour: "The majority of our readers start young," "Presents is often the first series read," and more).
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Posted by at Wednesday, June 10, 2009 5 comments
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Thursday, September 27, 2007

BBC Radio 4 - Guilty Pleasure: A Hundred Years Of Mills And Boon


You can listen to the programme in full here, though I'm not sure how long it will remain available. Presented by "Stand-up comedian and writer Lucy Porter", this programme was a brief, but relatively balanced account of the history of Mills & Boon that also looks at the relationship between Mills & Boon readers and the novels they buy in such impressive numbers.

Porter begins by reading the blurb of Nicola Marsh's Two-Week Mistress: "Won over by a wombat [...]" and, herself won over by the wombat, she comments: "Brilliant! That actually sounds quite funny. [...] How times have changed!"

The press release describing this programme was misleading, however. Here are some of the key paragraphs from the press release:
The company has remained essentially conservative with no sex before marriage, no inter-racial relationships and, especially, no heroines with deformities allowed. One of Mills and Boon's most prolific writers in the Sixties, Violet Winspear, caused controversy in 1970 when she claimed her heroes had to be "capable of rape".

Lucy examines why Mills and Boon still doesn't deal directly with some elements of modern society, such as same-sex and inter-racial relationships. She finds out who reads these books, and why they remain a guilty pleasure for many women.

She hears from critics who argue the novels are formulaic, badly written, sexist and for people who are unhappy.
The first paragraph relates to information related by Joseph McAleer, author of Passion's Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon. In the programme McAleer relates almost verbatim something he mentions in his book:
In 1960 Anne Britton and Marion Collin published Romantic Fiction: The New Writers' Guide, which included several chapters on writing serial fiction. Britton was fiction editor of Woman's Own and My Home, and later wrote for Mills & Boon as 'Jan Anderson'. [...] Britton and Collin wrote [...] there were certain taboos to avoid:
  • Drunkenness. 'Certainly the heroine is never "tipsy" and rarely does the hero spend his time propping up bars.'
  • Deformity. 'Never a heroine with one leg. No one will buy that story.'
  • Divorce. 'This offends so many readers and especially Eire, which could mean the loss of several thousand copies.'
  • Illegitimate children. 'Never.'
  • Mixed race and colour bar. 'To make a mixed marriage the central situation in a story is to invite a definite rejection at the present time'. (231)
Clearly much has changed since the 1960s, and this is made clear in the programme (even if not in the press release). Mills & Boon novels may include gay secondary characters and the spokesperson for the company said that
homosexuality is okay but we would never actually do books where the two main protagonists are same sex, purely because we are the specialists in heterosexual sex. If you want gay romances there are other publishers who would do it much better than we would do it.
Regarding inter-racial relationships she commented:
I wish we had more of those, actually. The issue there for us is getting the material. We don't get enough manuscripts where people actually explore those kinds of relationships. If they do, I would say to them "don't get hung up on all the political and social issues."
It probably also depends on how you define "inter-racial" because there are a fair number of sheik romances. When we had only seen the press release and were therefore still speculating about what would be in the programme, Kate Walker mentioned Melissa James's novels. Melissa James's first novel,
Her Galahad is a based-on-fact book, gleaned from my Aboriginal History course in 1999. I was away camping with my family, and brought my reader. I read that weekend that the Australian Government had regularly given fake death certificates to members of the Stolen Generation (Aboriginal kids taken from their families) for their parents, so they wouldn't go home and look for their heritage, and blend into white society. Those same kids (the girls) quite often lost their children - told they were dead, and the government adopted them out to white families. And many of those boys ended up in prison, on real or fake charges. (James, in an interview)
James seems to have succeeded in not getting "hung up on all the political and social issues", since the reviewer at The Romance Reader, Thea Davis, comments that 'the mixed race issue [...] is subtly in the background'.

With regards to Violet Winspear's comment about rape, it has to be borne in mind that, as McAleer notes, she made her comment in 1970 and she
aroused considerable controversy by her remarks on the BBC Man Alive programme, and in a companion interview in the Radio Times. Winspear, described as possessing 'man mania' [...] got carried away in revealing her vision of the archetypal romantic hero:

I get my heroes so that they're lean and hard muscled and mocking and sardonic and tough and tigerish and single, of course. Oh and they've got to be rich and then I make it that they're only cynical and smooth on the surface. But underneath they're well, you know, sort of lost and lonely. In need of love but, when roused, capable of breathtaking passion and potency. Most of my heroes, well all of them really, are like that. They frighten but fascinate. They must be the sort of men who are capable of rape: men it's dangerous to be alone in the room with. (257)
One of the Mills & Boon editors responds that clearly in Winspear's time
attitudes about that sort of thing were a bit dodgy by our standards now. On the other hand, [...] there is a fantasy in Mills & Boon which is all about overwhelming passion . I think you have to take it sort of as a code, perhaps. It's a fantasy of sort of lying back and just being made love to by this wonderful man who wants only you and the force of his feelings is almost overwhelming. [...] It's a sort of abdication of responsibility. [...] I would say that rape is a power thing [...] we aren't really going there, all we're talking about is feelings and emotions
The programme quickly charts the history of Mills & Boon. One can find a summary of this on the Mills & Boon website:
When Gerald Mills and Charles Boon joined forces in 1908 to create Mills & Boon Ltd, the company was not founded as a romance fiction publishing house —although its first book was, prophetically, a romance. Since those early days, Harlequin Mills & Boon Ltd has developed from a general fiction publisher to become the UK's undisputed market leader in romance fiction publishing.

From the very beginning, Mills & Boon published in a form and at a price that was within the reach of a wide readership. In the 1930s the company noted the rapid rise of commercial libraries and the growing appetite for escapism during the Depression years. The favourite genre was romance and the company decided to concentrate on hardback romances, a policy which became increasingly successful. Mills & Boon books were initially sold through weekly two-penny libraries and their distinctive brown binding led them to become known as "the books in brown".

With the decline of lending libraries in the late 1950s, the company's most successful move was to realise that there would remain a strong market for romance novels, but that sales would depend on readers having easy access to reasonably priced books. As a result Mills & Boon romance became widely available from newsagents across the country. [...]

In 1957 Harlequin began buying the rights to romance novels from the English firm Mills & Boon Ltd. So successful were these Doctor Nurse romances that the Canadian Company began to concentrate on selling them and by 1964 romance fiction comprised the entire Harlequin list.

In the late 1960s Harlequin began a period of extraordinary expansion that propelled it into the international stage following the 1971 acquisition of Mills & Boon Ltd, then the largest romance publisher in the English speaking world. By the end of the decade, Harlequin's overseas acquisitions and partnerships were taking the company's brand of love stories to bookshelves around the world.
There are some critical voices on the programme, primarily those of Mary Evans, Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Kent, and novelist Celia Brayfield. Mary Evans, one of whose recent publications is Love: An Unromantic Discussion in which she "argues that we should abandon love in its romanticized and commercialized form", says that "I think they're very formulaic. I think they're formulaic in their endings, I think they're formulaic in their construction and I think they're formulaic in their language." Gill Sanderson responds by making a comparison with Shakespeare's sonnets and saying that there is a "set of rules that you stick to but within those rules there is an almost infinite variety of things you can do".

Celia Brayfield states of Mills & Boon romances that "the language is extremely tired and hackneyed. I do think they make an effort to remove clichés but you can almost see the holes where they've cut them out. I think they're very mediocre and competent in literary terms and not more than that. It's a kind of lowest common denominator of reading for people who can only just about read." It's perhaps worth noting that Brayfield has written "A how-to book for writers, about the theory and techniques of popular fiction, with illustrations from the work of over twenty best-selling novelists." Brayfield has also criticised Jane Austen:
"I think she betrays her time and I'm always gob smacked by what she ignored," says Celia Brayfield, author and lecturer at Brunel University. "She focused on such a narrow strain of human reality. Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't the Napoleonic War going on at the time when she was writing, she doesn't mention it. There is no poverty in her novels, no corruption, ambition, wickedness or war. Yes her wit is enchanting and her human observations enduringly accurate, but the world she writes about is so tiny. I find it claustrophobic."
I wonder if Brayfield is maybe either a little hard to please or has very particular views about what constitutes a good novel.

There's also this unattributed gem which, I think, really doesn't deserve a response:
What Mills & Boon do, really, is play to the lowest common denominator of the female readership and quite honestly any woman with two neurons to rub together would have serious trouble reading more than one of these books unless she had the flu
and here's another:
It's bad for women to suggest that the whole of their lives will be sorted out if they simply attract the right man. That is not the reality and it stands in the way of women taking responsibility for their own lives and for the lives of their children. Mills & Boon just says "make yourself attractive darling and some lovely bloke will come along and take care of it" and that simply doesn't happen and it also encourages women to be dependent, to underachieve their potential, and to not fully realise themselves as human beings.
Mary Evans then adds that she thinks of a Mills & Boon romance as
the kind of book that is read by somebody who feels that their life is lacking [...] so what they are turning to to make up that missing part is romance. So as I say, I see them as a literature of unhappiness rather than happiness. They're a classic literature for rather miserable, rather disappointed, rather jaundiced people."
Such negative opinions are countered by a variety of M&B authors and readers who point out that they enjoy the books, see them as fun, and can tell the difference between reality and fiction.

  • McAleer, Joseph. Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. [The introduction and a sample chapter are available from here as a pdf.]
Posted by at Thursday, September 27, 2007 16 comments
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