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Friday, October 03, 2008

Negotiating Gender Relations: Penny Jordan's They're Wed Again


At the Feminism and Popular Culture Conference last year, Laura gave a paper on "Feminism Revisits Mills & Boon: Second and Third Wave Contexts and Struggles in Two Mills & Boon Lines," in which she argued that

one can find parallels between the social and economic contexts in which many heroines of the M&B 'Modern' / Harlequin Presents line find themselves, and society as critiqued by Second Wave feminists. One could characterise the line as being one where there is conflict between men and women, creating an impression of a battle of the sexes [...]
This conflict between men and women is typically emphasised by an inequality of power and social status at the beginning of a novel: the hero has the advantage because of his wealth and the power it involves,* while the heroine is often less well off and overall in a more vulnerable position than the hero. Yet by the end of the novel, the external and internal conflicts have been overcome and, as Laura wrote in her blog post, the heroine "has achieved sexual fulfillment, equality within marriage and the freedom to pursue her career should she wish to do so."

When I read Penny Jordan's They're Wed Again (1999/2008) I was forcibly reminded of Laura's paper, not because Jordan's book is a typical M&B Modern romance, but because it's not. They're Wed Again is a second-chance-at-love story about a divorced couple who meet again before the wedding of the heroine's niece due to a mix-up with the invitations. The story of their marriage is told in flashbacks as both protagonists ponder on what went wrong with their marriage and where they made mistakes. This premise in itself is rather unusual: many second-chance-at-love stories within in the Modern line involve some sort of revenge plot** and a hero who thinks himself wronged by the heroine.

What lay at the root of the protagonists' problems in Jordan's novel is just as unusual because it turns a typical Modern / Presents scenario upside down: "It had been a private joke between them in those early days that she was the one with the large salary and the company car, whilst he was the one still eking out a meagre living on a grant" (Jordan 8). Yet the joke soon turns sour when Luc, the hero, feels more and more inadequate: "'It hurt me that I couldn't afford to provide you with the material things you wanted, that I wasn't the one paying the mortgage, that I couldn't go out and order that bed you wanted ...'" (Jordan 71). The financial inequality in their marriage challenges Luc's masculinity and he feels "demeaned" (Jordan 71) because he cannot not fulfill the traditional role of the provider and breadwinner in the family. In the intervening years, however, he has come to realise that it was wrong to let old gender roles dictate his life:

Certainly it had seemed impossible at the time for them to be able to reconcile their growing differences, but in the years since then his position [he is a Maths professor] had given him plenty of opportunity to observe and consider the changes taking place in the way the sexes related to one another and ran their relationships. (Jordan 53)
In hindsight, he now acknowledges, "If I was proud then it was a false pride. My pride should have been in you, in what you were doing for both of us, in what we are achieving by working together." (Jordan 71)

The heroine, on the other hand, used to be a career woman, and at one point her husband "accused her of putting her career above their marriage" (Jordan 39). But just as Luc now views his behaviour in the past in a different light, so does Belle:

[...] she was beginning to respond to a previously unacknowledged need to allow things into her life other than her work, beginning to admit to a sense of awareness that there were certain things she was missing out on [...] (Jordan 39)
In They're Wed Again Jordan thus explicitly discusses gender relations and makes questions of gender and equal opportunities a central focus of her story. In contrast to many other M&B Modern / Harlequin Presents novels, the battle between the sexes took place in the past (and eventually resulted in the break-up of Luc and Belle's marriage). When the story opens, the protagonists are now equal in all ways, and they have also reached a more balanced view on gender relations and on combining career and family. Thus, one could argue that the problems the protagonists face in the past of the novel are those of Second Wave Feminism, while the present stands for Third Wave Feminism and its struggles. Remarkably, this difference is perceived by the characters themselves. Comparing the young couple whose wedding they will attend, with themselves, Luc says, "'Fortunately his generation has a far healthier and more flexible attitude towards interchanging the traditional roles than ours perhaps did'" (Jordan 48, emphasis mine).

In the paper I mentioned at the beginning of this post, Laura argued that issues of Third Wave Feminism are more likely to be found in another line of Harlequin Mills&Boon: in the Romance line: "The second line I looked at is the 'Romance' line and the heroines of this line find themselves in a context which more closely resembles those in which Third Wave Feminists have reached adulthood." And again, she quoted from the submission guidelines: "the guidelines state that the novels must be 'About a hero and heroine who are equal (they need each other, their strengths and weaknesses balance the other's).'" As I have shown, Jordan's novel transcends these guidelines and combines elements from the Modern / Presents line with those from the Romance line.
  • Penny Jordan. They're Wed Again. The Mills & Boon Centenary Collection. Richmond: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2008.
~~~~~~~~

* Indeed, many of the M&B Modern heroes are what I call uber-alpha males: they are not only billionaires, no, they are Greek/Italian/Spanish billionaires because it would seem that the blood runs hotter in the veins of men from southern Europe than in those from dear, old England.

** One author who is great with revenge plots is Lynne Graham: see Claiming His Wife and Child, an anthology published as part of the "Queens of Romance" series in 2006. It contains two novels from 2000 and 2001 respectively, One Night with His Wife and Duarte's Child. As the second title implies, there are also secret babies involved.

28 comments:

  1. I love your offhand footnote:

    "As the second title implies, there are also secret babies involved."

    In what universe but romance would that sentence be instantly comprehensible? "There are also secret babies involved." It makes me smile to type it. The secret baby is such a strange phenomenon.

    On another note, the last time Laura mentioned the Romance/Tender line, I went to look at the guidelines and the books. The titles and descriptions on eHarlequin sound so "Presents"-like (e.g. Found: His Royal Baby and The Millionaire's Nanny Arrangement) that they put me off. On the Mills&Boon site, I couldn't find Tender Romance but the Romance line has similar covers (e.g. Her Millionaire, His Miracle and The Tycoon's Christmas Proposal). Am I looking at the right lines but having trouble decoding the marketing? They look awful to me, but I know I've been fooled by Hqn/M&B marketing in the past.

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  2. On the Mills&Boon site, I couldn't find Tender Romance but the Romance line has similar covers

    Yes, that's because M&B's "Tender" line got renamed and is now called "Romance." Around the same time one of the Silhouette lines (I think the Silhouette Romance line) got blended in with it. So now there's M&B Romance (in the UK) or Harlequin Romance.

    It's been a while since I finished writing that paper (at least, it feels that way to me, even though it's not been much over a year) and I have an impression that the blending may have affected the overall tone of the Romance line a bit. It's difficult to pinpoint how, though, particularly as I haven't been reading it quite as methodically and intensively since I stopped doing the research for that paper.

    Another thing that may have made a difference is that some of the Romance/Tender Romance authors (e.g. Trish Wylie, Ally Blake) seem to have made at least a partial transition to the Modern Heat (Harlequin Presents Collection) line (which was originally called the Modern Extra line). The Modern Heats/HPCs are supposed to be "focusing on the kind of relationships that women between the ages of 18-35 aspire to." I've not read very many of these in comparison with the other two lines, but then, there have been fewer of them published. Julie Cohen had a few novels published as Mod Extras/Modern Heats/HPCs, but she's made a transition out of M&B and into romance/chick lit and is now published by Little Black Dress.

    Hmm. With all these name changes to the lines, authors shifting lines and lines being merged, it's no wonder I feel as though it's been a long time since I wrote the paper.

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  3. I wonder how much the traditional plot of the heroine having less money, perhaps even borderline destitute, is simply a manifestation of upping the stakes in a story. I don't mean this is the ONLY reason at all. Clearly not. But it's traditional plotting in any genre to make the stakes for the protagonist be as high as possible. If the heroine is already self-confident, happy, and independently wealthy, it takes more artistry to make us flip pages. But if she's out hunting for grubs for breakfast, well, gosh, we just gotta find out what happens.

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  4. Paca, there are some romances where the hero is poorer. Loretta Chase's Miss Wonderful, Diane Farr's The Fortune Hunter, Jessica Hart's Her Ready-Made Family (that's from the M&B Tender line) are ones that spring to mind.

    As you say, the "upping the stakes" explanation may not be the only one. I can see how that's a factor, but the fact that in romance the protagonist to whom this particular problem tends to occur is the female one, whereas the stakes tend to be upped for male characters in other ways, does suggest something about gender/power dynamics, I think.

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  5. Laura wrote: When the story opens, the protagonists are now equal in all ways.

    How did this come about? Did she lose her high-flying job? Did he invent Rubik's cube and make a fortune? I really wonder, because it might add to the question of gender-based financial dynamics re: "success" and "failure."

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  6. Tal, the post was written by Sandra. I've got the novella in my TBR pile.

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  7. rfp wrote:
    The secret baby is such a strange phenomenon.

    No stranger than the lost king in fantasy fiction, I suppose. :)

    They look awful to me, but I know I've been fooled by Hqn/M&B marketing in the past.

    When they renamed the line, they also came up with these awful in-year-face-pink covers. The old orange covers were much nicer. When the good people at M&B switched from the even older yellow covers of the Enchanted line to the orange of the Tender Romance line in 2000, they also began to use photographs as cover pictures, which was something I quite liked. Well, in most cases anyway.

    Here's a list of my 13 favourite M&B novels (Susan Fox's The Prodigal Wife is also my favourite #1 when it comes to romance novels in general).


    Laura wrote:
    Yes, that's because M&B's "Tender" line got renamed and is now called "Romance." Around the same time one of the Silhouette lines (I think the Silhouette Romance line) got blended in with it.

    Argh, I wasn't aware of that last part (but it explains all these 'new' author names ...). And of course, they've changed the guidelines and description of the line, too.

    With all these name changes to the lines, authors shifting lines and lines being merged, it's no wonder I feel as though it's been a long time since I wrote the paper.

    This shifting around is definitely not fair to us poor academics. I propose to write a letter to Harlequin and M&B in protest against such highly irregular practices.


    pacatrue wrote:
    I wonder how much the traditional plot of the heroine having less money, perhaps even borderline destitute, is simply a manifestation of upping the stakes in a story.

    That's part of it, no doubt; after all, making the hero filthy rich is a nice way to make him (socially and financially) more powerful than the heroine in contemporaries. I'll write about this more later; at the moment I'm in a bit of a hurry.

    Tal wrote:
    Did she lose her high-flying job? Did he invent Rubik's cube and make a fortune?

    She is still very successful in her job and he's become a Maths (!!!) professor, a leading scholar in his field.

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  8. I too was surprised he became a maths prof. How often is that a hunky profession?! (Says the grad student, albeit not in math.)

    Anyway, yes, the plotting factor is certainly just one reason in many for the less powerful female heroine. However, isn't the relatively well-off lady who finds love with a cowboy, native american, etc., also somewhat common?

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  9. Surely one of the main points of M&Bs is about fantasy and escapism. Hence the wealthy, powerful, in-charge hero.

    Rich, successful, gorgeous? Poor, struggling-but-obviously-noble? Hmm, call me shallow, but I know which I would choose to escape with.

    When I do pick up a M&B though, it's a Modern Heat, where the men and women tend to be a bit more equal, and the men don't generally use their wealth and power to blackmail/coerce/threaten the heroine.

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  10. pacatrue said...
    "However, isn't the relatively well-off lady who finds love with a cowboy, native american, etc., also somewhat common?"


    It's certainly a very common theme in the western genre novel in the US, all the way back to Zane Grey. Probably Majesty's Rancho is the most striking example in Grey's work. There's also Peter B. Kyne, The Enchanted Hill. Both of those were best-sellers in their day.

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  11. Here's a list of my 13 favourite M&B novels

    Thanks, Sandra!

    Laura, I would selfishly love to see more analysis like your "Feminism Revisits Mills & Boon" paper, but it must be like being a geographer specializing in Eastern Europe: there's a bounty of material, but simply defining boundaries and keeping up could occupy a whole career.

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  12. As a kind of postscript for pacatrue, I think that its frequency in western genre fiction goes back to the prevalence in the American 19th century mid-set of the "nature's nobleman" theme from Rousseau, sometimes combined with the "noble savage" theme. There tends to be a subtheme in these of the weakling nature of [male] easterners, especially those involved in commerce/banking/clerking and other basically indoor occupations, and visiting Englishmen.

    In some ways, the prevalence of cowboys and ranchers in series such as Harlequin American Romance continues this. There are far more of them as a percentage of the overall population in books than in real life. That may be one of the reasons why the authors are now using construction contractors, landscapers, and other outdoor occupations. In the 1920s and 1930s, American heros sometimes ran logging or mining companies, but they're apparently "out" now on the grounds of being ecologically unsound.

    Sometimes I think one could do an interesting sociological study on the topic of "what's an acceptable occupation for a romance hero," arranged by decade. :)

    I've often wondered if the attitudes in the M&B novels weren't a good generation behind the times. I graduated from college in 1961 and got my Ph.D. in 1967. It wasn't our contemporaries who -- with some exceptions, of course -- had trouble with competent, successful women; it was mostly the older professors, and not all of them.

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  13. pacatrue said...
    "I too was surprised he became a maths prof. How often is that a hunky profession?! (Says the grad student, albeit not in math.)"

    It also comes to my mind that several people who reviewed Jo Beverley's Hazard (which is one of my all-time favorite romances) found that the wish of Racecombe de Vere, now that he had survived the Napoleonic Wars, to become a secretary/archivist or estate librarian of some type, to be sadly unheroic.

    It seemed to me like a perfectly reasonable ambition :)

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  14. OT: Sorry I haven't had time today to properly join the discussion; I'm off to a conference tomorrow and consequently I've been running around very much like a headless chicken the whole afternoon...

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  15. I propose to write a letter to Harlequin and M&B in protest against such highly irregular practices.

    You could try, Sandra, but somehow I don't think they'll give our needs a high priority when they think about the marketing of the novels.

    It would be rather nice though if, in compensation for these changes, they sent us lots of free books. ;-) But somehow I don't see that happening either. I suppose it's for the best, so that we can retain our academic independence!

    isn't the relatively well-off lady who finds love with a cowboy, native american, etc., also somewhat common?

    Paca, Virginia's already given an answer to this and I haven't been reading the genre nearly as long as she has, but my experience, certainly with M&Bs, is that this isn't common in the modern romances. There are certainly plenty of cowboys, but they're not generally poorer than their heroines.

    Surely one of the main points of M&Bs is about fantasy and escapism. Hence the wealthy, powerful, in-charge hero.

    But Lucy, there are so many different M&B lines and some of them are more escapist (if by that one's meaning distant from the reader's reality) than others. In addition, a "wealthy, powerful, in-charge hero" isn't every reader's fantasy man. One of the things I find so interesting about Harlequin/Mills & Boon is the way it seems to appeal to so many different preferences. Each of the lines (and there are a lot of them) seems to be quite carefully targetted.

    I would selfishly love to see more analysis like your "Feminism Revisits Mills & Boon" paper, but it must be like being a geographer specializing in Eastern Europe: there's a bounty of material, but simply defining boundaries and keeping up could occupy a whole career.

    It is indeed rather tricky, RfP. I think it's important to be fairly specific about the time-period and lines one's writing about with regards to this kind of topic because there can be a lot of variation between lines and from one decade to another (that's roughly the time-periods jay Dixon divides M&B's history into, and it's probably a good rough guide to the time-scale of the changes, though there are bound to be overlaps). I was also quite careful to identify variations within each line, because those certainly exist too, even within a single time-period.

    Your enthusiasm for the topic explored in the paper is very encouraging because my other problem with this paper was that the peer reviewers at the journal I sent it to wanted more about feminism. However, that too is an area with lots of different trends and varieties. I think it would be difficult to go into great detail about both areas (i.e the history of feminism and the specifics of the various M&B lines) in a short-ish essay.

    Sometimes I think one could do an interesting sociological study on the topic of "what's an acceptable occupation for a romance hero," arranged by decade. :)

    I think you're right, Virginia. It would be very interesting, and I think it might reveal some of the subtle kinds of politics (rather than party politics) which make their appearance in the genre, which is a slightly tangential angle to the main topic of discussion on a current thread about politics and romance at the SB's which I went off on.

    several people who reviewed Jo Beverley's Hazard (which is one of my all-time favorite romances) found that the wish of Racecombe de Vere, now that he had survived the Napoleonic Wars, to become a secretary/archivist or estate librarian of some type, to be sadly unheroic.

    It seemed to me like a perfectly reasonable ambition :)


    Yes, I found it an ambition I could very much relate to, and I thought Beverley did an extremely good job of conveying the hero and heroine's passion for their subject of study. Clearly, though, if some people felt it was unheroic, not all readers agreed :-(

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  16. Sometimes I think one could do an interesting sociological study on the topic of "what's an acceptable occupation for a romance hero," arranged by decade. :)

    Virginia, I had the same thought about heroines a few weeks ago, and started to tag my books in LibraryThing by female lead's occupation. I got distracted (which is probably inherent to the process), but apparently I've recently read about 2 artists, 2 novelists, 2 hitmen and 1 hitwoman, 2 courtesans, 2 computer gurus, a cat burglar, an image consultant, a model, a nun, a radio host, and an economist. Also an alligator, a commercial fishing boat, 2 sailboats, and a cruise ship. You see: very distracting.

    isn't the relatively well-off lady who finds love with a cowboy, native american, etc., also somewhat common?

    As Virginia said, that's easily found in American historical romances (single-titles), probably playing on the idea that women are scarce in frontier towns and the only refined "ladies" in the West are fresh off the train from the East. That type of dynamic is still operative in isolated areas. For example there's a magazine called Alaska Men, whose sole purpose is to lure more women from the "lower 48". Its advertising spin is rather in the style of real estate. "Isolated area with grouchy hermit and unheated shack" becomes "Unspoiled wilderness and simple, organic living with a true individualist". There was also this kerfuffle a few weeks ago in an Australian town with few women.

    I think a new form of the rich woman/cowboy relationship is sometimes depicted in contemporary romances, where a big-city woman gets involved with a farmer or small-town man. (I have a feeling it's often about city/country culture clash, which may be a bit different from your point.) I saw a rash of those in American and Australian 1980s-90s categories. Even in Robyn Donald's The Final Proposal (1997), in which the "farmer" is extremely well-to-do, he refuses to fall for a city-slicker image consultant because she mightn't like the isolation.

    several people who reviewed Jo Beverley's Hazard... found that the wish of Racecombe de Vere, now that he had survived the Napoleonic Wars, to become a secretary/archivist or estate librarian of some type, to be sadly unheroic.

    Ah, too bad. That solution was perfect for those characters. It seems strange to expect all military men to be similar personalities, particularly in times when *every*one went to war. Romance acknowledges that some men come home damaged, some use their wartime skills for espionage or entrepreneurship, and some are unable to settle into quiet civilian life--but I don't see enough of those who come home eager to get back to their studies, farms, teaching, etc.

    the peer reviewers at the journal I sent it to wanted more about feminism. ... I think it would be difficult to go into great detail about both areas (i.e the history of feminism and the specifics of the various M&B lines) in a short-ish essay.

    I'm sorry to hear it, Laura. That's a huge pitfall in working across disciplines. Perhaps the Romance Scholars list could help come up with a few papers on the history of feminism that you could cite in a *very* short literature review? Or one particular feminist-historical perspective for you to work against? Or duck the question and add a discussion of why it's difficult to directly correlate feminism (with its vague periods and the time lags required to establish a change in attitude) with publishing? Or look for a journal that's better at finding cross-disciplinary reviewers?

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  17. Virginia, are you thinking of books like Harold Bell Wright's THE WINNING OF BARBARA WORTH, and the novels of Frank H. Spearman, upon which I cut my teeth (WHISPERING SMITH, THE DAUGHTER OF A MAGNATE, NAN OF MUSIC MOUNTAIN)? The heroes are engineers and lawmen, and some of the heroines are heiresses (though Nan is the daughter of a tribe of outlaws). But, as in the classic THE VIRGINIAN, the heroes are often easterners who came west where men are men, so they add culture to brawniness.

    I remember a story from one of the Signet anthologies in which the hero was a veteran of Waterloo. His elder brother had ruined the estate and was going to lose the whole thing; and his only asset was his ability to charm anyone into buying anything. And he absolutely HATED war. He wound up marrying a young Quaker widow and going off to Nantucket to help her run a ropewalk, accompanied by her former mother-in-law and three kittens.

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  18. Talpianna, I think that since my memory is highly visual, part of what I'm thinking about consists of illustrations from the popular magazines of the pre-WWI era (Charles Dana Gibson et al.) in which the hero (blond, muscular, wearing corduroys and a cable-knit turtleneck) is standing next to the heroine, looking with contempt at a dandy in evening clothes with a receding hairline and chin to match :)

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  19. rfp said, "I think a new form of the rich woman/cowboy relationship is sometimes depicted in contemporary romances, where a big-city woman gets involved with a farmer or small-town man. (I have a feeling it's often about city/country culture clash, which may be a bit different from your point.)"

    This is rampant in tv and movies today. The most specific thing that comes to mind is the recent reality TV show "Farmer Wants a Wife" in which 10 "city girls" go to meet a hunky farmer. My wife actually watched a couple episodes and the whole thing revolved around city folk having no ability to cope with anything country. While I don't know if the women were actually more wealthy than the farmer or not, they were certainly supposed to be creatures of contemporary American urban culture sipping $5 coffees and just assuming certain creature comforts. It doesn't sound particularly romantic though, does it?

    However, mostly I just wanted to say thank you. After reading these comments, I now have the theme to Green Acres in my head.

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  20. Virginia, the Gibson hero was more likely to be an athletic-type aristocrat--the sort who rowed for his college. Don't forget that he illustrated THE PRISONER OF ZENDA. I don't know if he ever illustrated the fiction of Richard Harding Davis, but they do seem to have been made for each other.

    I was googling unsuccessfully for a Gibson illustration that proved my point, and was surprised that he did so many satirical cartoons. Almost Hogarthian at times.

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  21. Or look for a journal that's better at finding cross-disciplinary reviewers?

    I think perhaps the problem was that I wasn't being interdisciplinary enough for them. I suspect a journal that was dedicated to the romance genre might be more favourable to what was quite a romance-heavy paper.

    mostly I just wanted to say thank you. After reading these comments, I now have the theme to Green Acres in my head.

    I have to thank you, too, Paca, because after looking at the opening sequence of that video on YouTube, I feel a bit a bit dizzy!

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  22. Talpianna, there are three reasonably inexpensive books on turn-of-the [20th] -century illustrators:

    Edmund Vincent Gillon, Jr., and Henry C. Pitz, intro., The Gibson Girl and Her America: The Best Drawings of Charles Dana Gibson (New York: Dover Publications, 1969).

    The nature of Gibson's hero depended on the story he was illustrating. When I was little, my grandparents had bound issues of The Saturday Evening Post ca. 1900. A lot of the story heroes weren't aristocrats (even by American standards of aristocracy).

    Tina Skinner, ed., Harrison Fisher: Defining the American Beauty. A Schiffer Book for Designers and Collectors (Schiffer Publishing, 1999).

    John Fleskes, Joseph Clement Coll: A Legacy in Line. Essays by Nick Meglin and Gary Gianni. (Santa Cruz, CA: Flesk Publications, 2004).

    The only original edition by Richard Harding Davis I have on my shelves is The King's Jackal. It was illustrated by Gibson.

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  23. Laura,

    I would be curious to know what was meant by the reviewers who told you you "needed more feminism". As much as I love the sound of that it certainly sounds vague!

    Also, for Sandra, Laura, or whomever cares enough to answer this probably very naive question: what counts as a "trend", or a "common theme", etc. The essays discussed don't seem to have quantitative data, so I'm curious about how many times a theme (say, a secret baby!) has to show up to count as either.

    (I'm thinking back to the JSR article that said 45% of romances had rapes in them, and I wondered, "How on earth would you arrive at this number? Do you have to read every one?")

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  24. I would be curious to know what was meant by the reviewers who told you you "needed more feminism". As much as I love the sound of that it certainly sounds vague!

    The vagueness is because I was giving an ultra-compressed summary of what they wrote. I don't think it would be appropriate to copy out their comments in full here, but if you like you could get in touch with me via the contact form on my website.

    what counts as a "trend", or a "common theme", etc. The essays discussed don't seem to have quantitative data, so I'm curious about how many times a theme (say, a secret baby!) has to show up to count as either.

    Some people have done statistical analysis of elements of romances, but I didn't. It really wouldn't have been very meaningful unless I'd decided on my sample size and then chosen the novels at random, which I didn't, because I was specifically searching for novels which mentioned feminism. I'm careful to be vague and not state things like "45% of romances have X in them" and I also explained why I was going to be vague and not do a statistical analysis.

    I suppose the JSR article (which was a meta-analysis) might have been slightly misrepresenting the finding. According to the version here, the authors say that: "One review of historical romance novels found that 54% included the rape of the lead female character (Thurston, 1987)." It could be that Thurston found that 54% of a small sample of romances had rapes in them but the authors of the JSR have phrased it so that someone might think it meant 54% of all romances. Is it possible that's what could have happened? I'd really have to go and look up Thurston to be sure.

    As for how I come to the conclusion that something's a "trend" or a "common theme," if I've read discussions about it on lots of romance boards/blogs, and/or if I've read quite a lot of romances that include it, then I think it's probably safe enough to call that thing a common theme.

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  25. Laura,

    Thanks for the helpful lesson on methodology! I don't want to take this too far afield, but it's interesting to me what counts as salient in determining how common something is. You say that romance boards and blogs are part of the picture, and that's so interesting: I'm guessing they would be a newer but very crucial -- assuming participants don't differ markedly from the average romance reader (or assuming one narrows one's claims to that subset of readers) -- source of information for the kinds of analyses you and others are working on.

    I didn't mean to pry about your article: thanks for offering to give me the details. If I thought I could be more of a help than a nuisance, I would certainly take you up on it.

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  26. 82% of all statistics are made up out of whole cloth.

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  27. Thanks for the helpful lesson on methodology!

    If I were you, which I'm not, because I'm me, I wouldn't pay that much attention to my opinions about methodology. I haven't thought the issues through very deeply. I try to steer clear of statistics because, as RfP could tell you, they're not my strong point.

    You say that romance boards and blogs are part of the picture, and that's so interesting: I'm guessing they would be a newer but very crucial -- assuming participants don't differ markedly from the average romance reader (or assuming one narrows one's claims to that subset of readers) -- source of information for the kinds of analyses you and others are working on.

    For me personally, they're useful because there are a lot of sub-genres I either don't read or wouldn't be able to get hold of in large numbers from my local libraries. The easiest romances to get hold of in the UK are Harlequin/Mills & Boons, so I do feel fairly confident in my knowledge of some of the M&B lines. However, only relatively few of the lines are available for direct sale in the UK, which again makes it more difficult for me to learn about those lines.

    When I'm writing here at TMT I allow myself to do quite a bit of speculating about topics I don't know thoroughly and I think it's OK to be a little bit less rigorous in my blog posts with regards to the amount of evidence I provide to back up my statements than I would be when writing an academic paper. That's partly because this is a format where the people who comment bring their own expertise to the discussion.

    When I'm writing on here it's also easy to link directly to websites and blogs. They definitely inform my thinking about the genre and have given me a wider (albeit second-hand) knowledge of it.

    I didn't mean to pry about your article: thanks for offering to give me the details. If I thought I could be more of a help than a nuisance, I would certainly take you up on it.

    I didn't think you were prying! And I think you're being very modest in suggesting that you'd be more of a nuisance than a help.

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  28. I think perhaps the problem was that I wasn't being interdisciplinary enough for them. I suspect a journal that was dedicated to the romance genre might be more favourable to what was quite a romance-heavy paper.

    That's tricky. A romance-oriented journal might "get" it as is, but a broader audience would see it if you changed the paper substantially. Not an easy choice to make. I'm not sure from what you've said whether there's some aspect of that criticism that would apply regardless of where you publish? If so, that might help you prioritize or decide how far you would have to go to address it. You've probably thought that through already, though.

    I try to steer clear of statistics because, as RfP could tell you, they're not my strong point.

    Clearly not as strong or as pointed as your memory!

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