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Monday, December 23, 2019

Johanna Lindsey Has Died

Romance novelist Johanna Lindsey died Oct. 27 in Nashua, New Hampshire, according to family members. She was 67. [...]

In 1977, Avon Books published Lindsey’s debut novel. (Dayton Daily News)

That first novel was Captive Bride and her most recent novel was Temptation's Darling (2019), published in July.
Together with her well-known contemporaries Kathleen Woodiwiss, Rosemary Rogers and Bertrice Small, Lindsey’s work was an integral part of the ‘Romance Revolution’ which injected sizzling sex scenes into the pages of the romance novel. It was a revolution that contributed to the Americanization of the twentieth-century romance novel. (Hsu-Ming Teo)
A New York Times obituary which I can't access can be found here. However, many readers expressed dissatisfaction with it:

Ella Drake, for example, said it "didn't even try to say what Johanna Lindsey meant to the romance genre and her readers."

Nancy Bozeman pointed out inaccuracies in the obituary, including a typo in the name of Lindsey's first published novel.

Sulheika Snyder observed that Lindsey's "impact on the genre, on writers who came after, was enormous." More responses can be found on this Twitter thread. The Browne Popular Culture Library has tweeted pictures of some of its archival material relating to Lindsey.

Here's an obituary by Kelly Faircloth at Jezebel and another by Maureen Lee Lenker at Entertainment Weekly.

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