CFPs: Recycling, Whiteness, Paper and Asperger's Syndrome

Laura Vivanco

These calls for papers aren't specifically about romance: they're about "cultural recycling," whiteness, "the materiality of literary texts" and Asperger's Syndrome. One could, though, discuss romances in conjunction with all of these issues.

Since fairy tales and references to Shakespeare, occur fairly frequently in romance, and since in For Love and Money I took a quick look at some romances which were reworkings of the Pygmalion myth, and others which reworked the tale of Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady, it seemed to me that romance fiction is full of "allusions and echoes."

Allusions and echoes – cultural recycling and recirculation

An international colloquium at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK

June 16-17, 2012

Deadline for paper/panel submissions is March 30, 2012.

The many ways in which stories are recirculated is astounding – from relatively straightforward retellings of fairy tales and classical myths, to feminist, queer, postcolonial or ecocritical subversions of central themes, to fan fiction’s adaptations of beloved characters and story worlds.

The international colloquium "Allusions and echoes – cultural recycling and recirculation" is an opportunity to explore the various ways in which texts communicate over borders of space, time, genre and medium. What themes, motifs, backgrounds and details capture the imagination of authors, readers and viewers? How are they recycled and recirculated from one period, or one audience, to another? How and why do they gain currency again and again? Contributors are invited to cast their net widely and consider not only contemporary works, such as The Canongate Myth Series (2005-2011) and Cinderfella (1960, 2013) but also older texts, such as Chaucer’s The Physician’s Tale and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. 

More information here.

Apparently "Interracial and interethnic marriages are at an all-time high in the US" (BBC) but I've not seen a lot of work on race in romances (other than The Sheik and romances specifically marketed as being about characters of a particular racial group) since Stephanie Burley's "Shadows & Silhouettes: The Racial Politics of Category Romance" was published in 2000 (in Paradoxa 5.13-14). Abstracts for the following conference are due by today, but maybe it'll still be of interest:

2nd Global Conference
Images of Whiteness

Saturday 7th July 2012 – Monday 9th July 2012
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

Since the publication of Richard Dyer’s seminal study 'White' in 1997, academics have increasingly turned critical attention to the subject of racial whiteness. Publications include historical accounts detailing the emergence of whiteness as a racial category, cultural studies exploring the representation and construction of white identities in popular culture, film and television scholars examining narratives about white people, reflecting white themes, white obsessions, and white anxieties. Consistent with the shift in critical studies from minority identity formations to consider ‘central’ identities – masculinity, heterosexuality – the study of whiteness is increasingly understood as central to understanding the operation of ‘race’ as a form of social categorisation. Inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary perspectives are sought from those engaged in any field relevant to the study of whiteness including media and film studies, performance and creative writing, cultural theory, sociology, psychology and medical approaches including cosmetic surgery, and other cognate areas

More information here.

Has publication in the mass-market format affected perceptions of romance novels?

Distinctions that Matter: Popular Literature and Material Culture

Essays are invited for a special issue of Belphégor that seeks to explore the relationship between distinctions of taste and textual production by examining how the materiality of literary texts influences and perhaps even determines their cultural status. In the nineteenth century, for example, printing and binding became cheaper, faster, and more easily accessible than ever before, which resulted in an explosion of print material. As printing costs decreased and print runs increased, the price of books became cheaper and publishers were able to attract more readers, which led to a greater demand for new content. The cultural impact of this shift was twofold. On the one hand, this decrease in printing costs lowered the cultural entrance level, which resulted in the expansion of popular or trivial literature as well as a wide range of new popular formats, such as dime novels, pulp magazines, comic books, and paperbacks. On the other hand, publishers also attempted to mimic the conventions of exclusiveness through printing and binding techniques in order to preserve the highbrow status of literature as a marker of class distinctions. This led to the rise of competing formats that attempted to challenge the perceived lowbrow status of popular literature, such as deluxe editions and graphic novels. As the divide between highbrow and lowbrow taste widened, the materiality of the text became the primary site where the cultural status of popular literature was both constructed and contested. The same issues also inform cultural debates concerning digital media, as cultural distinctions are now being reconfigured through new forms of electronic display in the post-print era.

Abstracts must be submitted by 1 March 2012. More details here.

After the success of Jennifer Ashley's The Madness of Sir Ian Mackenzie and the recent publication of Eloisa James's The Duke is Mine in which the heroine

is torn between a duke with an Asperger's-like inability to express emotion, who relies on logic, and her fiancé Rupert, who is all emotion with almost no logic. (interview with the author)

I wondered if there was some material in romance novels which would be relevant to the following volume:

Bright Lines: Culture On the Autism Spectrum

"Am I on the spectrum?" asks Abed Nadir, a character on the show Community. He then provides an answer: "None of your business." His joke presumes that the audience will understand this reference to the autism spectrum, and Community introduces the topic of Asperger's Syndrome in its pilot episode. Since the publication of Temple Grandin's work on autism in 1986, there has been a textual explosion of work on Asperger's Syndrome and the autism spectrum. Changes to the DSM-V will replace Asperger's Syndrome with Autistic Spectrum Disorder, a broadening that could threaten the culture that aspie/AS-identified people have produced in the form of literature and visual media. This volume would explore representations of autism within popular culture.

Abstracts are due by 1 May 2012. More details here.

What the Dickens! Lorraine Heath's In Bed with the Devil

Laura Vivanco

What if

• Oliver Twist's parents had been legally married and then, when Oliver was still a child, had been murdered in front of his very eyes
• Oliver had joined Fagin's gang immediately afterwards
• Mr Brownlow had, instead of being an old friend of Oliver's father, been an earl and Oliver's grandfather
• the evil Monks had been an uncle rather than a half-brother and had been murdered by the child Oliver
• Oliver had grown up, was now Lucian Langdon, Earl of Claybourne, but wasn't convinced he was truly the old man's grandson because he can't remember his supposed parents?

That's the premise of Lorraine Heath's In Bed with the Devil. It can be read for free online until 23 December 2008 as part of Avon's Love Gives Back promotion. As usual I'm not writing a review (although you can find reviews here, here, here, here, and here), but I've tried to avoid giving spoilers about aspects of the plot which don't relate to Dickens's novel. Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist is also available as a free online read. You can find a synopsis of its plot here, here and here.

I tend to find intertextuality of this sort amusing and interesting because it challenges the reader to find the similarities as well as the differences between the two texts and to identify the references to the original which appear in the newer novel. The fact that Heath is drawing on Oliver Twist wasn't immediately apparent, but it gradually became more so, until eventually inescapable proof of the connection was provided by the novel the heroine (Lady Catherine Mabry) has chosen to read to her dying father: "With a sigh, she sat back and lifted a book from the bedside table. 'Let's see what sort of trouble Oliver and the Artful Dodger are going to get into today, shall we?' " (47). The novel is mentioned again at various points in the novel, including when Catherine also "told her father the tale of the Earl of Claybourne. He'd seemed as entertained by the story as he was by Oliver Twist" (339). Finally, on her wedding day, Catherine learns that Lucian's full name is Lucian Oliver Langdon:

Oliver.
Holding his gaze as he gave her his vows, she wondered how much of his youth was contained in the words of the story that she'd recently read to her father. It seemed improbable, but not impossible. But it was a puzzle for another day. (365-66)

Within her novel Heath thus toys with the concept of reversing the direction of the source of inspiration. She proposes that the story of her own fictional character (based on Dickens's Oliver) may have been the inspiration for Oliver Twist. In fact, it is thought that Dickens may have based his Oliver on the real-life Robert Blincoe.

In addition to borrowing from Dickens to create her hero's backstory, Heath also pays homage to Dickens's work in the choice of names she gives her characters. Fagin is transformed into "Feagan, the kidsman who managed our rather notorious den of child thieves" (2) and Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger, becomes Jack Dodger:

"Dodger." In their youth, he'd been Dodger more often than Jack. He'd been skilled at dodging the hands that wanted to grab him when the target realized his pockets were being picked. (91)

As mentioned at Wikipedia,

In the tradition of Restoration Comedy and Henry Fielding, Dickens fits his characters with appropriate names. Oliver himself, although "badged and ticketed" as a lowly orphan and named according to an alphabetical system is, in fact, "all of a twist."[...] Toby Crackit’s is a reference to his chosen profession–housebreaking.

Other children in the gang Lucian belonged to derived their names from their professions: Dr William Graves spent his "youth as a grave robber" (207), Inspector James Swindler is so-called because "When I was young and in search of a name, it seemed appropriate" (182) and Lucian himself was known as "Luke Locke. I was very skilled at picking locks. Most of us were orphans, didn't know our real names anyway. But even for those who did, Feagan always insisted on changing their names. When they came to him, they started life anew" (262). For her part Frannie is "Frannie Darling because that's how Feagan referred to me. 'Frannie, darling, rub my feet.' 'Frannie, darling, fetch me a cuppa gin.' And so when your grandfather asked me my name, I said Frannie Darling" (52-53).

Lucian, unlike Oliver, never spends any time in the workhouse but Heath does include a reworked version of the famous scene in which Oliver asks for more food. Here it's Lucian, Earl of Claybourne, who's offering food while another little boy asks for more:

"Did you know they have lemonade, pastries, and lollipops over there? Would you like to buy some for you and your mum?" Claybourne asked.
Whit nodded enthusiastically, his weariness suddenly cured.
"Hold out your hand," Claybourne ordered.
Whit did.
"Fold it up." Claybourne demonstrated, closing his hand into a fist. Then he snapped his fingers. "Open your hand."
The boy did, his eyes growing wide at the ha'penny resting on his palm. [...]
He turned back to Whit. "Close your hand around the coin and say 'Please, sir, may I have more?'"
Whit closed his hand around the coin. "Please, sir, may I have more?"
Claybourne snapped his fingers. Whit opened his hand, his eyes wider than before. The ha'penny was gone. A sixpence rested on his palm. (219-220)¹

Dodger's life-story is also altered. Catherine says of Dickens's Dodger that: "My heart did go out to the Artful Dodger, though. I was sorry he was transported. I hear it's a very harsh life, although I suspect there are those who deserve it" (340). Heath's heart seems to have gone out to the Artful Dodger too, and so instead of having him transported, she allows him to become a successful businessman who is the hero of Between the Devil and Desire, which is the sequel to In Bed with the Devil.

Some of the social themes of Dickens's work also reappear, in a somewhat modified form, in Heath's. Here are Catherine and Lucian discussing Dickens's work:

"I've been reading Oliver Twist to my father. It's the story -"
"I've read it."
"Did Dickens have the right of it?"
"He painted a very accurate portrait of life in the rookeries, yes." (162)

Heath continues the social critique present in Dickens's novel by having Lucian demonstrate concern about the treatment of young criminals. He's written to The Times: "what I argued in my letter was that children, even if over the age of seven, should not be held accountable for understanding the law and, therefore, shouldn't be punished as though they had the reasoning power of an adult" (163).

Lucian also explains that these children have not been "taught what is right and what is wrong" (163). He then admits that "I knew better. I don't know how I knew, but I did" (164). This is, of course, explicable if he really is the Earl of Claybourne and had been taught right from wrong by his parents before their deaths. Dickens's Oliver also has different moral values from his companions, but the reader was perhaps supposed to ascribe this to some innate genetic qualities:

Oliver [...], who has an air of refinement remarkable for a workhouse boy, proves to be of gentle birth. Although he has been abused and neglected all his life, he recoils, aghast, at the idea of victimizing anyone else.This apparently hereditary gentlemanliness makes Oliver Twist something of a changeling tale, not just an indictment of social injustice. (Wikipedia)

Another issue which is touched on in Dickens's novel is domestic violence. Sikes murders his girlfriend, Nancy. It is this issue rather than that of social justice which provides the driving force of Heath's novel. Interestingly,

The marks of domestic violence were not invisible in one crucial sphere of mid-nineteenth-century discourse. Stories, novels, and essays proliferate that relate incidents of violence against working-class women, prostitutes, and "fallen women," whether publicly in the streets, or domestically in their squalid homes [...]. Locating violence against women in the poor and working classes seems to have been an attempt by bourgeois society to quarantine the pestilence of violence to the "lower orders." (Lawson and Shakinovsky 8)

and

Descriptions such as "helpless women," and "woefully unwomanly, slatternly, coarse," indicate that the writers expect their bourgeois readers to recognize the victim "type" but not themselves to identify with her misfortune.
This discourse is quite naturally carried over to fictional representations of poor and working-class women's bodies [...]. For instance, Sikes's murder of Nancy in Dickens's Oliver Twist, grotesque and horrific as it is, is true to the "type" bourgeois readers are to expect from such degraded characters. (Lawson and Shakinovsky 9)

Heath, by contrast, locates domestic violence at the heart of a relationship between two people at the very top of the social hierarchy. The Duke of Avendale beats Winnie, his wife and Catherine's friend:

Tears rolled from Winnie's eyes. "Oh, Catherine, sometimes he terrifies me so. They say his first wife was clumsy and fell down the stairs. And his second slipped in the bedchamber and banged her head so hard on the floor that it killed her. I knew these tales, but I didn't doubt the veracity of them, not until after I was wed. He is so charming when he is not angry. Oh, but when he is displeased, he is most frightening." (42-43)

This suggests, correctly, that domestic violence is not solely an issue for the poor and the working classes, but is also one which can affect families from all parts of society. It also ensures that, although London has changed very considerably since Dickens's day, Heath's novel, though set in the same period, highlights an issue which is of relevance today.
--------

• Heath, Lorraine. In Bed with the Devil. New York: Avon, 2008.
• Lawson, Kate and Lynn Shakinovsky. The Marked Body: Domestic Violence in Mid-nineteenth-century Literature. SUNY Press, 2002. (Via Google Book Search)

1 The original scene is in Chapter 2 of Oliver Twist:

Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said: somewhat alarmed at his own temerity:

"Please, sir, I want some more."

The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and then clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralysed with wonder; the boys with fear.

"What!" said the master at length, in a faint voice.

"Please, sir," replied Oliver, "I want some more."

The master aimed a blow at Oliver's head with the ladle; pinioned him in his arms; and shrieked aloud for the beadle.

The photo of the cover of Oliver Twist is from Wikimedia Commons. The word "dickens", which I capitalised in my title so that it also referred to the author, is "used to express annoyance or surprise when asking questions: what the dickens is going on?" and was originally "a euphemism for 'devil'" (Compact Oxford English Dictionary).

Rosy Thornton - More Than Love Letters

Laura Vivanco

Rosy Thornton's More Than Love Letters isn't exactly a typical romance, either in form or in content, though it does have "a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending" (Romance Writers of America's definition of a romance novel). Rosy herself describes it as "romantic comedy" but as the reviewer at Trashionista observed, it "manages to balance serious issues with being the funniest book I’ve read for a while". The Amazon reviews highlight the ways in which the novel combines comedy and tragedy, multiple perspectives (from characters who span the generations) and

was completely unlike any other 'chick lit' I have ever read, by turns satirical yet warm-hearted, serious and also farcical in the best and original sense of the word. The central story focuses on the unlikely, yet touching, romance between an MP [Member of Parliament] and a young woman called Margaret. The story also tackles issues, great and small, from homelessness and asylum seekers to dog fouling and unfair taxes. (Liz)

Over at AAR there's a thread about cultural differences, in which EllenB asked whether "romances accurately reflect the culture they're set in": this is a novel which felt very distinctively and realistically British to me. I also wrote recently about what readers bring to a novel and I was reminded of this when reading the reviews because although Margaret and her political activities seemed relatively normal to me, one reviewer felt that "I loved the heroine, Margaret, from the very beginning and although she might seem slightly bonkers, her passion and enthusiasm make her totally loveable". As a 24-year-old who regularly contacts her MP to raise issues with him she is a little unusual: according to a recent GfK NOP survey, "Only 11 per cent of 16-24 year olds have contacted their MP about an issue that concerns them. By contrast a third of 45-54 year olds (33 per cent) have contacted theirs". Climate change, however, one of the issues raised by Margaret, is an issue which concerns the vast majority of her age-group: "Over two thirds of the adult population (69 %), and three quarters (75 %) of 16-24 year olds think a climate law should be introduced that requires UK carbon dioxide emissions to be cut every year". She also campaigns on some very local issues (e.g. dog fouling in a local park) and some more unusual ones, such as VAT on sanitary products. As the Women's Environmental Network note, "Until comparatively recently sanitary protection was classified as a luxury item and taxed at the full VAT rate of 17.5%. Since January 2001 however, the tax on these products has been cut to a fairer 5%. They cannot be zero-rated due to a European agreement not to extend zero-rating to any products other than those already in place at the end of 1975" (WEN, pdf document). Margaret's view is that "they should be zero-rated" because "the charging of any VAT on sanitary towels and tampons is an unarguable example of sex discrimination" (1).

Of course, the fact that I know these things may be one reason why Margaret didn't seem particularly "bonkers" to me. Then again, as I'm a sandal-wearing, vegetarian Guardian reader, who regularly writes to her MP and knows plenty of people whose commitment to a variety of causes matches Margaret's, that reviewer might consider me just a little bit "bonkers" too. Which brings us back to the issue of reader perceptions and how they can differ from one individual to another. As this is an epistolary novel there is no narrator to shape the reader's perception, and so we must each fill the gaps between the texts in our own way, reaching our own conclusions about both the characters and the events which take place in the novel.

Rosy Thornton, a Bye-Fellow in Law at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, may write that "Lawyers are famous for being unimaginative thinkers. Law is one of those subjects where you dissect things" (EADT24), but this is a novel which sets the reader thinking, and not just because of the various issues raised in the course of the novel, but also because of its form: it's "written as a series of traditional letters and emails - plus the odd extract from the minutes of meetings of WITCH: Women of Ipswich Together Combating Homelessness" (EADT24) which span the period from the 14th of September 2004 to the 21st of December 2005. The various texts (which are, as the title of the novel suggests, "more than love letters") ask the reader to assume the lawyerly role of questioning the texts presented as evidence, in order to draw his or her own conclusions. Characters are also readers, reading and responding to some of the texts included in the novel, though none of them are privy to all of the texts in the way that we are. We can compare the differing linguistic registers in which Margaret writes to her grandmother, her friend Becs, and her local MP. The attention to words and texts is shared by many of the characters, some of whom enjoy wordplay and many of whom make intertextual references to a wide variety of novels and television programmes, including The West Wing, What Katy Did, and Cora's "eclectic mix [...] everything from the Brontës to Mills and Boon. We have lots of the same favourites - like Lord Peter Wimsey, and Frenchman's Creek, and those Margaret Forster family histories" (48). Cora herself suggests that references which might be familiar to people in her age-group will not be understood by those in another: "I didn't want her to hear 'Stand Down Margaret'! We really used to hate that name, didn't we. But she's so young, I don't suppose she thinks of that association" (111), and yet Thornton suggests that perhaps we should not make such assumptions too quickly. Margaret has, in fact, already said of her name that she doesn't like the shortened form

Maggie [...] for me the only image that conjures up is documentary footage on TV from the 1980s, CND demos, or striking miners on picket lines, and that inevitable angry chanting: 'Maggie, Maggie, Maggie - out, out, out' (80)

Contemporary authors can still be inspired by novels written over a century ago (More than Love Letters is loosely based on Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South) and, conversely, the old, represented by Margaret's grandmother, may be in touch with contemporary popular culture:

What's 'The West Wing', by the way? Is it something I should watch, do you think? Would I understand it? I am so grateful that you started me off watching 'Friends'. I used to really look forward to my Friday evenings, and I was so pleased when Rachel decided not to go to Paris in the end. She and Ross make such a lovely couple, don't they? (26)

In its form More Than Love Letters reminds me somewhat of the video for JXL's remix of Elvis's A Little Less Conversation. This, like Thornton's novel, is a reworking of an original text/song. The video also includes a frame, so that we become an external viewer, regarding a viewer within the frame who is himself watching various dancers and singers responding in their own ways to Elvis's original song. Thornton places us in the position of the viewer, interpreting others' interpretations. In the JXL remix the dancers and singers, from different social, ethnic and age groups, each have their own responses to the song in a way which is not dissimilar to the manner in which each character in More Than Love Letters has his or her own reactions and interpretations of events. The reader is thus presented with a variety of characters, each the main performer in his or her own drama. In addition the lyrics of the song seem an apt reflection of Margaret's feelings. In general she would like "A little less conversation, a little more action please" from her elected representatives, including, eventually, precisely that sort of "action" implied by Elvis.

The interpretation of texts and reported actions, and the ways in which they can be misleading is in fact a theme of the novel. Richard Slater is an MP in the post-Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson world of New Labour so he discusses with his friend how to maximise his media coverage and spin it to his advantage; images in newspapers can be misinterpreted; journalists may juxtapose quotations to misleading effect. More benign examples of deliberate lack of clarity can be found in the minutes of WITCH meetings, which allow the truth to be read through the lines:

Mrs Robertson from number 27 has complained again about noisy male visitors late at night. Emily and Pat T. have spoken to Lauren once more about telling the boys to keep the noise down, and explained how vital it is for the future of the project that no money should change hands. (6)

Margaret's grandmother tells of the slight (and very well-meaning) deception she engages in with her home help:

Kirsty comes at nine o'clock, which is when she starts work, and that's fair enough, she has her own little ones to get up and fed and off to school first. But I feel so idle just sitting in bed until she comes, so sometimes I have a wash and a piece of toast before she arrives, and then hop back into bed when I hear the gate. Then I have to pretend to be hungry when she makes my breakfast later. (I can tell you, love, because I know you'd never say anything.) (25)

She also recounts a story from Margaret's past which involved a verbal misunderstanding:

The very first day you started nursery school, I remember I went with Mum to meet you at three o'clock, and the first thing you said when you saw us was, 'I've got a new friend and she's called Horatio.' It took us three weeks to work out what her name really was - though your mum said Carnation wasn't much better than Horatio! (24)

Misunderstandings and deliberate deceptions (which range from the benevolent white lie to the concealment of sexual abuse) abound and we, as readers, are at times amused and at times challenged by the mixture of truths and falsehoods.

• Thornton, Rosy. More Than Love Letters. 2006. London: Headline, 2007.

Solidarity Among Novels

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

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

“Why not?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and

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

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