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.

Romance I: Romance Across the Canon

Laura Vivanco

The PCA/ACA annual conference is very special for romance scholars but not everyone can get there (I haven't even been once). We can, though, read the abstracts of papers which will be presented in the many sessions on romance. I'll be putting them up here at Teach Me Tonight, session by session.

Romance I: Romance Across the Canon (Fairy Tale, Shakespeare, Lit Fic)

Navigating the Fantasy of Romantic Love Through Popular Romantic Adaptations of "Cinderella"

(Margot Blankier, doctoral candidate at Trinity College Dublin's School of English)

This paper, part of a larger thesis project on “Cinderella” as fairy tale and American myth, will examine contemporary popular romance fiction that announce themselves as adaptations and use “Cinderella” as their structural framework. The narrative concerns of the popular romance and the fairy tale often overlap: in her article “Guilty Pleasures: Reading Romance Novels as Reworked Fairy Tales,” Linda J. Lee observes that classical fairy tales and romance fiction are both formulaic, invoke fantasy realms, and are often dismissed as trivial entertainments. However, where fairy tales are noted for their abstract and “depthless” characters, writers of contemporary popular adaptations of “Cinderella” justify the length of their novels by according their protagonists an interiority that, according to Max Lüthi’s The European Folktale, opposes the generic expectations of the fairy tale. In this way, the writers of these texts “betray” the expectations of the classical fairy-tale heroine by emphasizing her agency and wit over her “archetypal” qualities. She meets the prince character early in the novel and experiences an intense physical desire for him, but their relationship ebbs and flows over the course of the novel. Generally, the culmination of their relationship—the “happily ever after” ending—occurs after they have been “tested,” and the prince character has proved that he “deserves” the love of the Cinderella character. Thus, while the romantic implications of Cinderella’s marriage in Charles Perrault’s original fairy tale are largely reader-generated rather than textually present—there is no mention of love between the pair—writers of popular romance develop the physical and emotional relationship between Cinderella and the prince as the most important element of the story. This paper will consider the transformative power of love as a substitute for the fantasy aspect of fairy tale, the readerly movement between in and out of the textual world as a source of pleasure, and the stepmother figure as a source of repressive social milieu and patriarchy.

Texts to be considered include, but are not limited to, Eloisa James’ A Kiss at Midnight (2010), Claire Delacroix’s The Damsel (1999), Teresa Medeiros’ Charming the Prince (1999), Katherine Kingsley’s Once Upon a Dream (1997), Mercedes Lackey’s The Fairy Godmother (2004), and a selection of titles from Harlequin’s Silhouette Romance imprint.

(EMS:  Margot Blankier was unable to attend, but we hope to hear more about her research in the future!)

Taming Shakespeare: Historical Romance Novel Adaptations of Taming of the Shrew

(Tamara Whyte, Piedmont Virginia Community College)

Despite its less romantic elements, many romance novelists allude to and adapt William Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. In my research, I have found 40 romance novels since 2000 that allude to the play. Most of these novels have little to do with Shakespeare’s text, but six recent historical romance novels attempt to rewrite elements of the taming plot for a modern audience: Sabrina Darby’s Woo’d in Haste and Wed at Leisure, Johanna Lindsey’s The Devil Who Tamed Her, Christy English’s How to Tame a Willful Wife, and Eloisa James’s Kiss Me, Annabel and The Taming of the Duke. Darby breaks her adaptation into two separate narratives. The first, Woo’d in Haste, focuses on Bianca’s perspective, vilifying Kate. But then the second, Wed at Leisure, focuses on Kate, redeeming her. Lindsey’s novel adapts the taming plot to make it more acceptable to romance readers without changing the gender dynamic in which an aggressive man attempts to change the behavior of a woman who fails to conform to societal expectations for her sex. English includes a commentary on Shakespeare’s work within her adaptation. James depicts a failed taming attempt in Kiss Me, Annabel and inverts the gender roles in The Taming of the Duke. In my paper, I will analyze these various adaptations and appropriations of The Taming of Shrew with particular emphasis on how romance authors make the taming plot more palatable for modern romance authors. 


Love and the Machine: Romance in the Victorian Industrial Novel

(Sarah Ficke, Marymount University)

My most recent paper on popular romance (presented at this year’s IASPR conference) examined the Iron Seas steampunk series by Meljean Brook to discover how these texts configure the relationship between technology and humanity. I found that the language and actions of romantic relationships were instrumental in demonstrating a positive connection between people and technology in the stories. However, this made me wonder about the 19th-century novels that provide much of the foundation for steampunk. How did they represent romance within an industrialized, mechanized context? The paper I am proposing will answer this question by analyzing the role of romance and its relationship to technology in several important industrial novels from the Victorian period, including works like Hard Times by Dickens, North and South and Mary Barton by Gaskell, and Shirley by Charlotte Brontë. I will be using digital humanities tools to uncover language patterns and points of connection across the texts, as well as examining their individual representations of romance. I hope to discover how these industrial novelists imagined technology describing, enabling, or disrupting romantic relationships. This is part of my larger project on how steampunk romances adopt and reconfigure Victorian ideas about technology for a 21st-century world.


 “Stay away from my sister”: Romance and the Asian American Male Canon

(Erin Young, SUNY Empire State College)

No abstract provided.

Links: Medical Romance, Fifty Shades, Viking Bondage and L. M. Montgomery

Laura Vivanco

Jessica, of Read React Review, presented a paper about medical romance novels at the PCA/ACA conference and she's summarised it on her blog. She argues that

it’s possible to view commercial fiction as actually participating, however indirectly, in bioethical conversation. [...]

The Penhally Bay series was written in the first decade of the 21st century, a time when organized medicine was having a lot of internal debates about what “professionalism” means. [...] The professionalism project emphasizes old fashioned values of altruism, compassion, and integrity. It focuses on individuals, and on maintaining continuity with a perceived tradition of medical professionalism dating back 200 years. Medical sociologists, identifying a number of competing accounts of medical professionalism, identify this as “nostalgic professionalism”. [...] I think that the Penhally Bay series presents a version of medical professionalism closely aligned with nostalgic professionalism in several ways.

The full post can be found here.

Eva Illouz has a new book out soon: Hard-Core Romance: "Fifty Shades of Grey," Best-Sellers, and Society will be published in May by the University of Chicago Press. In it, Illouz

delves into its remarkable appeal, seeking to understand the intense reading pleasure it provides and how that resonates with the structure of relationships between men and women today. Fifty Shades, Illouz argues, is a gothic romance adapted to modern times in which sexuality is both a source of division between men and women and a site to orchestrate their reconciliation. As for the novels’ notorious depictions of bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism, Illouz shows that these are as much a cultural fantasy as a sexual one, serving as a guide to a happier romantic life. The Fifty Shades trilogy merges romantic fantasy with self-help guide—two of the most popular genres for female readers.

Madison Prall, a student at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne has created a conference poster which

compares a contemporary historical romance novel series published between 2001 and 2004 by Karen Marie Moning with an older historical romance novel series published between 1980 and 1994 by Joanna Lindsey, in order to assess changing values regarding idealized romantic relationships between men and women.

Madison notes that "All three female protagonists in the Lindsey novels are enslaved by their future husbands, and Kristen and Erika are even forced to wear chains by their romantic partners." Madison finds "disturbing [...] the implication that rape and domination are elements of romantic relationships that romance novel readers think are acceptable or even desirable."

Given the recent success of Fifty Shades I can't help but wonder, though, if "Johanna Lindsey's portrayal of the bondage and domination of her female protagonists by the male protagonists" was an earlier way of writing "hard-core romance" at a time when explicit BDSM would not have been so acceptable. In other words, was it intended to be read more as a "Viking rape scene" than as a suggestion that rape could be romantic or acceptable in real life?

There's been a lot of discussion of the "romance canon" recently. It looks as though some people might be lobbying for the inclusion of L. M. Montgomery (or maybe they'd rather she stayed out of the romance canon and was accepted into the literary canon). The reissue of a book about her works may be of particular interest to romance scholars working on romances for younger audiences given that Montgomery's best known for her series about Anne of Green Gables but she did write some works for adults, including The Blue Castle:

When it originally appeared, Elizabeth Rollins Epperly’s The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass was one of the first challenges to the idea that L.M. Montgomery’s books were unworthy of serious study. Examining all of Montgomery’s fiction, Epperly argues that Montgomery was much more than a master of the romance genre and that, through her use of literary allusions, repetitions, irony, and comic inversions, she deftly manipulated the normal conventions of romance novels. Focusing on Montgomery’s memorable heroines, from Anne Shirley to Emily Byrd Starr, Valancy Stirling, and Pat Gardiner, Epperly demonstrates that Montgomery deserves a place in the literary canon.

Focus on Authors

Laura Vivanco

Chelsea Ann Pierce's recent MA thesis is on the topic of "The Apprenticeship of Laurell K. Hamilton: How Aspiring Writers Learn to Write."

The Princeton Symposium on Authorship in the Popular Romance Genre , whose participants also focus on authors, will be starting in a few days' time. On Friday attendees will be able to hear:

Deborah Chappel Traylor on “The Novels of Edna Ferber, An Important Link in Popular American Women's Fiction”

It may be easy enough to see connections between popular romance written today and the novels of Jane Austen, but how do we explain how one leads through centuries and across oceans to the other?   How do we present a history of women’s romance without exploring and establishing links to other writers, traditions, and events?

Maryan Wherry on “Adventure, Mystery, Romance: The Voice and Style of Mary Stewart”

Mary Stewart is an important transition figure within 20^th century romance. [...] Stewart combines the neo-gothic traditions of Daphne du Maurier and Victoria Holt with the traditional mysteries of Georgette Heyer and Mary Robert Rinehart to establish the foundations of the romantic suspense subgenre.

Hsu-Ming Teo on “'Everyone loves a Lindsey!': Evaluating the Historical Romance Oeuvre of Johanna Lindsey”

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.

Jackie Horne, “Feminism and the Romance Author”

This talk will take a closer look at romance writers’ relationship to feminism during the past twenty years, not by analyzing their novels, but by looking at their interviews and critical writings on the craft of romance.

Jonathan Allan, “Twisting the Romance Novelist”

for a study of male/male romance to develop at all, we need to build the theory from the ground up, beginning with the author. By “twisting” authorship, I hope to offer a critical model of authorship, that recognizes the particularities of male/male romance, particularly since the subgenre is largely written “by women for women.”

Jennifer Lois and Joanna Gregson, “Sneers and Leers: Romance Novel Writers and the Stigma of Sexual Shamelessness”

Writers reacted to the sneers and leers in two opposing ways. Some accepted the invitation and displayed personalized aspects of their sexuality for shock value, career promotion, or to reclaim control of defining their sexual selves in a patriarchal culture. Others contested the assumption that their personal sex lives were relevant to their work and chastised outsiders for intruding on their privacy.

Annette Couch-Jareb, “Self-Publishing and the Individual Author as an Agent of Change”

In recent years, publishing has undergone a revolution, as dramatic as the invention of the Guttenberg Press. For the first time, authors are able to publish without the gatekeeping effects of publishers.

Jayashree Kamble, “Defiance and Definition: Constructing Authorship in Lisa Kleypas’s Dreaming of You”

Kleypas’s Sara Fielding (whose name evokes a history of women authors) is a claim of authorial self-determination in a genre that is constantly battling for the right to define what it is (and is not).

Eric Selinger, “The World Split Open, Slightly; Or, I Fought the Law and the Law Spanked”

This consoling narrative [Victoria Dahl's Talk Me Down], in which the truths told by romance can be easily and pleasurably recuperated, contrasts in several ways with the representations of gender, truth-telling, and the law in Dahl’s Twitter and Tumblr posts, which include impassioned, explicitly political reflections on gendered poverty, abortion rights, and access to birth control.

Jessica Matthews, “When Authors Won’t “Die”: Diana Gabaldon as Imperial Author in the Books and Writers Community Online Forum”

Gabaldon uses her position as the author to offer the “correct” interpretation to readers’ questions, all while creating an online persona that is friendly to those who agree with her, but caustic to those who do not. Her answers often require her to provide information that would not have been available to the reader, thus allowing her to extend her narratives beyond the novels themselves. In other words, her online forum allows her to keep writing her novels and position herself as the leading authority on them.

Regina Künne, “L’Auteur Est Mort. Vive L’Auteur!”

The talk will address Jayne Ann Krentz’s works and will give answers about changes within twenty-five years of her writing career 

The full abstracts for all of these talks can be found here.