Black and White

Some people like to see things in black and white. It's simpler that way. But, as Benjamin Zephaniah's poem 'White Comedy' demonstrates, these colours have particular connotations:

I waz whitemailed
By a white witch,
Wid white magic
An white lies,
Branded by a white sheep
[...]
Lived off the white economy.
Caught and beaten by de whiteshirts
I waz condemned to a white mass,
Don't worry,
I shall be writing to de Black House.

Zephaniah's reversal of black and white in this poem reveals the extent to which, in English, the colour white has, both in the past and in the present, been associated with goodness and cleanliness (cleanliness being next to godliness), while black has often been associated with evil and dirt. The continued acceptance of these connotations is demonstrated by the following quotations from a webpage about a software programme to be used to create colour schemes:

White is associated with light, goodness, innocence, purity, and virginity. It is considered to be the color of perfection. White means safety, purity, and cleanliness. As opposed to black, white usually has a positive connotation. [...] In advertising, white is associated with coolness and cleanliness because it's the color of snow.

Black, on the other hand, has dangerous, sinister connotations, it

is associated with power, elegance, formality, death, evil, and mystery. Black is a mysterious color associated with fear and the unknown (black holes). It usually has a negative connotation (blacklist, black humor,'black death').

In the romance genre whiteness (blonde hair, or the redhead with very pale skin) has often been associated with beauty and purity. In E. M. Hull's The Sheik, for example, the heroine, Diana Mayo (whose name is that of the virgin goddess of the hunt), has a 'thick crop of loose, red-gold curls' (page 3 of the Project Gutenberg edition). Even today 'The majority [of heroines in sheik romances] are slender, with long fair hair' (Sheikhs and Desert Love), though there are exceptions, such as Brenda Jackson's Delaney's Desert Sheikh, in which the heroine is African-American.

Dandridge notes of the post-1989 historical romances written by African-American authors that they challenge the convention which so frequently links the heroine's beauty to her pallor:

The new image is that of the dark-hued heroine who triumphs. This figure revises the mulatta stereotype dominant in early African American historical romances and descended from the tradition of the blond, fair lady populating the traditional genre. In the later works, the dark-skinned heroine is a masculinized or toughened character, whereas her light-complexioned counterpart is too often perceived in black male and female fiction as too weak to effect societal change. [...] Dispensing with weak, light-complexioned heroines, post-1989 black writers of historical romances give victory to strong black women darker than mulattas. These narratives celebrate black women's victories in the tradition of black women pioneers who paved the freedom path. (2004: 4-5)

The associations between the features of the white heroine and beauty would, however, seem to persist in some of the Carribbean romances analysed by Morgan:

In some of the texts [...] curious permutations remain. Whereas the dark-skinned hero dovetails neatly with the bronzed Caucasian hero of the traditional formulaic romance, the requirements for female beauty are far more stringent, leading to peculiar formulations. [...] Charles's heroine may be brown of skin, yet her face, which is "a legacy from her Spanish ancestors, was that of a Renaissance painting of the Madonna" [...]. In this case, the darkness is, in a literal sense, no more than skin deep; every other feature remains Caucasian in ancestry and in construction. (2003: 808)*

Dandridge and Morgan's observations about the skin tones of African-American heroines reveal that skin colour remains an important issue, not just for 'white' people, but also for African Americans themselves. Monica Jackson's contemporary paranormal romance Mr. Right Now opens with the quotation 'I am black, but comely...' from the Song of Songs, thus affirming that black is beautiful. Later one of the characters asks 'Is he light or dark-skinned?” [...] Danni wasn't asking if he were white or black, she was asking about skin tone.' This isn't generally a question that would be asked about a white person perhaps because, as Kathry Perry observes, 'Gradations of shade in the skin colour of white people [...] carry little of the corresponding significance that slavery attached to the range of colour in black people' (1995: 176). In a short online novella, The Choice, also by Monica Jackson, Evelyn, the heroine, has very noticeably darker skin than her sisters:

Deb was beautiful, trim and small with smooth skin that looked like honey and long black relaxed hair hanging over her shoulders and down her back. Deb favored her other two younger sisters and her mother’s sister, Aunt Jean. Not for the first time did Evelyn wonder why she’d gotten such a different set of numbers in the gene lottery, with her stocky body, dark skin and short, kinky hair. [...]

Her body was sturdy and plump, not willowy with feminine curves like her sisters. Her skin was the color of Hershey’s chocolate, her features distinctly African. Brothers who would turn all the way around when one of her sisters passed wouldn’t give her a second glance on the street.

Of course, this isn't just about aesthetics and which colours or types of physical characteristics are more pleasing to the eye. Colour is usually interpreted as an indication of racial origin and Evelyn's appearance, for example, is described as being considered less beautiful not just because her skin is darker but because it, her hair, her body-shape and features are 'distinctly African'. Steig, writing about 'Indian romances' (i.e. romances set in India and written by British authors during the period 1890-1930) notes that:

All authors of Indian Romances during this period were firmly committed to the notion that the two groups [Indians and British] were different in fundamental ways and should remain separate. They would have agreed with the mother of two girls in a Fanny Penny novel that “there was very little romance when it was a question of color.” [...] Indian Romances were clearly on the heredity side of the heredity vs. environment debate. The theme “blood will tell” recurs again and again. (Stieg 1985: 7)

Stieg adds that

When sex between English and Indians rears its ugly head, Indian Romances become almost-if not actually-hysterical. The credo of the Romance was “that nature itself has built a wall between East and West” and any interracial connection violated that natural law. There is more than an implication that Indians commonly engaged in deviant forms of sexual activity to intensify the reaction. (1985: 8)

Teo adds that in these romances 'If interracial love was to be contemplated, it could not be between an Indian man and an English woman, only between an English man and a high-caste Indian woman' (2004).

In the context of this sort of attitude, where genetics is thought to inexorably shape a character's personality, a novel such as Julia Collins' 1865 The Curse of Caste with 'its dominant themes of interracial romance, hidden African ancestry, and ambiguous racial identity' can be read as a challenge to simplistic, racist divisions between black and white, good and bad. On the other hand, as implied in Dandridge's comments about the very dark-skinned heroines of the recent historical romances, the mixed-race and paler-skinned heroine might be taken as an indication of capitulation to white aesthetic and cultural values. This ambiguity of interpretation exists in many other texts which deal with race. Is the marriage of Shylock's daughter to a Christian in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice a triumph of inter-racial harmony, understanding and tolerance, or is it a way of destroying Shylock by denying him the possibility of having fully Jewish grandchildren who are aware of, and proud of, their Jewish heritage?

in late-fifteenth-century Iberia, and increasingly throughout sixteenth-century Europe, the idea that meaningful national identities are determined immutably by inherited 'blood' began to take hold [...]. In The Merchant, Jessica herself enters this discourse – against the 'blood' fatalists. Of Shylock, she says, 'though I am a daughter to his blood, / I am not to his manners' (II.iii.18-9) (from a review written by Rebecca Nesvet)

Is the fact that Daniel Deronda, in George Eliot's novel of that name, can only marry the Jewish heroine once he discovers that he himself is Jewish (and the fact that the Jewish heroine rejects a non-Jewish suitor) an indication that individuals should not marry outside their own racial group? If we return to romance, we find that in E. M. Hull's The Sheik, the hero is not, in fact, Arab in origin and the heroine 'learns that she need harbour no further qualms about having sex with a man of a different race. It turns out that he is actually as white-skinned as she (though, of course, a touch more sun-bronzed) and is the son of a British peer and his strikingly beautiful Spanish wife' (Cadogan 1994: 130). Modern sheik romances do feature heroes who are Arab or Beduin, but 'In most cases, the heroines of these stories are women who hail from progressive countries, such as the United States, Canada, Australia or Great Britain' (Sheikhs and Desert Love). In many cases 'while the sheik’s country is often described as a utopian state where the people are happy and rich, it is also backwards and needs modernizing. [...] Often, the heroine somehow has the key to this modernization' (Taylor 2003). Is the heroine's role to 'tame' and civilise the noble savage? Or can the modern sheik romances be seen as rejecting the racism of the earlier works in this sub-genre?

When it comes to that other group of 'noble savages', the Native American, we find

the figure of the Native American in the widely popular "Indian romance," as the industry has named these novels that depict a love affair culminating in marriage between a European American character (usually the heroine) and a full- or half-blood Native American. Like Cooper and previous writers, the Native American in these texts represents more of the American cultural imaginary; these novels do not reflect reality so much as fantasy and include a mythical depiction of the tribal community as an integral part of that fantasy. (Wardrop 1997)

McCafferty has analysed a sample of these 'Savage' romances (they all feature the word 'Savage' in the title' and would appear to be historical romances) and finds that

The basic story formula is as follows: young, beautiful, white, affluent woman meets young, handsome, Native American man. Eighty percent of the time, players meet along border spaces, where the female has fled from an economically privileged but repressively gendered role. [...] Native lovers, “pure” or “half-pure,” come to accept mixed blood in themselves/their children, through the catylyst of romantic love for the white hero[ine]. In doing so they overcome the dominant model of oppositional racism, in favor of “miscegenation.” (1994: 46-47)

These romances about sheiks and Native Americans, then, present mixed-race relationships in a positive light, though they often emphasise the role of the white woman in 'civilising' the sheik or present a hightly idealised portrait of the world of the Native American hero. The latter 'offers as symbolic capital a utopian society in which women are valued for their social contributions; where they are sexually assertive members of a group distinctive for cooperation and solidarity' (McCafferty 1994: 51).

Romances perhaps use racial difference/difference in skin-colour and the differences in culture between the tall, dark, handsome and 'othered' Arab or Native American hero and the pale, beautiful heroine to reinforce the binary opposition of gender which is already emphasised in many romances. As Taylor observes,

The central ethnic/racial/national identification in the category romance, the non-Other condition, is that of the heroine, which is generally white Anglo Westerner. Thus, the male Other ethnic/racial/national positions do not just include the Arab sheik, but often also the Greek tycoon, the Italian count-- a type of aristocratic Mediterranean lover.

But if the tall, dark, handsome, male and 'Other' role can be filled by powerful men of Arab, Mediterranean and Native American origin, why is it so rare to find African-American heroes, who would also be tall, dark, handsome and male, in the non-African-American romance lines and in the general romance sections of bookshops? African-American heroes can be found in large numbers in modern romance novels, but they seem generally to be confined to the segregated African-American romance lines and African-American sections of many bookshops.

One possible answer to why this might be the case is suggested by McCafferty is that

In the choice of Native American (rather than African-American, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Filipino, or Japanese American) lover, a tension concerning romantic love’s vulnerability to economic instability is avoided. The myth runs that the Native American man lived comfortably off the land (1994: 51).

The sheik too offers economic security, which is an important aspect of the romance fantasy for many readers (the hero of the popular Harlequin Presents/Mills & Boon Modern line, for example, is always 'wealthy'). I suspect, however, given that there are plenty of affluent, successful African-Americans, that financial status is not the only factor which impedes the acceptance of black heroes in mainstream contemporary romances.

As we have seen, racist attitudes towards sheiks, Indians and Native Americans did, in novels from an earlier period, preclude them from being cast as heroes. It is worth remembering too that where these heroes are present in modern romances they are usually paired with a white heroine. To my knowledge, romances featuring both a Native American hero and a Native American heroine, or a sheik and an Arab heroine are few or non-existent in the Western romance genre. Nor am I aware of many modern, Western romances which feature non-white heroines paired with a white man. This is not to say that there are not exceptions, but they remain rare (some are to be found here).

Inter-racial relationships between white and African-American characters would seem to have remained problematic for the romance genre and in Mr Right Now the black heroine, Luby, tries to resist her attraction to a white man (the hero): 'He’d probably never be attracted to a black woman, and to be frank, he wasn’t what I wanted either'. She also questions the motives of white women who seek out sexual relationships with black men:

Danni liked black men and black men only, although she was a petite, pretty blonde with a generous chest and big blue eyes. I know, once you go black, you don't go back, but it was deeper than that. She had issues and apparently sleeping with black men helped.
Most white girls like that were subconscious racist bitches wanting only to degrade themselves, but I’d known Danni long enough to see she didn’t have a bigoted bone in her body.

The suspicion about the motivations of people in mixed-race relationships can come from both black and white people, even from some of those individuals themselves engaged in a mixed-race relationship. Kathryn Perry writes that

Many white people are wary of discovering that the myths of black sexuality have spilt over into their own imaginations. Uncomfortable to be seen to have 'a thing' about black people, they deny that their desire may also encompass their partner's blackness. Others unashamedly desire the 'forbidden fruit' of racist mythology. (1995: 174)

Issues of race remain highly divisive and controversial within society and within the romance-reading and writing community, as suggested by the history of the African-American romance and African-American authors' ambivalence about courting a white readership (Monica Jackson, for example, has said that 'Disloyalty to the [African-American] niche is perceived as disloyalty to the readers who shell out their dollars to support us and our work. How can we diss them?'). Discussions of race generally, and of sexual relationships between members of different races may create unease. They can question the very foundations of 'race' itself and the cultural differences (and perceived differences) which have grown up around them. They may not do so as incontrovertibly as the

DNA analyses [which] illuminate the raging scientific debate about whether there is anything real to the notion of race.
"There's no genetic basis for any kind of rigid ethnic or racial classification at all," said Bryan Sykes, the Oxford geneticist and author of The Seven Daughters of Eve. "I'm always asked is there Greek DNA or an Italian gene, but, of course, there isn't. . . . We're very closely related."
Likewise, The New England Journal of Medicine once editorialized bluntly that "race is biologically meaningless" (CNN, from The New York Times, 2003)

but even if race is 'biologically meaningless', racism exists, and cultural diversity is often tied up with a perception of racial/national identity. It's an issue to ponder while looking at the photo of these babies (we're discussing romance, and given the popularity of babies in romance, I thought I'd finish up with a couple of them):

Beautiful baby twins Alicia and Jasmin Singerl certainly make people look twice.
Alicia has dark brown eyes and complexion, while Jasmin is blue-eyed and fair-skinned.
Experts say the chance of twins being born with such different physical characteristics is about a million to one.
Conceived naturally, the sisters from Burpengary, north of Brisbane, were born at Caboolture Hospital in May. (The Courier Mail)

• Cadogan, Mary, 1994. And Then Their Hearts Stood Still: An Exuberant Look at Romantic Fiction Past and Present (London: Macmillan).
• Dandridge, Rita B., 2004. Black Women's Activism: Reading African American Women's Historial Romances, African-American Literature and Culture, 5 (New York: Peter Lang).
• McCafferty, Kate, 1994. ‘Palimpsest of Desire: The Re-Emergence of the American Captivity Narrative as Pulp Romance’, Journal of Popular Culture, 27.4: 43-56.
  
• Morgan, Paula, 2003. ‘ “Like Bush Fire in My Arms”: Interrogating the World of Caribbean Romance', Journal of Popular Culture 36.4: 804-827.
• Perry, Kathryn, 1995. 'The Heart of Whiteness: White Subjectivity and Interracial Relationships', in Romance Revisited, ed. Lynne Pearce & Jackie Stacey (New York: New York University Press), pp. 171-184.
• Stieg, Margaret F., 1985. 'Indian Romances: Tracts for the Times', Journal of Popular Culture, 18.4: 2-15.
• Taylor, Jessica, 2003. '"And you can be my Sheikh": Gender, Race, and Orientalism in Contemporary Romance Novels', an online essay.
  
• Teo, Hsu-Ming, 2004.'Romancing the Raj: Interracial Relations in Anglo-Indian Romance Novels', History of Intellectual Culture, 4.1.
• Wardrop, Stephanie, 1997. 'Last of the Red Hot Mohicans: Miscegenation in the Popular American Romance', MELUS, 22. 2, Popular Literature and Film: 61-74. [Unfortunately this article refers to only two of the modern romances in this sub-genre, both published by Zebra,so the sample size is extremely small.]
  

* I wonder what Faith Smith's Smith 1999 'Beautiful Indians, Troublesome Negroes, and Nice White Men: Caribbean Romances and the Invention of Trinidad' in Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation, ed. Belinda Edmondson (Charlottesville, VA: UP of Virginia), pp. 163-182 has to say about race and representations of race in these romances. It's an item I haven't been able to find and read.

African-American Romances - A Short History

In 1865 'Julia C. Collins, a free black woman who lived in Williamsport, Pa., serialized The Curse of Caste [...] in The Christian Recorder, the newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church' (The New York Times). Whether or not it is the first published novel written by an African-American woman is a matter of controversy, but had it been completed it might have been the first romance written by an African-American. Unfortunately the author died before she could finish it, so the editors of the current edition from Oxford University Press have written two alternative endings, one 'The Happy Ending' and the other 'The Tragic Ending'. An earlier novel by the African-American William Wells Brown, Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853), ends tragically, and the heroine of Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859) is abandoned by her husband.

In The Curse

The novel treads gingerly around issues of sexuality. The principal black women are essentially asexual. Claire [the heroine] is suddenly born on her mother’s deathbed, without warning that Lina was even pregnant.
“It was really dangerous for a black woman writer at this time to talk about passion and desire,” Mr. Andrews said. “There was a prejudice that black women were not faithful, not true to their marriage vows, and that marriage wasn’t prized by black people.”
The book differs from most novels of the period about mixed-race romance in that Lina and Richard [the heroine's parents] are allowed to marry and to be briefly, blissfully happy in the United States. “Typically,” Mr. Andrews said, “white writers and black writers who wrote about racial mixing pack them off to Italy or France.”
Ms. Collins, he said, is taking “the bold step of saying black women should be able to marry whomever they want.”

Monica Jackson recently posted an extremely thought-provoking item at Romancing the Blog about the publishing business and black authors. It seems to me that this is an issue which, among many other things, affects the history of the romance genre, and I've not seen much mention of African-American romances in the academic writing on the subject (though that could be because I haven't read widely enough).* On her own blog Monica offers a short history of black romance:

It wasn’t until the 1980’s that more than a very few romances with black characters appeared. Sandra Kitt [whose first book, Rites of Spring was published in the Harlequin American line in 1984 and whose Adam and Eva, also published in 1984, was 'the first Harlequin release to be written by a black author and to feature an African-American hero and heroine] and Francis Ray were pioneers. Gwendolyn Osborne wrote an excellent article on the subject of how black romance started. A portion of the romance reading market has always been women of color. Black women read romance and read it as voraciously as any group of white women. So what did black women read before the publishing industry allowed black heroines? They read white characters like everybody else.

When I was a teenager and reading romances, I wondered why you had to be white to fall in love according to books. If a black woman wanted to write romance before the mid-nineties, basically she had to write white characters. To put it in perspective, what if a white romance writer couldn’t write white characters and sell until 1994?

In the mid 90’s New York started seeking black popular fiction writers. We have Terry McMillan to thank for this primarily, because with the best selling status of Waiting to Exhale, she made them realize that not only do black people read; they spend money on books.

In 1994 Kensington Publishing started a line of romances featuring black characters, Arabesque. It did very well and Black Entertainment Television acquired it in 1998

If we look at the history of the romance genre in the USA in general, we can see that although romances written by Americans made up only a relatively small proportion of the romance novels published worldwide in the early 1970s, in subsequent decades African-American romances have not gone mainstream in the same way as romances written by non-black American authors.

In 1981, when Simon & Schuster launched Silhouette Books to challenge Harlequin’s domination of the market for short, sweet romance novels (often called “category romances”), most forms of the romance genre derived from British models and most writers hailed from Great Britain or the Commonwealth. Harlequin, a Canadian firm based in Toronto, 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. As for the other romance subgenres, the lone exceptions to British dominance were the adventurous, sexy novels sometimes called erotic romances or “bodice rippers”, which had come to prominence in the previous decade. Erotic romances, unlike others, had been invented, shaped, and marketed by American writers and editors; and such authors as Rosemary Rogers and Kathleen Woodiwiss had turned many readers into avid fans of the genre [...]. But for the most part, these very popular American writers were few compared to the many British and Commonwealth writers of category, gothic, or historical romances, whose work was imported into the United States and Canada. (Mussell 1999: 1)

and

According to American writers who tried to break into the market in the late 1970s, the firm [Harlequin] showed little interest in recruiting writers from North America or in expanding the typical settings of their books into North American locales. (Mussell 1999: 2-3)

Simon and Schuster spotted a niche and began to publish Silhouette romances which were

a mirror image of Harlequin['s]. Their content was 'sweet contemporary'. The only variation on Harlequin’s content was to accentuate an American theme: The setting of the romance was to take place in the United States, and Silhouette’s hero[e]s and heroines were to reflect American values (Markert 1985: 85)

and, 'In addition, Silhouette recruited well-established Mills and Boon/Harlequin authors, such as Janet Dailey and Anne Hampson [who was not American], and also actively sought new North American authors' (Mussell 1999: 5). One can therefore see parallels with the current state of African-American romances, where African-American authors are recruited to write about African-American characters.

Harlequin bought Silhouette in 1984 and nowadays, with the Romance Writers of America having roughly 9,500 members and 144 chapters it's easy to forget that the American presence on the romance genre's scene is relatively new, and that the RWA was only 'founded in Houston, Texas, in 1980 by 37 charter members'. The Romantic Novelists' Association, by contrast, was founded in 1960, in the UK.

African-American romance authors would appear to have benefitted from the upheaval in the romance world that took place in the early 1980s.Gwendolyn Osborne writes that

By 1980, journalist Elsie B. Washington, writing under the pseudonym of Rosalind Welles, published Entwined Destinies. Believed to be the first-known romance featuring African-American characters written by an African-American author, Entwined Destinies was published under the Dell Candlelight imprint with editor Vivian Stephens.**

Stephens, one of the first African-American editors of romance fiction, bought the first works of several romance authors whose names now appear regularly on The New York Times best-seller's list. Later, during her tenure with Harlequin, Stephens was credited with updating and "Americanizing" the romance genre. She put into place the framework for the Harlequin American Romance, Harlequin Intrigue and Harlequin American Premier editions.

In 1985, Harlequin published its first romance by and about African-Americans with Sandra Kitt's Adam and Eva. [I found the date 1984 given in various other locations, including Sandra Kitt's website.]

Until 1994, no publishing house had a line devoted to black romance novels. Then along came Kensington Publishing, which became the first major house to develop a line of African-American romances called Arabesque. [...] In June of 1998, less than five years after the launch of Arabesque, Zacharius sold the line to black-owned Black Entertainment Television (BET). [Arabesque was sold to Harlequin in 2006 and is now one of the lines published by Harlequin's Kimani Press]

It would seem, however, that unlike the new American-set romances which would not be shelved separately from British, Australian, Canadian or New Zealand-set romances, and which, in fact, are probably what most American readers would think of simply as 'contemporary romance' (though Harlequin does retain a specific Harlequin American Romance line), the African-American romances remain separate. They are often shelved in special African-American sections and there are many lines which are labelled and marketed as African-American romances. Also, while some African-American romances are reviewed by the larger romance review sites (and All About Romance has had some in-depth columns on the issues related to book segregation and the difficulties some readers had in even finding AA romances in their local bookshops and libraries), there are also separate African-American romance review sites, such as Romance in Color. As Monica Jackson observed in her article, there are both advantages and disadvantages to being published in the African-American romance niche, but the Millenia Black case has brought the issue to the forefront of many people's minds and has led authors such as Monica Jackson, Millenia Black and Donna Hill to ask searching questions about the negative aspects of book segregation and why it persists.

• Markert, John, 1985. ‘Romance Publishing and the Production of Culture’, Poetics, 14.1-2: 69-93.
• Mussell, Kay, 1999. 'Introduction' in North American Romance Writers, ed. Kay Mussell and Johanna Tuñón (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press), pp. 1-9.

* Paula Morgan's 2003. ‘ “Like Bush Fire in My Arms”: Interrogating the World of Caribbean Romance, Journal of Popular Culture 36.4: 804-827, deals, as its title indicates, with Caribbean romances. Morgan notes that 'a definite innovation appears to be the creation of protagonists who reflect the multi-ethnic composition of this region's peoples. [...] One can expect these novels, at the very least, to undermine the myth that only Caucasian women can be beautiful' (2003: 807-808). Unfortunately I have not been able to find copies of Stephanie Burley's 'Shadows and Silhouettes: The Racial Politics of Category Romance', Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres 5.13-14 (1999): 324-343 or Rita Dandridge's (2003) 'The Race, Gender, Romance Connection: A Black Feminist Reading of African American Women's Historical Romances', in Doubled Plots: Romance and History, eds. Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi).

** 'referring to her position as the new editor of Candlelight Romances in 1979-1980, Vivian Stephens (1984) could say, ‘The line wasn’t really looked at to make any money or make a statement for Dell. It was just there’. This lackadaisical attitude toward romances by management allowed Stephens room to experiment.' (Markert 1985: 86)