Representing Mothers and Children

Laura Vivanco

I've just finished reading Kate Walker's Kept for Her Baby and one of the key issues is the heroine's status as a mother. In part this is because, as the title suggests, "If she had never become pregnant then he would never have married her at all. It was only because of his determination that his son would be legitimate that he had ever put a ring on her finger" (45) but it is also because of the questions raised by what happened after that son was born: "What loving mother, what good mother, would abandon her baby, walk out on him, leaving him alone with his father?" (17). The baby ended up in the care of

his father and the trained nanny [...]. The nanny that Ricardo had insisted on from the moment she had given birth, making her feel useless and inadequate, in a way that must have contributed to her breakdown. (36)

As the above quotation indicates, Lucy's abandonment of her child is ascribed to a temporary cause, and since "The doctors said that she was well again now" (18) there is no reason for the reader to believe it will affect her ability to be a "loving mother," a "good mother" in the future.

What does one have to do, though, in order to qualify as a "good mother"? Lucy seems to convince her husband that she's a good mother at least in part by how she picks up the baby and changes his nappy:

She almost laughed as she laid Marco on his back on the brightly coloured changing mat. This was something she knew how to do.
'Let's get you cleaned up ...'
Unfastening the sleep suit, removing the dirty nappy, cleaning, was the work of moments. And she enjoyed it - doing this simple task for her baby. Even when Marco waved his arms and legs wildly in the air, wriggling so that it was a struggle to get the nappy on and fastened, she couldn't hold back the soft chuckle of appreciation of his life and energy. Forgetting about the dark, watchful man behind her, she bent her head and blew a loud raspberry on his exposed stomach, revelling in its soft roundness, the uncontrollable giggles that burst from him in response. (115)

and how she feeds him:

She was looking down at Marco, laughing softly as the little boy squished his banana in his hand, obviously revelling in the mess he was making and the feel of it between his fingers. And Marco was watching her, his wide smile a beam of delight as he held up the sticky mess for her to see. (118)

Obviously one has to interpret Lucy's happiness in these scenes in the context of her previous separation from her baby. Having feared she might never see him again, it's entirely understandable that she should feel delighted to have the opportunity to spend time with him. It's also important to remember that the book is about a heroine who had "Post-natal psychosis" (171). Nonetheless, what is depicted for the reader are scenes which present motherhood as a source of joy.

The depiction of motherhood in Angela Thirkell's High Rising (1933) is rather different. In part this is because of the very different circumstances in which the two mothers find themselves, but I think it may also reflect different attitudes towards motherhood. It should also be noted that Thirkell's novel is more "romantic fiction" than "romance" since the central protagonist, Laura, is not involved in a romantic relationship (she does get involved in a bit of matchmaking for others). She's a forty-five year old author and widowed mother-of-four who, at the beginning of the novel, is collecting her youngest from boarding school. I wonder how many modern heroine-mothers would choose this option for their children? Clearly the many billionaire/sheik etc heroes could easily afford to educate their children this way, and some have been to boarding schools themselves. Maybe the ages of the children in romances play a part in how schooling choices are depicted in the genre, but I wonder if nowadays more people feel that children should stay with their parents. The heroine of Janet Evanovich's Smitten in fact broke up with her husband over this issue rather than over his infidelity:

"It turned out we had different expectations about marriage. Paul expected me to close my eyes to constant indiscretions, and I expected him to be faithful to me."
"I'm sorry."
Lizabeth waved it away. "Actually, I could have lived with that. What finally drove me out of the marriage was when he insisted that the boys go to boarding school. Paul had political ambitions. He wanted me to be a perfect hostess. He found the children to be a burden." (24)

For Laura, and other mothers of her class and era, sending children to boarding school would have seemed entirely normal, and although she may wonder, "as she had often wondered with the three older boys, why one's offspring are under some kind of compulsion to alienate one's affections at first sight by their conceit, egotism, and appalling self-satisfaction" (4) she does love her sons. It seems unlikely, however, that she would respond with joy to a sticky mess, no matter how much a child was "revelling" in it. This is a woman who admits to feeling rather "exhausted" after bringing up so many children:

When for about a quarter of a century you have been fighting strong young creatures with a natural bias towards dirt, untidiness, and carelessness, quite unmoved by noise, looking upon loud, unmeaning quarrels and abuse as the essence of polite conversation, oblivious of all convenience and comfort but their own, your resistance weakens. (21-22)

And when she has finally got her son into his bed after his first day home for the holidays, she

shut the door and reeled downstairs. [...] Oh, the exhaustingness of the healthy young! Laura had once offered to edit a book called Why I Hate my Children, but though Adrian Coates [her editor] had offered her every encouragement, and every mother of her acquaintance had offered to contribute, it had never taken shape. Perhaps, she thought, as she stood by Tony's bed an hour later, they wouldn't be so nice if they weren't so hateful.
There lay her demon son, in abandoned repose. His cheeks, so cool and firm in the day, had turned to softest rose-petal jelly, and looked as if they might melt upon the pillow. His mouth was fit for poets to sing. His hands - spotlessly clean for a brief space - still had dimples where later bony knuckles would be [...] she tucked the bedclothes in, kissed her adorable hateful child, who never stirred, and turning out the light left the room. (39-40)

The ways in which heroes respond to mothers also vary. Amanda Vickery describes one depiction of motherhood thus:

When Samuel Richardson singled out the breast-feeding mother in Sir Charles Grandison (1753-4), one of the most popular novels of the century, he presented a traditional duty in a haze of beguiling limelight. Witness the scene when the once naughty Lady G. is surprised with her babe at the breast by her estranged husband:

Never was a man in greater rapture. For lady Gertrude had taught him to wish that a mother would be a mother: He Threw himself at my feet, clasping me and the little varlet together in his arms. Brute! said I, will you smother my Harriet - I was half-ashamed of my tenderness - Dear-est, dear-est, dear-est Lady G. - Shaking his head, between every dear and est, every muscle of his face working; how you transport me! - Never, never, never, saw I so delightful a sight! (Vickery 93-94)

Heroes in modern romances may not express themselves in quite these words, or feel "rapture" of exactly the same kind, but they too often react extremely strongly to motherhood:

Her body was preparing itself for the birth of their baby and the thought of that was a massive turn-on. (Williams 107)

'You're very sexy, pregnant,' he whispered.
'No, I'm not.'
'You are to me. [...] We men are simple creatures [...] Evidence of our virility can't help but prove satisfying. Call it a weird macho thing.' (Williams 108)

There are, of course, plenty of romances involving pregnant heroines who become involved with a new man, but occasionally I've come across characters who would rather not begin a relationship with a woman who's a mother. In Janet Evanovich's Smitten, for example, the hero hesitates before kissing the heroine:

He didn't want to come on too strong or too fast and frighten her away. And he didn't want to make working conditions awkward. And besides that, she was a mother. He'd never before been involved with a mother. In his eyes motherhood was in the same category as a PhD in physics. It was outside his sphere of knowledge. It was intimidating. And the thought of bedding someone's mother felt a smidgeon irreverent. Not enough to stop him, he thought ruefully. Just enough to slow him down. (17-18)

The heroine herself seems to have some preconceptions about what is, or isn't, suitable for a mother to do, but by the end of the novel she appears to have revised at least some of them:

She was in a suggestive position on the trunk when he returned. "Do you think this is undignified for a mother?"
He pulled her panties down. "I think this is perfect for a mother." (176)

So, is this novel grappling with the madonna/whore dichotomy? According to Caroline Myra Pascoe:

Images of motherhood in western society have most often ignored maternal sexuality, notwithstanding the sleight of hand that this entails. Anne Summers in Damned Whores and God's Police noted:

It is conveniently forgotten that married women must have sexual intercourse in order to reproduce: a general Australian puritanism has managed to convince itself that mothers are not sexual creatures and female sexuality is either denied or relegated entirely to the Damned Whore stereotype.

The modern romance genre, however, provides a reader with plenty of sexually active mothers and mothers-to-be. I suspect that the portrayal of mothers and children varies not just across time (and cultures, classes and many other social variables), but also across different genres. Jennifer Weiner, who writes women's fiction, thinks that

even though there are blogs and books and first-person essays about the everyday exhaustion and dreariness and frustration of motherhood, the prevailing cultural view is still that motherhood comes with this rose-tinged blissful glow.

You might get rather a different view of children and childrearing from the horror genre, however. John Patterson at the Guardian suggests that

The most interesting evil-kid movies seem to rise up from the subconscious of their creators. Stephen King has said that he wrote The Shining when he was drinking a lot to numb his bleakest feelings about family life, and evil and/or seriously scary kids proliferate across his work in that period: Danny and the chopped-up Grady Twins in The Shining; Drew Barrymore in Firestarter; the dead child in Pet Sematary; Isaac in Children Of The Corn. David Cronenberg had a five-year-old daughter when he made his 1979 gyno-horror movie The Brood, with its murderous mutant children, and David Lynch memorialised his complicated feelings about fatherhood with the monstrously deformed baby in Eraserhead. Whereas most kid-slaying horrors play nakedly to the taboo, these films have a sense of anxiety, dread and profound ambiguity about parenthood that often makes them richer as works of art.

Those examples were all created by fathers, whereas romances are far more likely to be written by women. Is that just a coincidence? And does the romance genre, as a whole, represent motherhood and children in an idealised way or is it relatively realistic?

-----------

• Evanovich, Janet. Smitten. 1990. London: Bantam, 1991.
• Pascoe, Caroline Myra. Screening Mothers: Representations of motherhood in Australian films from 1900 to 1988. PhD thesis. University of Sydney, 2006.
  
• Thirkell, Angela. High Rising. 1933. Osney Mead, Oxford: Isis, 2000.
• Vickery, Amanda. The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.
• Walker, Kate. Kept for Her Baby. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2009.
  
• Williams, Cathy. The Italian's One-Night Love-Child. Richmond, Surrey: Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2009.

With thanks to Kate Walker for sending me a copy of Kept for Her Baby, Tumperkin for giving me The Italian's One-Night Love-Child, AgTigress for providing me with a copy of Smitten and Sunita, who recommended Angela Thirkell's novels. The illustration came from Wikimedia Commons.

Sarah Frantz on "Darcy’s Vampiric Descendants"

Laura Vivanco

I am very pleased to be able to announce that Sarah S. G. Frantz's "Darcy’s Vampiric Descendants: Austen’s Perfect Romance Hero and J. R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood" is now online in volume 30.1 (Winter 2009) of Persuasions On-line, a publication of the Jane Austen Society of North America.

The juxtapositioning of Darcy and vampires in the title of the essay reminded me of the existence of Vampire Darcy’s Desire: A Pride and Prejudice Adaptation by Regina Jeffers and Mr. Darcy, Vampyre by Amanda Grange, but Sarah Frantz's essay is not about such very direct vampiric descendants. Indeed, the fact that J. R. Ward's heroes are vampires is relatively unimportant to her discussion, except inasmuch as it is the cause of their "hypermasculinity."

Frantz argues that

the proof of the power and appeal of the hero’s confession, and of Austen’s genius in creating it in the first place, can be found in the modern romance reader’s continued desire for similar masculine confession and emotion in modern romance heroes. Indeed, the most significant change in popular romance over the last thirty years is the increase in the reader’s access to the thoughts and emotions of the romance hero. [...] From the perspective of popular romance narratives, then, Austen’s achievement was to locate the emotional climax of the novel in Darcy’s narration of his maturing emotional state, even though it was constructed primarily from the exterior through dialogue. Modern popular romances expand and exploit the power and appeal of Darcy’s confession by providing continuous access to the interior perspective of the romance hero as he realizes and admits that his heroine has become indispensible to his happiness.

It could, perhaps, be argued that the hero's confession was not created by Austen. In Diego de San Pedro's late fifteenth-century Spanish sentimental romance, Cárcel de Amor, for example, it is initially made through an intermediary. However, the hero's pains are also depicted via his apparent imprisonment in a prison of love, where he is chained, and crowned with metal spikes. He eventually dies of love, but his sufferings and their depiction suggest that there has been a very long and varied tradition of depicting heroes' immense emotional suffering caused by love. Even if one only goes as far back as Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) we can find a hero making a confession of love. Mr B.'s letter to Pamela, in which he opens with the words "In vain, my Pamela, do I find it to struggle against my Affection for you" (250) even contains the same words, "In vain" and "struggle," which are used by Mr Darcy: "In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you" (Chapter 34). Mr B's love also appears to make him fall ill and he tells Pamela from his sickbed that:

Life is no Life without you! If you had refused me, and yet I had hardly Hopes you would oblige me, I should have had a severe Fit of it, I believe; for I was taken very oddly, and knew not what to make of myself: But now I shall be well instantly. (255-56)

Compared to some earlier heroes and the sometimes very dramatic manifestations of their lovesickness, Mr Darcy's outburst may indeed seem "relatively mild." Frantz argues that is the insights which modern romances provide into "the interior perspective of the romance hero" which have led to an intensification in the type of evidence provided of the hero's emotions:

Darcy’s relatively mild words to Elizabeth in both the first and second proposal scenes are meaningful because the lack of narrative access to his internal perspective makes the directly expressed words a powerful representation of the barriers he has overcome in order to be able to express them at all. But when access to the hero’s thoughts is granted by the narrative, the emotional power of the hero’s confession of his feelings for and his education by the heroine must be attained through other the narrative strategies, resulting not only in supernatural heroes whose inhuman abilities redefine the limits of the merely human hero, but also in a narrative insistence on locating the emotional climax of the novel in the hero’s tears. Stereotypically in modern popular romance, the more masculine the hero, the more emotionless he is, and the larger the barrier that must be overcome to achieve access to his emotions.

Frantz focuses on heroes' tears:

In order for these superhuman men to prove that they have broken through the barrier of their masculine emotionlessness enough to fall in love with and appreciate the changes wrought by the heroine, the narratives invariably depict them crying. Masculine tears are something modern women are taught to long for as demonstrating the depths of a man’s emotions, precisely because our culture paradoxically teaches boys and men that, in order to be “real” men, they should never cry.

Of course, not all modern romances feature "superhuman men," and not all "modern women are taught to long for" masculine tears. Furthermore, not all readers of the essay will share the same "culture." Given that Frantz's essay moves from analysis of an early nineteenth-century English tex to several early twenty-first-century American ones, it might have been useful to have been told a little bit more about differences between the cultures in which they were both produced. Perhaps differences in culture, as well as differences in the degree of access the author grants the reader into the heroes' thoughts, have affected the depiction of "the hero’s confession of his feelings." In addition, although Ward's novels "invariably depict them [the heroes] crying," not all modern romance heroes cry.

In fact, Frantz seems to acknowledge this last point when she writes that "The current trend in the hero-focused popular romance means that the more alpha the hero, the more likely he is to cry to prove his love for the heroine." She has therefore chosen to study the tears shed by the heroes of J. R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood series and she concludes that

As campy as they are, Ward’s hypermasculine vampires are Darcy’s ultimate heirs. Darcy not only must mature because of his love for Elizabeth, but he must also recognize and welcome the change his heroine has wrought in him. Superhuman, nearly immortal, cursed, and emotionless, Wrath, Rhage, Zsadist, Butch, Vishous, and later Phury and Rhevenge, represent the hyperbolic extreme of Darcy’s attractiveness, power, and pride. Their tears of love, acceptance, and despair break through strong taboos of masculinity and represent the inevitable physical embodiment of Darcy’s verbal expression of his emotional maturation. The stunning popularity of the Black Dagger Brotherhood series indicates that modern romance readers—just like Darcy’s first fans—appreciate the opportunity to plumb the true emotional depths of the romance hero. The more masculine the man and the more devastating to his own emotional control is his admission of the importance of love to his very existence, the more powerful and precious that admission is to the reader. Pamela Regis, after claiming Pride and Prejudice as the Ur-text of popular romance fiction, argues that “Ordering society is now an issue of taming or healing the hero. . . . Untamed or unhealed, the hero will not truly appreciate the role of the heroine in his life; he will not engage with her emotionally” (114). The spectacle of masculine tears in the popular romance both tames and heals the hero and allows him to accept, appreciate, and verbalize the necessity of his love for his heroine. But Darcy led the way two hundred years ago.

You can read the whole article at the Persuasions On-line website.

I do wonder where this analysis leaves Austen's other novels, and non-alpha romance heroes. Is Northanger Abbey the "Ur-text" of the modern romance beta hero, for example?

---
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. The Republic of Pemberley's online edition.
Richardson, Samuel. Pamela. Ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.


The photo of the "Title page from the first edition of Pride and Prejudice" came from Wikipedia. The photo of the cover of J. R. Ward's Dark Lover came from J. R. Ward's website.

Marriage

As Pamela Regis observes,

The happy ending is the one formal feature of the romance novel that virtually everyone can identify. This element is not limited to a narrow range of texts: a marriage - promised or actually dramatized - ends every romance novel. Ironically, it is this universal feature of the romance novel that elicits the fiercest condemnation from its critics. The marriage, they claim, enslaves the heroine, and, by extension, the reader. (Regis 2003: 9)

I think the happy ending in romance no longer automatically implies marriage, but can include what one might term 'marriage equivalents', and this reflects changing social mores, with increased co-habitation among both straight and gay couples, as well as legal equivalents to marriage such as civil partnerships for homosexual couples. It's not as though the genre and its predecessor's portrayals of marriage were ever static: marriage and ideas about marriage have changed over time, and this has been reflected in literature. As Regis says,

looking at the older books, beginning with Richardson's Pamela [...] a reader can see the shift in motives for marriage--from dynastic (marrying out of duty, for reasons of family, property, and so forth) to companionate (marrying for love). Most if not all of contemporary romance novels simply assume that companionate union is the only, best reason for pairing off.

And, although in the past marriage was intended for 'the procreation of children', nowadays this may not be the case since couples may choose to remain childless/child-free. Meanwhile, among those who do not, many

married couples now see children as an obstacle to their marital happiness. According to one recent review of over 90 studies of marital satisfaction, married parents report lower quality relationships than married couples without children.[..] Yet this does not mean that younger Americans are rejecting parenthood altogether. Most Americans are, or will become, parents. (Whitehead and Popenoe, 2006)

Regarding divorce, in the UK,

For many couples, obtaining a divorce has never been easier. The old-fashioned concept of establishing that one party is at fault has been consigned to history and the important fact to establish now is that the relationship has "irretrievably broken down".

and similar developments have taken place around the world, alongside the ending of the stigma previously attached to divorce.

In this context, it seems likely that modern romances may take a variety of different approaches to marriage, depending on the opinions and experiences of the author as well as factors such as the time-period and location in which the novel is set.

For many individuals modern marriage is something to aspire to, and they set very high standards of what they expect both from marriage itself and from their marriage partner:

Young adults today are searching for a deep emotional and spiritual connection with one person for life. At the same time, the bases for marriage as a religious, economic or parental partnership are receding in importance for many men and women in their twenties. [...] An overwhelming majority (94%) of never-married singles agree that "when you marry you want your spouse to be your soul mate, first and foremost." (Whitehead and Popenoe, 2001)

I wonder if this aspiration for, and view of, marriage lies behind the portrayal of soul-mate relationships in paranormal romances such as Christine Feehan's Carpathians and their 'lifemates', Robin D. Owens' HeartMates, and many other romances in which paranormal creatures feel a particular link to only one individual, to whom they become bound for life.

Back in the real world, however, women may still feel that they must behave in particular ways if they are to optimise their chances of finding a spouse. In Crusie's Bet Me, Min's mother is focussed on making Min acceptable to a man (both in order to catch a husband and to keep him after marriage), though her concern is predominantly with Min's physical appearance rather than her behaviour:

“I’m worried for you,” her mother was saying. “[...] I can’t stand it if you’re hurt.”
[...] “I just don’t want you hurt,” Nanette said, and Min thought she heard her voice shake. “I want you married to a good man who will appreciate you for how wonderful you are and not leave you because you’re overweight.” [...]
“Marriage is hard, Min,” Nanette was saying. ‘There are a million reasons for them to cheat and leave, so you have to work at it all the time. You have to look good all the time. Men are very visual. If they see something better -” [...] “No matter how hard you work, there’s always somebody younger, somebody better,” Nanette said, her voice trembling. (2004: 116-117)

She also advises Min not to use her 'loud voice' (2004: 69). Min keeps her loud voice, takes up eating carbs and butter and finds true love with Cal. What Crusie's re-writing of the Cinderella fairytale suggests is that there are far too many women out there trying to force themselves physically, emotionally and intellectually, into a corset (Min's mother has picked one out of her that is several sizes too small). But, as she's not an ugly sister, she doesn't need to squeeze herself into shoes that are too small: her glass slippers fit her perfectly.*

It's not just their bodies and personalities which women have been told to suppress in order to be marriageable, for example:

In Backlash, Susan Faludi revealed the stealth strategy of the right: to prove that the rights women gained for themselves through the feminist movement are causing their lives to fall apart. Among other things, she recalled a famous 1986 Newsweek story that said a single woman in her mid-thirties with delusions of meeting a partner ought to be very frightened. It seems that women were more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to get married after the age of thirty-five. Faludi discovered that the story was no more than "a parable masquerading as a numbers report." In fact, it was an offhand remark made by a reporter, which was then taken seriously by a stringer in New York, who spun it into Spinstergate for Newsweek. (Baumgardner & Richards 2000: 103-104)

As reported at Salon in 2006:

Twenty years later, Newsweek is finally eating crow -- and practically serving wedding cake. "Months [after 'The Marriage Crunch' ran], other demographers came out with new estimates suggesting a 40-year-old woman really had a 23 percent chance of marrying. Today, some researchers put the odds at more than 40 percent," reads the new article, which also sputters an aside that that "terrorist" thing -- the "terrorist" thing that "quickly became entrenched in pop culture" (Oops! Our bad!) -- "wasn't actually true."

A recent item in Forbes Magazine is perhaps a sign of how far we've come (and how far we still have to go). On the 22nd of August 2006 an article was published by editor Michael Noer, in which he proclaimed:

Guys: a word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don't marry a woman with a career.

Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage. While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat and less likely to have children.

The original article was very quickly noticed and critiqued, by many people including the Smart Bitches, and Forbes.com rapidly removed the original article and then put it back alongside another column putting the opposing view because, as they acknowledged, the original had 'provoked a heated response from both outside and inside our building. Elizabeth Corcoran, a member of our Silicon Valley bureau and principal author of the magazine's current cover story on robots, sent in this rebuttal', which was then printed alongside Noer's piece. Corcoran sensibly pointed out that it takes two people to make a marriage work:

The essence of a good marriage, it seems to me, is that both people have to learn to change and keep on adapting. Children bring tons of change. Mothers encounter it first during the nine months of pregnancy, starting with changing body dimensions. But fathers have to learn to adapt, too, by learning to help care for children, to take charge of new aspects of a household, to adapt as the mothers change.

Many modern romance heroines end up married by the end of the novel but not all do and there are relatively few whose main aim in life is to get married (and in the cases where it is, there are usually practical, financial reasons for this, particularly in historicals). In addition, romances are usually about a woman who is loved for who she is, not for who she's pretending to be. That's one of the positive messages about women and marriage that come out of romance.

On the other hand, as the Smart Bitches observed in their response to the Forbes article,

How many of you have noticed how contemporary romances oftentimes demonize the working life, specifically for women? I’ve noticed several stories about women on the verge of burnout who find fulfillment in a life filled with babies and domesticity

This is also something that was noted by Peter Darbyshire in his analysis of Harlequin's inspirational romances:

the unhappiness of the heroine in any given Love Inspired novel generally stems from resisting the wishes of the hero, who invariably demands she abandon her independent lifestyle and quit her job in order to become a full-time wife to him and a full-time mother to their children. The heroines inevitably do relent [...] Even in those few instances when female characters happily continue with what appears to be an independent lifestyle, they do so only with the tacit approval of male characters. (2002: 83)

Darbyshire was writing when this was a very new line, and he may therefore have reached conclusions about it which are not applicable to later novels in the line, but his comments and those of the Smart Bitches demonstrate that while some romances portray more modern attitudes towards marriage, others are much more traditional.

• Baumgardner, Jennifer & Amy Richards, 2000. Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
• Crusie, Jennifer, 2004. Bet Me (New York: St Martin's Press).
• Darbyshire, Peter, 2002. ‘The Politics of Love: Harlequin Romances and the Christian Right’, Journal of Popular Culture, 35:4: 75-87.
• Regis, Pamela, 2003. A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).
• Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe & David Popenoe, 2006. 'The State of Our Unions: The Social Health of Marriage in America, 2006, Life Without Children', The National Marriage Project, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
• Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe & David Popenoe, 2001. 'The State of Our Unions: The Social Health of Marriage in America, 2001, Who Wants to Marry a Soul Mate?', The National Marriage Project, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

* If you scroll down this page you'll find Crusie's description of the cover of Bet Me, which includes the 'glass slippers'. For more on fairytale elements in Bet Me, see Maria M. Brown's notes on the novel.

Famous Literary Predecessors of the Modern Romance Novel

My New Year's resolution was to read and blog about some of the predecessors of the modern romance novels published today.* I also qualified this by adding that I'd only blog about some of the less well-known novels. That's because some of these predecessors are among the most famous novels written, and (a) you can read about them in great detail elsewhere and (b) anything I could write here would look a bit feeble in comparison with the volumes of literary criticism on them that already exist. I will, though, mention some of the famous literary predecessors of the modern romance very briefly. I'm sticking to novels which are romance according to the RWA definition, i.e. novels that have 'a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending'. For reasons of space, if a particular author has written more than one romance I'll usually just list one of them.

• 1740, Richardson, Samuel, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded. This is Richardson's 'most widely read work. At once profoundly influential, yet heavily and publicly vilified, the novel's publication marked the beginning of one of the most astounding moments in literary history and laid the foundation for Richardson's status as one of the founding fathers of the modern novel.' (Batchelor 2002). Regis dedicates a chapter to it (2003: 63-74). You can read a brief description of the novel here, and see illustrations from five eighteenth-century editions here.

• 1778, Burney, Frances, Evelina: Or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World . This was 'a critical success, receiving praise from respected individuals, including the statesman Edmund Burke, and literary critic Dr. Johnson. It was admired for its comic view of wealthy English society, and for its realistic portrayal of working class London dialects' (Wikipedia). It was initially published anonymously, which led 'leading London society to speculate on the identity of the writer, who was universally assumed to be a man', though Burney's identity was later revealed and 'She was taken up by literary and high society and became the first woman to make writing novels respectable' (The Burney Society). Another aspect of Evelina which was of great significance for future women writers was that 'The "comedy of manners" genre in which she worked paved the way for Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and other 19th-century writers' (The Burney Society).
  

• 1813, Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice. Sarah's already claimed Austen as a romance author, and this novel is so well-known and well-loved that it hardly seems to require any further description from me, but if you'd like the Spark Notes, they're here, and, as they say, 'Pride and Prejudice contains one of the most cherished love stories in English literature: the courtship between Darcy and Elizabeth'. Colin Firth's portrayal of Darcy in the 1995 BBC adaptation is extremely popular. The link to the text of the novel will take you to the Republic of Pemberley site, where you can find a wealth of information about Austen, her novels and her times. You can also see Regis (2003: 75-84), and the chapter's titled 'The Best Romance Novel Ever Written', which makes Pam's feelings on this novel extremely clear! My favourite Austen is Persuasion, but I know I'm in the minority on this.

• 1847, Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre. If you haven't read it, and want a quick synopsis, there's one here, or you can look at the Spark Notes. The Victorian Web has plenty of very short articles on many aspects of the novel, including its political and social context, treatment of gender issues, and imagery/symbolism. See also Regis (2003: 85-91).

  When Jane Eyre was published in 1847, it became a bestseller. The reviews were on the whole favorable. There was much speculation about whether the writer was a man or a woman [...]. When it became known that a woman had written such a passionate novel and seemed so knowing sexually, the reviews became more negative. [...] The reviewer for the Rambler expressed a criticism that was made against all the Bronte novels--coarseness. The reference to "grosser and more animal passions" is a roundabout way of saying "sex." (Melani 2005)

• 1847, Brontë, Anne, Agnes Grey. There's a synopsis here, where the observation is made that

  Anne's first novel resembles in its calm naturalism nothing so much as one of the later Austen novels, with the vital difference that her heroine is a working woman. It deserves, far more than Jane Eyre, the description 'governess novel', because Agnes's experience is far more typical, and the predicament of the occupation is analysed much more closely. (Brontë Parsonage Museum and Brontë Society).

  Agnes Grey isn't as famous as Jane Eyre, but personally I prefer both it and Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which 'A number of contemporary critics have recognized [...] as a landmark feminist text' (Downey, 2000) to the other Brontë novels. Whatever the reason, I can manage perfectly well without the brooding Mr Rochester (and particularly without the horrible Heathcliff).

• 1854, Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, North and South. There's a synopsis here. Unlike the Brontës, Gaskell shows us the industrial activity which contributed so greatly to the Victorian economy.

The novel is famous as an "industrial novel" that engages [with] class struggle and suffering in newly industrialized Victorian cities like Manchester (or, as Gaskell calls it, Milton) and as an important female bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel. Margaret's public intervention in the strike ranks among the most exciting moments in Victorian literature. (Literature, Arts and Medicine Database)

• 1861, Trollope, Anthony, Framley Parsonage. There's a synopsis here and it was with this novel that 'Anthony Trollope enjoyed his first popular success. It is the fourth of Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire - a set of six novels that share a fictional geography, interlaced characters, and a thematic preoccupation with the church in a Cathedral town' (Regis 2003: 93). Although a 'thematic preoccupation with the church' might sound a little dull, it really isn't. This is a church rife with the equivalent of modern office politics, and for those of you who like series of romances which follow a group of characters, Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire provide an example of rich and complex world-building. His other series, the Palliser novels, again involve politics, though this time the plots 'usually involve English politics in varying degrees, specifically in and around Parliament' (Wikipedia). Trollope was an extremely prolific author, and this may well have been a trait he learned from his mother:

  Fanny Trollope [...] had been writing, industriously, a record of her crazy trip to America. She called it: Domestic Manners of the Americans. It was published, and quickly became a bestseller. [...] It gave Anthony an insight into how a professional writer should write. From his mother's example (she was constantly writing for many years, although she never quite achieved the same degree of success), he learned the habit of sheer hard work. (The Trollope Society)
  

  One might make comparisons with Nora Roberts' work habits, but unfortunately for Trollope, 'After his death Trollope's literary reputation sank low, and he was regarded as something of a journeyman of letters. This arose partly from the revelation in his Autobiography that he treated literature as a trade and wrote by the clock' (The Victorian Web). It rose again, however, as the mass of writing about his work testifies, and he still has plenty of enthusiastic fans in the UK, US and elsewhere.

• 1872, Hardy, Thomas, Under the Greenwood Tree. I know this isn't the most famous of Hardy's works, but it seems only right to include Hardy who is, as the Penguin Reader Factsheet acknowledges, 'one of the greatest novelists of the nineteenth century' and 'This charming, timeless story of rural life gave Hardy his first real taste of fame and success'. Or, as one reader candidly describes it,

  it's a book with about the least plot you will ever find in a novel. It's also on the short side. Unusually for Hardy's novels. it has a happy ending - however Far from the Madding Crowd, the next one he wrote, does too - it was only as Hardy's reputation grew that he could afford to upset his public at the end of every book.

  I was amused to note that one of the minor characters, whom some consider a witch, is called Mrs Endorfield.
  

• 1908, Forster, E. M, Room with a View. As Regis observes, 'E. M. Forster may have ended this novel happily, but he was by no means sanguine about happy endings in general' (2003: 99). It's fame is probably due at least in part to the award-winning 1986 Merchant Ivory film. The Spark Notes are here.

Can you think of any others? I thought of including George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, but although it has a love story and a happy ending, I'm not sure whether the love story between Daniel and Mirah is 'central'. I also considered Dickens' Great Expectations, but again, I wasn't sure if Pip and Estella's relationship is really 'central'. And how about D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover? It certainly has a central love relationship and the ending, if not happy, seems relatively optimistic. What do you think?

Even incomplete as it is, what this list suggests to me is that (a) as we've discussed previously, men can write romance/romantic novels and (b) that the so-called 'constraints' of writing within the romance genre (which basically amount to the need to end a love-story happily) in no way preclude the creation of a work of literary merit.

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• Regis, Pamela, 2003. A Natural History of the Romance Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

* I'm taking the term 'today' somewhat loosely, to mean 'anytime in the past few decades'. Having been a medievalist, a decade or two seems like a short space of time to me. I'm sure geologists would consider a decade the equivalent of a mere blinking of an eye.