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When the Romantic Novelists' Association was inaugurated in January 1960, Barbara Cartland was one of two Vice Presidents and she

was the biggest personality ever in the Romantic Novelists' Association, even though she was only a member for six years. She was undoubtedly a major force in getting it off the ground and recruiting founder members. But over the years she has also presented a problem, with which the Association still grapples today: that carefully crafted image of hers has been accepted universally as the archetypal romantic novelist. (Haddon & Pearson 22)

Rosalind Brunt, for example, while acknowledging that Cartland "cannot be understood in terms of a norm or an average [...] would suggest that Cartland is 'typical' in the sense of embodying certain features that are 'characteristic' of romance" (127). Cartland's novels certainly provide some very clear examples of what Kyra Kramer and I have termed

the “alchemical” model of romantic relationships, [in which] the heroine’s socio-sexual body (her Glittery HooHa) attracts, and ensures the monogamy of, the hero’s socio-sexual body (his Mighty Wang), allowing the heroine’s socio-political body (her Prism) to focus, and benefit from, the attributes of the hero’s socio-political body (his Phallus).

This is a model she would have encountered in her own reading of romantic fiction when still a schoolgirl because she

read voraciously - dozens and dozens of light romantic novels: Elinor Glyn, E. M. Hull, whose book The Sheik had set Edwardian womanhood aquiver with dreams of an illicit passion for a desert lover, and the Queen of all romantic lady novelists, Ethel M. Dell. [...] she is insistent on the debt she owes to Ethel M. Dell, a prolific and almost totally forgotten author.

I have copied her formula all my life. What she said was a revelation - that men were strong, silent, passionate heroes. And really my whole life has been geared to that. She believed, and I believed, that a woman, in order to be a good woman, was pure and innocent, and that God always answered her prayers, sooner or later.

There was a further lesson Barbara learned from Miss Dell [...]. It was [...] the belief, as she has put it, that 'human passions are transformed by love into the spiritual and become part of the divine'. (Cloud 31-32)

Consequently, Cartland's own works of fiction

speak with mystical and transcendental accents of romance as a means to spiritual enlightenment. [...] In her many novels, Cartland promoted what she referred to as a “religion of love,” a concept she explained as a theo-philosophical concept in her many non-fictional books. The myth that Cartland cultivated in her novels was that we are saved from our material-physical prison by love. (Rix)

While Dell influenced the content of Cartland's novels, their style would appear to owe much to Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor of the Daily Express and the Evening Standard, who took her as a protégée:

'Max taught me to write,' she says. 'I believe it is entirely due to him that I have been so successful with my books and the thousands of articles I have done over the years.' [...] she would take her Express and Standard paragraphs to the Hyde Park Hotel where Beaverbrook maintained a phone-filled office. There he would make a great performance of cross-questioning her about what she had written, then pulling her article into little pieces and crossing out the superfluities until finally he applied the proprietorial initials of approval and the authorised version went off to the paper for automatic inclusion.

The trouble, of course, was that Beaverbrook's idea of how to write was highly individual. He liked opinions expressed with certainty in short paragraphs, short sentences and short words. This was a fine formula for popular newspapers but not, alas, for great literature. The Beaver's influence is easily detected in Barbara Cartland's romantic fiction and I am not at all convinced that the influence is wholly benign. (Heald 45-46)

She herself, though, does not seem to have aspired to writing "great literature." When Tim Heald began the process of writing about her, he told Cartland he'd

better get down to some hard reading. She agreed that I must look at her four autobiographies but when I touched on the estimated 575 novels she said, quite rattily, 'Oh, you don't want to read them - they're all the same.' I said nothing to this, but thought, privately, that this was the sort of judgement made by her enemies. It was not what she herself was supposed to say. (14-15)

When asked by another biographer, Henry Cloud, about her heroines, she responded "Oh, she is always me, and always virginal of course. She's something of a Cinderella" (14). Her son, Ian McCorquodale, who became responsible for marketing the novels,concurred with her about this: he "maintains that all his mother's novels are variations on the Cinderella theme" (Heald 47). Heald's

impression is that while she would defend her work on grounds of style, accuracy of research and detail, and general all-round professionalism she acknowledges, within her own circle, that they are merely artefacts designed to give wholesome, harmless pleasure to what in a former age would have been servants and shop girls. (193-94)

Heald doesn't wholly disagree with Cartland's assessment of her work but he notes that she didn't write "her first historical romance [...] Hazard of Hearts" (129)

until 1948 [...]. She was a mature woman of forty-seven who had been writing novels for a quarter of a century before she suddenly hit on the formula which was to make her world famous. (130)

and it was, furthermore, only in the 1970s that

she really slipped into gear and started to churn them out at the prodigious rate she has maintained into her nineties [...] The popular conception is that all her books are historical romances yet this is far from the truth. Earlier novels were different. Jigsaw, the very first, was set in Mayfair, the world she knew best. [...] Later novels also took place in contemporary settings and some took themselves surprisingly seriously. None did so more than Sleeping Swords published in 1942 under her married name. The Daily Telegraph described it as 'long, serious' and 'well done'; the Manchester Guardian opined that she had adopted a 'Wells formula' and given us a 'socio-political novel, this time concerned with the last four decades of English history'.

I don't think that anyone, then or now, would claim that Sleeping Swords was a great novel but it had aspirations to genuine seriousness. (Heald 201-03)

Cloud, though, thought Cartland was also serious about her later novels:

She believes implicitly in what she writes, and this is the key to their success, the vital quality she shares with every really big, mass-selling author of popular fiction - sincerity. It is impossible to conterfeit and pointless to deride. Edgar Wallace had it, so did Ian Fleming, so does Barbara - the ability to turn their private dreams into the sort of myth that has a universal appeal. (16)

Not quite universal, I think, but certainly one that found a worldwide market.

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Brunt, Rosalind. "A Career in Love: The Romantic World of Barbara Cartland." Popular Fiction and Social Change. Ed. Christopher Pawling. London: Macmillan, 1984. 127-156.

Cloud, Henry. Barbara Cartland: Crusader in Pink. 1979. London: Pan, 1981.

Haddon, Jenny & Diane Pearson. Fabulous at Fifty: Recollections of the Romantic Novelists' Association 1960-2010. RNA, 2010.

Heald, Tim. A Life of Love: Barbara Cartland. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994.

Rix, Robert W. '“Love in the Clouds”: Barbara Cartland's Religious Romances." The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 21.2 (2009).

Vivanco, Laura and Kyra Kramer. "There Are Six Bodies in This Relationship: An Anthropological Approach to the Romance Genre." Journal of Popular Romance Studies 1.1 (2010).

I'm probably going to be moving house soon, which means I'll have to part with quite a few of my books. I'm treating this as an opportunity to take a break from my current project and concentrate on books I've been meaning to read for a while; one of them is Amanda Vickery's The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (there's a detailed review here). Vickery's description of their lives and beliefs suggests that women who might be considered doormats by the standards of many modern romance readers would have seen their own behaviour rather differently:

it was a commonplace that the strict performance of duty generated a degree of secret pleasure, and ladies were relentlessly tutored on how to reach and enjoy the moral high ground: 'You must also learn to be satisfied with the Consciousness of acting Right', counselled Lady Sarah Pennington, 'and look with an unconcerned Indifference on the Reception every successless Attempt to please may meet with,' while Eliza Haywood promised 'Sweet indeed are the reflections, which flow from a consciousness of having done what virtue and the duty owing to the character we bear in life, exacted from us ...' Women's own letters and diaries do suggest that many did their duty to a round of inner applause, finding a certain exaltation in it. Ladies accepted patriarchy in theory, although, strikingly, the assertion of male authority often proved much more acceptable and manageable coming from fathers than from husbands and brothers. Still, when wronged, genteel women rarely questioned the justice of the gender hierarchy; rather they bemoaned the fact that their menfolk departed so sorrily from the authoritative masculine ideal. That said, none of the women studied here expected to endure tyranny [...] and they were fully conscious of what was owing to their dignity and rank. While not above the occasional exhibition of an almost theatrical feminine inferiority when petitioning for favours, the habitual self-projection of most was of upright strength, stoical fortitude and self-command. To be mistress of oneself was paramount - genteel ladies aimed to be self-possessed in social encounters, self-controlled in the face of minor provocations, self-sufficient in the midst of ingratitude, and, above all, brave and enduring in the grip of tragedy and misfortune. Abject feminine servility was the ineradicable mark of the kitchen maid not her employer. (8)

Samuel Richardson's Pamela Andrews and Jane Austen's Fanny Price may not appeal to modern readers as much as the outspoken Elizabeth Bennet, but they are "brave and enduring in the grip of tragedy and misfortune" and, in their own ways, they show a great deal of strength. They may begin their stories rather closer to being kitchen maids than employers but by the end of the novels in which they appear these heroines have been rewarded for their fortitude and virtue with more than "a round of inner applause": they are firmly embedded in the ranks of the genteel.

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Vickery, Amanda. The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.

During the recent Australian election campaign the "Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee" promised that

A Coalition Government, if elected, will crack down on Labor’s addiction to waste by auditing increasingly ridiculous research grants and reprioritising funding through the Australian Research Council (ARC) to deliver funds to where they’re really needed. [...] There will be no reduction in research funding. In fact, the Coalition has announced new research into dementia and diabetes. (Briggs)

One of the academics whose research was singled out as an example of the "ridiculous" responded by arguing that "Philosophising is, like all intellectual work, work" (Redding). The Coalition, however, evidently doesn't think of all intellectual work as equal: only some is "really needed." Perhaps the only "intellectual work" which is deemed "work" by such politicians either produces tangible products or trains others to work outside academia. That would seem to have been the position of Governor Rick Scott of Florida, who in 2011 declared that:

We don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It’s a great degree if people want to get it, but we don’t need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, and math degrees. That’s what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on, those types of degrees, so when they get out of school, they can get a job. (qtd. in Lende)

I can't help but see parallels between this sort of politician and the Protestant Reformers who

stripped down the list of admissible callings, lopping off not only the beggars and rascals whose idleness cumbered the land but the courtiers and monks who were no better. The medieval summum bonum, a life of contemplation and prayer, suddenly was no vocation at all. "True Godliness don't turn men out of the world" into "a lazy, rusty, unprofitable self-denial," William Penn insisted, joining the attack on the monasteries; faith set men to work in the occupations of the secular, commonplace world. (Rodgers 8)

The constant stream of attacks on the humanities makes me wonder if we're coming up for another dissolution of the monasteries, only this time

it is the humanities and several of the social sciences that many public leaders have come to see as irrelevant (or worse) [...]. Notwithstanding the dizzying pace of change in the economy, policy leaders seem to imagine that a tighter focus on patently job-related fields of study now in short supply — STEM and selected "career fields" -- can somehow build the full range of skills and knowledge [...] society will need. (Schneider)

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Briggs, Jamie. "Ending More of Labor's Waste." 5 Sept. 2013.

Lende, Daniel. "Florida Governor: Anthropology Not Needed Here." PLOS blogs. 11 Oct. 2011.

Redding, Paul. "Philosophy is not a 'ridiculous' pursuit. It is worth funding." The Guardian. 17 Sept. 2013.

Rodgers, Daniel T. The Work Ethic in Industrial America 1850-1920. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.

Schneider, Carol Geary. "A Dangerous Assault." Inside Higher Ed. 8 February 2013.

The image of a monk at work in a scriptorium came from Wikimedia Commons.

In “What’s Love But a Second Hand Emotion?”: Man-on-Man Passion in the Contemporary Black Gay Romance Novel," Marlon B. Ross states that

The black gay romance novel emerges in the mid-1980s both as a riffing response to the kind of pop heteronorm performed by mass mediated hip hop, as well as to the consolidated white gay rights agenda, the rising homonorm that aims to exclude black man-on-man desire while claiming that its own articulation of same-sexuality is categorical, universal, and biologically ordained. (676)

He focuses on Larry Duplechan's Eight Days a Week (1985), James Earl Hardy's B-Boy Blues (1994) and E. Lynn Harris's Invisible Life (1994).

Ross is critical of "hegemonic, homonormal modes of identification that fix gender-dissident desire in order to legitimate it on par with heterosexual love" (674) and while the novels he's chosen are definitely about romantic relationships, I'm not sure they're strictly speaking "romance novels" as defined by the Romance Writers of America, who stipulate that there should be:

A Central Love Story: The main plot centers around individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work. A writer can include as many subplots as he/she wants as long as the love story is the main focus of the novel.



An Emotionally-Satisfying and Optimistic Ending: In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love.

Larry Duplechan's novel was

aimed at the new gay white culture forming in the ghettoes of the urban North. The story of an aspiring twenty-two-year-old black gay singer who falls in love with a blond bisexual ex-football player, Duplechan’s first novel, like his succeeding ones, might be called integrationist fantasies, like the post-Civil Rights narratives of good noble blacks, usually men, single-handedly integrating white institutions. (678)

There is apparently no happy ending for the central couple because, "despite their fierce attraction to each other, their relationship fails" (Nelson 633).

Hardy and Harris's books are both the first installment in series. I have the impression that Hardy's comes closest to the pattern expected of "romances" because

Hardy clings to one signal attribute of homonormative romance, the rule that true love can be manifested only in the heteronormalizing coupling convention, as Ann duCille labels this trend in African American women’s fiction. In addition to ruffneck Pooquie’s eventual self-acceptance as a man-loving man who can take it up the ass with the best of sissy-punks, many of Littlebit’s and Pooquie’s love trials revolve around sexual fidelity not only to each other but more crucially to the ideal of monandrous commitment. (Ross 680)

The relationship begun in B-Boy Blues evidently has its ups and downs since the sixth book, A House is not a Home (2005) begins "ten years since Mitchell and Raheim became lovers, and four since they broke up" (Kirkus). It would seem to conclude with a "happy for now": "They give their relationship a second chance, but not until the last few pages of the book. Whether it'll work or not, who knows" (Grey853).

I haven't been able to find out exactly what happens to the protagonist of Harris's Invisible Life but his relationships are turbulent and over the course of the series he shares the stage with other couples.

Regardless of whether or not one thinks of these three novels as "romance" or "romantic fiction" they're an important part of the history of black and gay romance novels.

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Nelson, Emmanuel S. "Duplechan, Larry." The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature: D-H. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005. 632-34.

Romance Writers of America. "About the Romance Genre."

Ross, Marlon B. " 'What’s Love But a Second Hand Emotion?': Man-on-Man Passion in the Contemporary Black Gay Romance Novel." Callaloo 36.3 (2013): 669-687.

"There is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Not content with annoying philosophers and scientists, though, the evolutionary psychologists seem to have decided to annoy those of us in the arts and humanities too. Recently some of them set out to uncover the "Mating Strategies Exemplified by Austen's Characters" (Kruger et al 199).

Their credibility was somewhat undermined by an early use of the world "natural":

Jane Austen is well known for her rich descriptions of female protagonists and their varied experiences in their quest for male partners (Harman, 2009), and thus, it seems natural to explore women’s mating strategies as depicted in her texts. (199)

Really? I'd have thought they'd want to distinguish between natural/biological influences on behaviour and nurture/social factors. That's perhaps a minor nitpick, but they also suggest that Austen had an "intuitive understanding of women's reproductive concerns" (199). I'm sure it suits their purposes to depict Austen as someone who was intuitively in touch with women's innate biological motivations: this would make her novels an invaluable source of primary information for them. I'm not sure what "Janeites" would feel about this, but I very much doubt it's a view which would find favour among "Austenites":

Michael Hayes

locates the difference between the two groups via discourse:It is also easy to recognize the legitimacy of two very different discourses: Janeite, which tends to be informal, intimate and personal accounts of her social and sentimental costume dramas, and Austenite, which is formal, intellectual and objective in its explication of her ironic, moral and subtle narratives that constitute a social and moral analysis. (221)

According to Hayes, the Janeite discourse is dependent on both personal narrative and period trappings, while Austenite interaction is marked by a more academically rigorous and formal evaluation of the same work. (Gross 4)

Moreover, I feel sure that those who "regard her as the most unflinchingly satirical of all great novelists" (Mullan) would be less than happy about these academics' assumption "that her characters should be immediately comprehendible to young adults, such that they would understand the various mating strategies the characters employ" (199).

Here's a description of the kind of research they undertook:

Men preferred the long-term strategist (Jane Bennett) to the flirty Lydia Bennett for both a long-term committed relationship and a short-term relationship, but did not have a preference for a one-night sexual relationship. Men preferred the short-term strategist (Maria Bertram) to the commitment-seeking Fanny Price for a one-night sexual relationship, but did not show a preference for other relationships. However, in a third comparison (Emma Woodhouse from Emma and Mary Crawford from Mansfield Park), men did not indicate any relationship preferences. (200)

This reads to me like a game of "marry, shag, kill". In this game

you have three people, and you have to decide wich of the 3 you would do what with. Shag, being the one night stand, marry, being you spend the rest of your life with them (which means you can shag them as many times as you want), and kill, I think is self explanatory.

Admittedly the academics left out "kill" but they seem to have replaced it with "a short-term relationship." What's really interesting to me is that

In both the preliminary and current study we decided that although Elizabeth Bennett is the central character, we chose to focus on her sisters Jane and Lydia because of their starkly contrasting personalities and mating strategies. (200)

In other words, they preferred to focus on the less nuanced characters. Would Elizabeth's success, that results from what might almost be called an anti-mating mating strategy, not have provided support for their theories? Furthermore, the graph in Figure 1 suggests that when it came to choosing between Jane and Lydia in the "shag" scenario, slightly more men chose Jane than Lydia, which was not really in line with the hypothesis

that participants’ ratings for a character’s attractiveness would be a function of the mating strategy the character exemplifies in the text, even when this information is excluded from the descriptive passage. (205)

They had "expected men to prefer Lydia [...] for non-committed sexual relationships" (207) but acknowledged that in the descriptive passage which the men read before making their decision

she is described very unfavorably. She is said to be ignorant, a poor listener, and unintelligent, all of which are negatively evaluated personality characteristics. It remains interesting, though, that although she is described so negatively, approximately half of the men preferred her for a hypothetical short-term and a brief, sexual relationship. (208)

What I find "interesting" is the fact that the men weren't being given a wide range of options. So, given a choice between a woman with an extremely unattractive personality and another whom one might reasonably doubt would consent to a "non-committed sexual relationship," opinions were split about which was the least-bad option. It certainly isn't a ringing endorsement of Lydia's mating strategy or, I would suggest, of the hypotheses underlying the approach of the academics carrying out the study.

Mate Selection: "Mr Collins meant to choose one of the daughters" (illustration by Hugh Thomson, via Wikimedia Commons)

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Gross, Ursula Marie. "What Happens Next: Jane Austen's Fans and Their Sequels to Pride and Prejudice." MA thesis. Washington DC: Georgetown University, August 2008.

Kruger, D. J., Fisher, M. L., Strout, S. L., Wehbe, M., Lewis, S., & Clark, S. "Variation in Women’s Mating Strategies Depicted in the Works and Words of Jane Austen." Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology 7.3 (2013): 197-210.

Mullan, John. "Jane Austen is not that soothing: Suggestions that her fiction is an escape into a calmer, less crazy world miss the novels' stinging satire." The Guardian. 11 July 2013.

The period covered by Claire Langhamer's new book, The English in Love: The Intimate Story of An Emotional Revolution is probably not quite "historical" by the standards of popular romance fiction since it looks at the years from "1920-1970" (4) but reading it made me consider beliefs about love in relation to both historical romances and the history of popular romance.

Langhamer argues that

there is something distinctive about the ways in which love, sex, and marriage were interwoven within mid-century England. This is not to suggest that love had no significance for ordinary people prior to the twentieth century or that there was somehow 'more' love in this period than ever before. [...] Romantic love is hardly a modern invention. (11)

but

While it would be inaccurate to suggest that pre-twentieth-century marriages were characterized by lovelessness, love was not always deemed sufficient reason to marry. [...] By the 1950s emotion alone was increasingly enough. (13)

Thinking about love as an emotion which "has a history. It has meant different things to different people at different moments and has served different purposes" (Langhamer 4) has obvious implications for historical romances.

Historical fiction, I suspect, always keeps one eye on the present even as it looks backwards in order to depict the past. Sometimes the eye looking back sees little more than picturesque clothes and quaint customs and the result is "wallpaper" historical fiction; at others a whole-hearted attempt is made to depict a time and place with its own mentalités (I put that in the plural because societies are not homogenous, and there are likely to be significant differences in the worldviews of people of different social classes etc).

Although

In recent years historical research has taken an 'emotional turn', driven by an assertion that feeling is shaped by time and culture. 'Emotions themselves are extremely plastic,' observes the medievalist Barbara Rosenwein, 'it is very hard to maintain, except at an abstract level that emotions are everywhere the same. (Langhamer 7-8)

another of my suspicions is that it is still more difficult to create a work of historical fiction which is accurate in its depiction of a society's attitudes than one in which, for example, details of clothing have been meticulously researched, partly because because beliefs are much less tangible than old fabrics and less visible than fashion prints but also because the beliefs and attitudes of the author and intended readers may get in the way. I suspect, too, that this might be a bit more likely to true in historical romance than in other kinds of historical fiction because the heroes and heroines of romances are usually people the reader is meant to find admirable and/or "sympathetic" and that probably means they're expected to have attitudes similar to those of the reader. Furthermore, readers of romances usually want the novels to be romantic and they may well define that by their own standards rather than by those of the historical period in which the book is set.

Characters whose attitudes seem closer to those of a modern reader than to those of their own time are not necessarily anachronistic. After all, as mentioned, societies are not homogeneous and it's possible that romance authors are more likely to write about characters whose beliefs are somewhat unusual yet might still have been held by someone living in that period. There's a limit, though, to quite how far "before their time" someone can be and still seem authentic, and there are also implications for such an individual's status in their society.

One way round this might be for authors of historical fiction to concentrate on periods which are not so very far from our own, so that the gap between their attitudes towards love and ours seems easier to bridge. I wonder if that might be one factor underlying the popularity of Regency romances.

Attitudes towards love and marriage would appear to have changed quite rapidly however, even within the past century. One indication of this is provided by lonely hearts columns:

What the modern reader might see as endearingly modest romantic aspirations were not unusual amongst Post clients in the 1920s and 1930s. The successful execution of gendered roles was of apparently more importance than looks and the capacity for passion. A 5 foot 6 inch tall widower felt it important to include his skills as a motor car driver, pony and pig breeder, and experimental fruit grower before self-describing as 'kind and cheery ... and not too ugly'. A commitment to domesticity was paramount: both spinster and bachelor clients requested 'homely' individuals. Steadiness was a much sought-after attribute.

After the Second World War personality traits became more important within the pages of the Post. Women clients now looked for a sense of humour, loyalty and kindness whilst men requested affectionate and loving women. 'Normality' and 'ordinariness' was also much in demand. By 1955, the language of emotional intimacy had shifted. It was not unheard of for those who advertised to suggest that they were looking for a soulmate. We can begin to discern a more introspective model of romantic taste which placed emotional connection at its heart. Changed understandings of love - of its everyday status, meaning, and power - underpinned this model. Within this context, love had the capacity to transform the self. Indeed, a capacity for transcendence came to be a marker of emotional authenticity. (23-24)

I can't help but wonder how these changes affected popular romance fiction. Langhamer notes that

historian Judy Giles explains: 'in the 1920s and 1930s the acceptable response to the longing expressed in romantic fiction was to read these as "silly", "perverted", and "immature", marginal and potentially threatening to the "real" experiences of a woman's life which consisted of prudential marriage and the provision of a comfortable, hygienic home in which to sustain a male breadwinner and rear healthy children.' (54)

Of course romantic fiction isn't homogenous and there's always been a mixture of the really escapist and unrealistic (like E. M. Hull's The Sheik) and the more down-to-earth, which is perhaps more likely to emphasise shared backgrounds and outlooks.  I wonder if, in a way, the more escapist side of the genre came to seem more emotionally realistic as the century moved on and people adopted more idealistic views about transcendent love within marriage. As far as the present is concerned, Langhamer's suggestion that

At the beginning and at the end of the twentieth century sex and love constituted separate, though often interlocking, spheres. The mid-century achievement was to entwine them. (49)

makes me wonder whether romance fiction which equates passion with true love seems increasingly unrealistic in the context of 21st-century attitudes towards love, sex and marriage. Also, given that Langhamer's study is about the English in love, and the centre of romance publishing seems to have moved from London to North America, I wonder whether there are significantly different ideas about love in the US and UK.

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Langhamer, Claire. The English in Love: The Intimate Story of An Emotional Revolution. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. [Excerpt here and reviews from Times Higher Education,  The Telegraph, The Economist and The Guardian.]

This week I've been reading some romances from the beginning of the twentieth century, including Berta Ruck's The Courtship of Rosamund Fayre (1915). In that novel Rosamond, who is working as a secretary, is asked to deputise for her employer, Eleanor Urquhart, who thinks herself too busy to correspond with her cousin and fiancé. This is just about feasible because the cousins have never met, the match is an arranged one, and Eleanor and Rosamond have almost identical handwriting because during their schooldays Eleanor admired Rosamond's handwriting and copied it. Rosamond, however, is uneasy about the deception and she becomes distinctly alarmed by what a visiting

elderly Professor-person had to say to old Mr. Urquhart. [...] It seemed to be all about "literary criticism" and "style" [...]. Suddenly, however, her mind leapt to attention.

The old Dryasdust-man was violently tapping his palm with his forefinger and almost shouting at Mr. Urquhart, who looked intensely irritated, "but, my dear sir, the personal elements of style can never be eliminated! The plagiarist may imitate the writing, the general trend of argument may arrive at the same conclusions, but the unconscious elements of style remain." (219-220)

Of course the fiancé does eventually work out what has been going on, and in fact returned from abroad unexpectedly because something about the "unconscious elements" of Rosamond's style suddenly made him very eager to meet his bride-to-be.

I'm not sure I would know any more than Rosamond does about how to set about doing this type of analysis of literary styles, but Olivia Davis seems to have attempted it in a recent essay on Fifty Shades of Grey. She takes as her model a

study by Talbot (1995) that examined transitivity choices achieved through the distribution of process verbs in selected extracts taken from Mills and Boon romance novels. Talbot’s study found that within the genre, female characters were represented as being in a habitual ‘struggle for self-control’ (Talbot 1995: 83), exhibited by their frequent used of mental process verbs. This was a contrast to the male characters, whose use of material processes depicted them as ‘a powerful person...the epitome of the patriarchal male’ (Talbot 1995: 81), thus reinforcing damaging gender stereotypes.

The study in question is Mary M. Talbot's Fictions at Work: Language and Social Practice in Fiction (1995) in which Talbot analysed one romance novel in depth (Kate Walker's No Gentleman, 1992). It was a Harlequin Romance and here's part of what Talbot had to say about the Harlequin/Mills & Boon hero of the time:

he is invariably tall, lean, white, and ruggedly handsome with an animal magnetism which is quite extraordinary. He turns heads wherever he goes. Always a powerful person, he is generally someone who is used to being obeyed; a bully, in fact, both professionally and personally. And, perhaps it goes without saying, he is always affluent, whether a successful architect or artist or a fully-fledged capitalist. (81)

By coincidence, Walker's heroine was named Anna and Talbot mentions that

she is tormented with (almost) uncontrollable urges of one kind or another. Her mind and body seem to be perpetually in conflict; the basic premise seems to be that women suppress their instincts/true feelings and are thrown into a state of confusion and consternation by a desirable man's attentions. (82)

The similarities between E. L. James's Christian and Ana and Harlequin/Mills & Boon heroes and heroines of this kind have been noted by Jodi McAlister:

Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey are clearly recognisable [...] as archetypes from the world of “Harlequin Presents” category romances: the shy virgin and the emotionally damaged billionaire.

Olivia Davis, though, sticks to analysis of the "unconscious elements of style" and looks in detail at the passage in Fifty Shades which

details the 21-year old, sexually naïve Ana losing her virginity to Grey, [...] an older, more experienced man. [...] Ana has less total verbs than her male counterpart. Grey uses a massive 37 verbs in the extract, implying he is more active, and he literally dominates the text. [...] Within these verbs, Grey also uses more material processes than mental. [...] Ana has a higher percentage of mental processes (65%) than material (35%) [...]. These figures indicate again that gender stereotypes are evident in the text, as this low level of material processes depicts Ana as more passive. Although [...] the narrative is told from Ana’s point of view, which can account for the use of some of the mental processes, Mills rightfully observes that ‘While the male [sexual] experience is represented in terms of the actions he does to her body, the female’s experience is given as her thoughts and feelings, and her body’s independent responses to physical pleasure’ (1995:149) [...]. (79-81)

I find all this interesting, though I can't say I fully understand it: like Jack Elliot's work on romance, which involves training "a computer to spot differences in word-use," it seems a much more scientific, numerical sort of literary criticism than mine.

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Davis, Olivia. "Fifty Shades of Grey: A Liberating Text in the Context of Post-Feminism?" Codex 1.1 (2013): 69-89.

McAlister, Jodi. "Fifty Shades of Genre." Popular Romance Project. 8 Nov. 2012.

Ruck, Berta. The Courtship of Rosamond Fayre. Toronto: William Briggs, 1915.

Talbot, Mary M. Fictions at Work: Language and Social Practice in Fiction. London: Longman, 1995.

I was reading Catherine Roach's Stripping, Sex and Popular Culture when I came across something that reminded me of a passage from Sarah Mayberry's Suddenly You which had generated a fair amount of controversy over at Dear Author. It's about breasts and breastfeeding:

Unlike many of the women in her mothers’ group, she had been unsuccessful at breast-feeding. A series of infections and an inadequate milk supply led her paediatrician to recommend bottle-feeding Alice when her daughter was barely a month old. Consequently, Pippa wasn’t nearly as casual about flinging her breasts around as some of her friends. To her, they were about sex and intimacy, not sustenance. (p. 42)

Here's what Roach, a successful breastfeeder, had to say on the topic of flinging one's breasts around:

Tassel-twirling [...] makes me inwardly cringe, it just looks so torturous, although I have to admit that all of the other women in my afternoon workshop seem to be having a blast. I’m one of the few who doesn’t glue on the tassels. I feel too sorry for the nipples. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent two years breast-feeding my child, an experience that was rewarding but also a form of hard labor for the breast. It left me with the sense that you’ve got to be gentle with them; they need nurturance, support, delicate handling. You can’t go swinging them around like a cowgirl looking to rope a steer. A bosom is not a centrifugal lettuce spinner. (115)

Roach came across the tassels while researching burlesque, to see if and/or how it differed from the stripping she'd already seen in stripclubs. She found that in burlesque the

look varies widely, from stunning to butch to art house to clown; from slim to fat; from pin-up polished to deliberately anti-glam. In comparison, the strip club insists on a much more monolithic and conventional vision of female form (slim, big-breasted, pretty, available). These differences illustrate that the definition of beauty and femininity in stripclub exotic dance is a comparatively narrow one driven by men’s pleasure and pocketbook. (111)

She argues that, "To the extent that the stripping industry fuels male fantasy – and female fantasy as well – about how a perfect woman should look and act, the 'average' woman can never measure up" (85).

Jade Beall's "A Beautiful Body Project" celebrates the beauty of more "average" women and, like burlesque, it puts on display bodies in a variety of sizes and shapes:

Beall says many of her clients don't like the images at first, and focus on what they see as blemishes or problem areas - a roll of fat, a wrinkle, a stretch mark.

But she says the more they look, the more they start to see the beauty in the images. (BBC)

Judge for yourself:

[Edited to add: I don't have a transcript of the video, but the gist of what's said in it is much the same as in this article in The Guardian.]

You can download

• Roach, Catherine M. Stripping, Sex, and Popular Culture (Berg, 2007)

for free (in pdf format) from OAPEN, whose "Library contains freely accessible academic books, mainly in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences. OAPEN works with publishers to build a quality controlled collection of Open Access books." Some of the other books available are:

• Cleminson, Richard & Francisco Vazquez Garcia, F. 'Los Invisibles': A History of Male Homosexuality in Spain, 1850-1940 (University of Wales Press, 2007)
• McDonald, Nicola (ed). Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance (Manchester University Press, 2004)
• Rydström, Jens. Odd Couples: A History of Gay Marriage in Scandinavia (Amsterdam University Press, 2011)

Some months ago Emma Barry, "a [romance] novelist and full-time mama and graduate student" wrote a post about "Politics and the Romance Novel" in which she commented that

One of the determinations and often-repeated truisms is that readers don’t like political books. It is believed readers won’t read about politics and, more broadly, they don’t like books that directly address inequities, social justice, organizations and belief structures (e.g., churches, capitalism), and so on.

Given the title of the post, I'm assuming she was referring specifically to readers of romance novels.

I have the impression that other popular genres, such as science fiction/speculative fiction and fantasy, quite often address these issues directly. Admittedly I've been reading pretty much exclusively within the romance genre since it became the focus of my research but I do occasionally venture outside and I don't think it can be a fluke that the two novels shelved as "fantasy" which I read this week "directly address inequities, social justice, organizations and belief structures (e.g., churches, capitalism), and so on": Mazarkis Williams, author of The Emperor's Knife creates a world in which there are a variety of different social structures, cultures and religious beliefs and the plot of Lois McMaster Bujold's The Hallowed Hunt turns on the importance of souls and some of the gods of the Quintarian religion make an appearance. In both novels there are discussions about politics and the responsibilities of rulers. My favourite bit of overt political commentary, though, comes from Mercedes Lackey's The Lark and the Wren, a fantasy novel I read a while ago. Here's a secondary character, Tonno, explaining why paying taxes is a responsible and necessary thing to do:

"Constables, dung-sweepers, the folk who repair and maintain the wells and the aqueducts, and a hundred more jobs you'd never think of and likely wouldn't see. Rat-catchers and street-tenders, gate-keepers and judges, gaolers and the men who make certain food sold in the marketplace is what it's said to be. [...] That's what a government is all about, Rune," he said, more as if he was pleading with her than as if he was trying to win an argument. "Taking care of all the things that come up when a great many people live together. And yes, most of those things each of us could do for himself, taking care of his own protection, and his family's, and minding the immediate area around his home and shop - but that would take a great deal of time, and while the expenses would be less, they would come in lumps, and in the way of things, at the worst possible time." (113)

Rune "could see his point" (113) but she evidently isn't wholly reconciled to the idea of paying taxes because when the subject appears again later in the novel it's due to her suggesting to Wren that living a life on the open road might be advantageous because of

"The damned tithe and tax. If they can't catch you, they can't collect it. And if you leave before they catch you -"

"Point taken," he admitted. "Though, I'll warn you, I do pay tax; I've been paying both our shares. If you want decent government, you have to be prepared to pay for it." [...]

"Point taken," she said, quietly. "Tonno - felt the same way as you, and lectured me about it often enough. [...]" (218)

One may agree or disagree with the political, religious etc stances taken by characters in these novels but I find it very refreshing to see them expressed openly, in much the same way that, in Lackey's novel, "musicians wore [...] ribbon knots on their sleeves" (103) so that their occupation is readily apparent. It's something I don't often see in romance, although it could be argued that all romances are political if, as Pamela Regis has argued, one of the "eight essential elements of the romance novel" (30) is

Society Defined

Near the beginning of the novel, the society that the heroine and hero will confront in their courtship is defined for the reader. This society is in some way flawed; it may be incomplete, superannuated, or corrupt. It always oppresses the heroine and hero. [...] The scene or scenes defining the socieyt establishes the status quo which the heroine and hero must confront in their attempt to court and marry and which, by their union, they symbolically remake. (31)

However, the politics inherent in defining a society and then remaking it would seem to be well masked in most romances. Perhaps this is because, as Merrian Weymouth once mused on Twitter, "romancelandia is an escape into privilege" (qtd by Meoskop). Privilege has been described as "an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was 'meant' to remain oblivious" (McIntosh). By definition, then, making overt the politics underlying romances would tend to work against an escape into privilege.

While I can understand the appeal of escaping into privilege, I find myself alienated by the implicit politics of a lot of romance novels and I can't help but agree with Emma Barry's conclusion:

If we’re pretending that a run-of-the-mill Regency or small-town contemporary is without statement about power or politics, it’s going to be very difficult for a novel that addresses inequity — across race, class, sexual orientation, nation of origin, etc. — to make it.

At the end of the day, I’d wish we talk about power and politics in every novel in more complicated ways, thus opening the market to the voices that are currently excluded.

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Barry, Emma. "Politics and the Romance Novel." 28 May 2013.

Lackey, Mercedes. The Lark and the Wren. 1992. The Free Bards. Riverdale, NY: Baen, 1997. 1-298.

McIntosh, Peggy. "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack."

Meoskop. "Master of His Domain." It's My Genre. 4 April 2013.

Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2003.

I've seen very little about romance publishing in Israel other than Paul Grescoe's brief reference to Harlequins being published

under a licensing arrangement in Israel, where the company had some difficult dealings but enjoyed among the highest penetrations of any country in the world. In recent years, however, Hebrew has become one of a couple of languages that are no longer part of the Harlequin world. (173)

I was therefore pleased to see some mention of romance in Rachel Leket-Mor's about "IsraPulp: The Israeli Popular Literature Collection at Arizona State University." She describes the items in the collection as being "on the ostracized fringe" (2) and adds that

Collecting, preserving, and enabling access to these materials are the responsibility of librarians and stewards of cultural memory, as demonstrated in cultural historian Robert Darnton’s essay “The Library in the New Age” (2008):

The criteria of importance change from generation to generation, so we cannot know what will matter to our descendants. They may learn a lot from studying our Harlequin novels or computer manuals or telephone books. Literary scholars and historians today depend heavily on research in almanacs, chapbooks, and other kinds of “popular” literature, yet few of those works from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have survived. They were printed on cheap paper, sold in flimsy covers, read to pieces, and ignored by collectors and librarians who did not consider them “literature.” (5)

Leket-Mor's article (which is freely available online) isn't just about the University's collection: it also includes a short "history of Hebrew non-canonized literature since the 1930s." She begins earlier, though, with related literature published elsewhere, and so she mentions that

In 1937, the two major Yiddish dailies in Warsaw, Haynt and Der Moment, started to publish sensational novels in booklets. The first installment was distributed with the Friday newspaper edition, and the rest of the series was sold separately, as a side business for the publishers. These novels, epitomized by the serialized Sabine and Regine, were usually titled after their female protagonists, featuring urban romance stories with a dash of erotic intricacies. By 1938, the distribution of these Damsel-in-Distress booklets outnumbered any Jewish newspaper in Warsaw (Shmeruk 1982; Cohen N. 2003b, 2008).

These serialized Yiddish novels were also exported to Erets-Israel, “boxes upon boxes of ‘Sabines’ and ‘Regines’,” by Jewish journalists who emigrated from Poland with the Fifth ‘Aliyah (1929–1939). Inspired by their popularity, similar series came out in Hebrew during the 1930s and 1940s. (9)

It was the

ha-Roman ha-Za'ir publishing house of the Farago Brothers [...] which was the steadiest enterprise in the non-canonized domain, and [...] therefore epitomized the concept of pulp fiction in colloquial Hebrew. According to the thorough study of Gavriel Rosenbaum (1999), the firm operated from 1939 to 1961, first under the name of ha-Roman ha-Za'ir [The Tiny Novel], and since 1952 as ha-Kulmos [The Quill] [...] ha-Roman ha-Za'ir and ha-Kulmos published about 700 chapbooks during their twenty-two years of continuous activity. Some of the titles were retranslated from Hungarian and republished because the publishers believed that the Hebrew register used in the first editions was too elevated. The scope of their output covered romance stories, along with crime and adventure stories spiced with romance, in urban settings. Erotic elements were moderate, and these never turned into pornography. According to Rosenbaum (1999), the Farago brothers took their publishing business seriously and insisted on well-translated, proofread, entertaining texts. (17-18)

Apparently

The activity of the pulp industry subsided during the seventies and by the end of that decade was practically gone. Among the genres that were still being printed were Westerns, Patrick Kim titles, children’s titles (including comic books), romance, mystery, and pornography, which became more explicit in nature. (36)

Arizona State University's Israeli Popular Literature Collection contains "several novels published by Mizrahi" (53) from this period but it would seem that the collection's body of erotic/pornographic texts is larger than its list of romances because the former includes

almost a complete run of all published Stalags, as well as other erotic and pornographic titles, some of them represent the gay culture. Publishers include Ramdor, ha-Sifriyah ha-Ketanah, Mor, Reno, Narkis, Hermesh, Yam-Suf, ha-Te’omim, ha-Sha'ashu'a ha-Kal, Orr, ha-Roman ha-Romanti ha-Refu’i [the Medical Romance]. (53)

One interesting difference between romances published in the UK and US is that

the overwhelming majority of non-canonized texts in Hebrew literature through its different periods were written by men, even when the targeted audience was clearly women, as in the case of romance novels issued by ha-Roman ha-Za‘ir press [...]. This fact is quite surprising when considering, for example, the American subsystem of romance fiction, dominated by female authors (Radway 1991). The far-reaching consequences of this on the writing style, representation of women, and assumed readers of Israeli popular literature are demonstrated in the terminology of erotic literature: according to Ben-Ari (2006), those erotic and pornographic texts that were written by women are not essentially different than those written by men, as the former adapted the norms prevailing in this genre. This is the only study that touches on this issue. (16)

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Grescoe, Paul. The Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance. Vancouver: Raincoast, 1996.

Leket-Mor, Rachel. "IsraPulp: The Israeli Popular Literature Collection at Arizona State University," Judaica Librarianship 16.4 (2011).