romance novels & I
As I mentioned, I’ll be writing about the romance genre, among other things. Just as a background, what follows is my own history of discovering that I liked reading and thinking about romance novels. (If you share that liking, what’s your history?)
I started reading them in 2006, when I was a fairly recent convert to feminism and still working on my English lit degree. I’d heard nothing but ill about them before–they were badly written, sexist, porn for prudes with bad taste in men. Yet I knew they were popular, and that they were written by women and for women. So even though I suspected they were everything I hated, I was curious.
My first few picks were by Stephenie Laurens. (I chose her because the amount of shelf space given to her indicated extreme popularity, and because I wanted something historical.) I really, really hated them. Even the one that started promisingly enough with the heroine dressing in men’s clothing to stop the smugglers (or something like that; it’s been a while) ended atrociously with the hero Taming Her Spiritedness.
But I was determined to find out for myself what was likeable about romances, so I went back to the store and this time I was lucky–I picked up something by Mary Balogh. I had found an author who truly respected her female characters, who gave them agency in their sexuality and in the course of their lives. I quickly read the whole Bedwyn series, and over the next three years acquired and read her entire backlist (yes, that was expensive, and got to be quite a hobby–I have a notebook with brief reviews of many of these novels, and will probably draw on them for a few posts).
Meanwhile I took a Feminist Rhetoric course in school and wrote a term paper about romance novels, drawing on Janice Radway’s work (Reading the Romance) which gave me some new, positive ways of thinking about the genre from a feminist perspective.
While I was reading Mary Balogh I didn’t look very far for other authors. I read a few by Julie Garwood that introduced me to racism in American historicals, and a few more by Julia Quinn, whom I found very lighthearted and fun but whose Everything and the Moon I threw against the wall.
Finally, about a year and a half ago, I discovered that guess what! Interesting people talk about romances on the internet! I started reading Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and slowly started following recommendations (or at least things that got made fun of a lot). I read Outlander (introducing me to scary gay stereotypes), The Flame and the Flower (introducing me to a different kind of racism in American historicals), Midsummer Magic (introducing me to … cream), a book by Jennifer Crusie, and a couple by Georgette Heyer. I also discovered Edith Layton and Beverly Jenkins. And then, thanks entirely to the internet, I found Loretta Chase and Sherry Thomas, whose books I might possibly like even better than Mary Balogh’s.
I’m beginning to realize that I have much more to learn about the romance genre. On my shelves I have a book each by Judith Ivory, Eloisa James, Victoria Alexander, Suzanne Enoch, and Suzanne Brockmann. And, now that I have this blog, I’m going to explore the romance genre community online some more and, I hope, find new authors and new books and new people who are discussing the things I’m interested in.
Hi, followed here from Shakesville. I, too, am a romance novel afictionado, more specifically Regency romance. I started them after someone from slash fandom took the frequent comment that slash often recreates romance tropes and decided to go read all the free e-books Harlequin offered for their anniversary and review them. They found most of them pretty crap, but recommended particularly Elizabeth Rolls’ His Lady Mistress. The summary looked pretty interesting so I downloaded it and was HOOKED. She only has 6 or so books out so I had to look elsewhere pretty soon, and found Mary Balogh pretty soon. I tend to go author by author and read all their works in one go, so I had a pretty big chunk there. I liked them in the beginning, and they do have pretty strong female characters that almost never need to be unduly ‘saved’ from things they could have handled themselves. But there were a few issues that started to grate on me more and more. The portrayals of disability are pretty bad, although I suppose at least disabled people are acknowledged to exist as full people and with sexual desires, even if she subsequently falls into every trope from ‘overcoming’ to ‘curing’ to ‘magical cripple’. But the thing that finally made me drop my phone (where I read e-books) in disgust was that every. single. person. talks about ‘magical’ places ‘that bring you closer to god’. In the beginning, I could swallow that as spirituality just being that person’s character trait, but if everyone does it… meh. (I don’t have anything against spirituality, it just doesn’t speak to me. And the constant presence really made it feel like proselytizing, which makes my mental barriers go up like whoa.)
So I went back to fanfic for a while (aside from a short foray into Jane Austen, which after becoming more familiar with the period was suddenly MUCH more interesting), but I recently found a thread on a forum with lots of people linking to romance novels, so I am going to go back there. Unfortunately, most of it seems to be contemporary/modern romance, which I really feel antagonistic towards, because:
a) I really do not care one whit about multi-millionaires and their problems
b) “he didn’t want to see her again after he managed to extract sex, but when he learned she was pregnant with his child, his honor demanded he immediately marry her” works for me in an 18th century setting but makes me go OMG WTF in ‘today’
c) the type of man in these books (‘the sheikh’, ‘the greek’ – mediterranean, muscled and oily) is MY BIGGEST TURN-OFF EVER.
(All that just from reading the summaries that came with the links, I haven’t read any of them yet…)
Anyway, beyond that, I think I will be staying and reading a little!
Hey, I love this comment! Sorry it took me so long to approve it–I haven’t been able to get online for a while.
I agree with you about Mary Balogh. I started to make notes on her treatment of characters with disabilities–since she does have a lot of them. Compared to some other examples I’ve read, hers do seem to have full personalities, as you noted, but she does tend to hit the tropes and I’ve been meaning to see if I can find a review that focuses especially on this–I’ve been reading her books for longer than I’ve been aware of disability activism, so I’ve undoubtedly missed a lot. I did notice that almost all of her main characters with disabilities acquired them after birth, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence–I think both the idea of not having children after marriage, and the idea of passing on a disability to a child, are both outside her definition of romantic acceptability. This is, obviously, a problem…
I also agree with you that she tends to repeat the same sentiments. The magical places that bring you closer to God do tend to get old! Also, I’ve noticed that in her more recent novels she tends to overuse the word “vivid.”
But, I still consider myself a fan because I know she doesn’t think that sexual coercion and harassment are romantic. I’m very, very particular about that and most romances fail by my standards; I know I’m safe in this respect with Balogh.
I think your point B really sums up why I don’t like to read contemporary romances. In historicals, because of the way gender roles were constructed, it’s easy to set up a situation that throws the hero and heroine together, and it’s easy (or it should be easy!) to seem feminist because things were so bad for women to start with. But so many authors seem to throw the couple together in contemporaries by having them, for instance, work together–in which case the first thing I think of is “This is a textbook case of workplace harassment! Totally inappropriate and unprofessional! Not in the least romantic!” In short it’s a lot easier to accidentally reveal how NOT feminist you are when your story takes place AFTER women gained the right to retain property after marriage, the right to vote, and entrance to higher education and the workplace. Not to mention birth control.
(Uh, I hope HTML works here? There’s no preview function to test it…)
Hey, I love this comment! Sorry it took me so long to approve it–I haven’t been able to get online for a while.
Don’t worry, that’s what the “Notify me of follow-up comments via email” ticky-box is for :)
I did notice that almost all of her main characters with disabilities acquired them after birth, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence–I think both the idea of not having children after marriage, and the idea of passing on a disability to a child, are both outside her definition of romantic acceptability.
That rings very true indeed. I don’t remember Mary Balogh stating it overtly, but in one of Elizabeth Rolls’ novels, The Unexpected Bride, which features a blind woman, she explicitly says, when disclosing her blindness to her new husband after the marriage, “I would never have married anyone if there had been the slightest possibility of passing my blindness on to a child.”
But, I still consider myself a fan because I know she doesn’t think that sexual coercion and harassment are romantic. I’m very, very particular about that and most romances fail by my standards; I know I’m safe in this respect with Balogh.
I wonder, have you read Thief Of Dreams? Generally, I would agree with you that Balogh is better than many in that respect, but that book made me intensely dislike the male protagonist, because I thought him extremely deceiving, egoistical and coercive, and I felt physically sick and enraged when she forgave him and ended up liking him.
have you read Thief of Dreams?
Yes, but ages ago–I think I found it in the library after I’d read all of her books that were still in print, in 2006. I remember not liking it but I don’t remember why … I guess that would explain it!
I also disliked the third book in her Web trilogy, for the same reasons.
So, I guess I should qualify that I can’t always trust her in this regard–but in general she is a lot better than almost every other author I’ve encountered.
My theory for those two books is that her main project as a writer is to explore how love develops and that she’s very interested in how that can vary. So she has some fluffy, cheerful love stories but quite a few that are very angsty with both people being significantly unhappy (like some of the Simply stories and The Secret Pearl). Some of these involve one of the parties being a jerk as a cause of the unhappiness–she wants to see how a relationship can recover from that. I think Dark Angel is exactly on the line there; it just barely worked for me, it was apparently a huge success with many readers, and I can imagine a lot of people hating it. And I think the third Web story and, I guess, Thief of Dreams are ones where she pushed it over the line and it failed.
(That’s not exactly me defending a favorite author as much as it is me speculating out loud about her writing process.)