Romance novel
A romance novel is a popular fiction genre centered around a central love story that typically concludes with a satisfying and optimistic ending, often referred to as a "happily-ever-after" (HEA). Commanding a significant share of the adult fiction market, romance novels generate annual sales exceeding one billion dollars. Traditionally written by women for women, the genre has seen increasing male readership. There are seven recognized subgenres of romance, with romantic suspense being the most popular. The genre's roots trace back to ancient storytelling, with notable historical influences from authors like Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, who contributed to the narrative structures and themes prevalent in modern romance. Over the decades, the genre has evolved, particularly from the 1970s onward, with notable shifts in content and representation, including more diverse characters and themes. The romance novel continues to gain respect and recognition within the literary community and has adapted to contemporary societal changes, making it a dynamic and multifaceted genre.
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Romance novel
Romance novel, as the term is commonly used in the twenty-first century, refers to the mass-market popular fiction that commands a 13 percent share of the adult fiction market and brings in annual sales of more than one billion dollars, a sum that supporters argue helps to fund less commercially successful fiction, including books by some of the genre’s fiercest critics who dismiss romance novels as "trash," "mind candy," or "bodice rippers." Romance Writers of America (RWA), the industry’s professional organization, defines the romance novel as a novel with "a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending." Social media discussions suggest that readers are more invested in a conventional happily-ever-after conclusion, referred to within the romance community as the HEA, than the more ambiguous official definition implies. Traditionally, romance novels have been written by women for women. Women readers remain a large majority (84 percent). Male readership, although small, is growing. The RWA lists seven subgenres of romance, with romantic suspense the most widely read.
Brief History
The basic plot of the romance novel can be traced at least as far back as the ancient Greeks who created stories about a girl and a boy who meet, fall in love, are separated, and overcome obstacles to achieve a happy reunion. Some scholars list Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740), an epistolary novel that includes seduction, attempted rape, and a marriage proposal, as a precursor of the popular romance novel. More acknowledge the influence of Jane Austen and Charlotte and Emily Brontë on the genre. Romance authors and readers claim Austen’s novels, particularly Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) as romance novels. Indeed, Pride and Prejudice was the third most popular title in the 2013 reader poll of the top 100 romance novels at All about Romance, a popular online community.
The romance novel’s closest historical relationship may be with the domestic novels of the nineteenth century. Focusing on a heroine, frequently an orphan, whose struggle to survive ends in marriage, novels such as Susan Warner’sThe Wide, Wide World (1851), Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854), and Augusta Jane Evans’s St. Elmo (1867) were enormously popular, earning the authors enough to prompt novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne to make his famous complaint about "a damned mob of scribbling women."
In the first half of the twentieth century, authors such as Faith Baldwin, Emilie Loring, and Grace Livingston Hill were writing novels that can be classified as romance novels, at least according to romance scholar Pamela Regis’s definition of a romance novel as one centered on courtship. Although the subgenres of romance as outlined by RWA (contemporary, erotic, historical, inspirational, paranormal, romantic suspense, and young adult) did not yet exist, the seeds for such division could be seen in the "New Woman" heroines of Baldwin, the suspense plots of Loring, and the faith-based world of Hill. More than half of Georgette Heyer’s fifty-five novels (published between 1921 and 1975) are set in the English Regency period, strictly defined as 1811–1820 but more inclusively identified as 1800–1830. These were the first Regency romances, making her the founder of that subgenre.
At the same time Heyer was attracting enough readers to sell a million copies a year, Mills and Boon, a British publisher, was publishing short books that modernized the basics of the sentimental novel. In 1949, Harlequin Enterprises, a Canadian company, began selling Mills and Boon romances to North American readers. A few years later, Mary Stewart’s novels were laying the groundwork for romantic suspense, and Victoria Holt, Phyllis Whitney, and others were making gothics the bestselling subgenre of romance fiction. The romance world had no idea of the revolutionary change that awaited them at the next turn of the page.
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The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss, pulled from a slush pile and published in 1972, introduced the reign of the "Avon Ladies," a group that included Woodiwiss, Johanna Lindsey, Rosemary Rogers, and Beatrice Small, all published by Avon and all producing romance novels that operated with the conventional framework but included historical settings, rape euphemistically termed "forced seduction," and a sensuality and frankness about female desire unprecedented in romance fiction. Their novels were the "bodice rippers," a tag that was employed as a term of derision and that continues to haunt the genre, generally applied inappropriately to post-1970s romance. Harlequin, who merged with Mills and Boon in 1971, made the contemporary romance novel ubiquitous. By the end of the 1970s, romance novels could be found in airports, supermarkets, and the corner drugstore—millions of Harlequin books were sold around the world. Harlequin was king, but other publishers entered the market. These shorter, "category" romances (referring to their publication as part of a numbered series issued monthly), many marketed under suggestively titled imprints such as Candlelight Ecstasy, Harlequin Temptation, and Silhouette Desire, were considerably sexier than the old Mills and Boon books to compete with changes in single-titles, but marriage and monogamy still ruled in category romance.
The battles between romance publishers in the late seventies and early eighties were often called the "romance wars." Harlequin, having bought its prime competitor Silhouette in 1985, was the clear victor by the nineties. Romance heroines of the nineties held jobs, and their heroes actively parented. Such changes meant little outside the genre. Scholars had generally agreed with Germaine Greer’s claim in The Female Eunuch (1970) that romance readers were embracing the enslavement of traditional gender roles and with Janice Radway’s designation of romance readers as "Other" in her influential analysis of romance, Reading the Romance (1984). But the twenty-first century saw a shift in academic attitudes, perhaps instigated by Pamela Regis’s A Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003), an analysis that refuted Greer’s claim, placed popular romance within the context of the literary canon, and provided a formal rubric to determine if a novel is a romance novel.
Within the dozen years following the publication of Regis’s book, Princeton University hosted a scholarly conference in romance fiction; the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance was founded and launched both an annual international conference and an online, open-source journal, the Journal of Popular Romance Studies; and Laurie Kahn-Leavitt produced Love Between the Covers, a film about those who write and read romance novels. The documentary’s cast included unknowns along with some of the genre’s biggest names such as Nora Roberts, arguably the public face and voice of romance; Beverly Jenkins, the leading force in making black history part of historical romance; and Eloisa James, the alter ego of Shakespeare professor Mary Bly. As the romance novel gains more respect in the larger world, the genre continues to evolve in ways that include the phenomenon of Fifty Shades of Grey, official industry recognition of erotic romance and digitally published romance, a growing acceptance of diversity (including LGTB romance), a new subgenre in New Adult romance, and a lengthy list of self-published authors.
Bibliography
Frantz, Sarah S. G. and Eric Murphy Selinger, eds. New Approaches to Popular Romance Fiction: Critical Essays. Jefferson: McFarland, 2012. Print.
Gleason, William A., and Eric Murphy Selinger, eds. Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom. Burlington: Ashgate, 2016. Print.
Market, John. Publishing Romance: The History of an Industry, 1940s to the Present. Jefferson: McFarland, 2016. Print.
Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984. Print.
Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2003. Print.
Roach, Catherine. Happily Ever After: The Romance Story in Popular Culture. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2016. Print.
"The Romance Genre." Romance Writers of America. Romance Writers of American, n. d. Web. 9 May 2016.
Thurston, Carol. The Romance Revolution: Erotic Novels for Women and the Quest for a New Sexual Identity. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987. Print.
Weaver-Zercher, Valerie. Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. Print.