The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction

Jayashree Kamblé, Eric Murphy Selinger, Hsu-Ming Teo, Jayashree Kamblé, Eric Murphy Selinger, Hsu-Ming Teo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317041948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

Popular romance fiction constitutes the largest segment of the global book market. Bringing together an international group of scholars, The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction offers a ground-breaking exploration of this global genre and its remarkable readership. In recognition of the diversity of the form, the Companion provides a history of the genre, an overview of disciplinary approaches to studying romance fiction, and critical analyses of important subgenres, themes, and topics. It also highlights new and understudied avenues of inquiry for future research in this vibrant and still-emerging field. The first systematic, comprehensive resource on romance fiction, this Companion will be invaluable to students and scholars, and accessible to romance readers.

Part I

National traditions

1 History of English romance novels, 1621–1975

jay Dixon

Romance is one of the oldest and most enduring literary modes (Radford 8). As Hall says, “The history of the romance novel might begin as early as the first century CE, with Chariton of Aphrodisias’s prose romance, Chaereas and Callirhoe, the earliest surviving ancient Greek novel.” That said, the romance novel is notoriously difficult to define (Saunders 1–2; see also Fuchs) because “romance” means different things to different readers in different periods. In the early years of fiction writing “romance” was used interchangeably with “novel.” However, Clara Reeve, herself the author of romances, and the first Englishwoman to write a history of romances, argues in The Progress of Romance (1785) that there is a distinction between the “novel,” which depicts everyday life, and “romance,” which is a more elevated form concerned with high emotion, and past times. A century later, “romance” became linked with male adventure novels. As Judith Wilt says romance can be a story foregrounding inventiveness, fabulation, and “the marvelous”; or a story about the quest for the ideal or heroic; or a story of lovers (vi; see also Beer; Radford).¹

In the mid-nineteenth century, after Charlotte M. Yonge’s bestselling novel The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) inspired other writers such as Rhoda Broughton and Mary Elizabeth Braddon to write novels about English heroes and heroines who fall in love and experience internal and external opposition to the consummation of their love, romances were just as likely to end in a tragic parting of the lovers through death as in their marriage. A happy ending was not always assured, nor did readers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century require one.

However, between the ending of the First World War and the start of the Second, the meanings of “romance” and “romantic” as “terms of literary description became more narrowly specialised and signified only those love stories which … end happily in marriage” (Light 160).

In this chapter, I use the term “romance(s)” as a general term for any novel whose foremost concern is a love relationship between the main protagonists: fiction in which the relationship between hero and heroine is paramount, and other types of plot—crime, science fiction—are subordinate to the main relationship. Those stories with a happy ending I refer to as “romance novel” and I use the term “romance fiction” for those that, in today’s terms, do not. I concentrate on that fiction written mainly by women, for women, and from the woman’s point of view.

This chapter is about both contemporary and historical English (not British) romances. That is, it talks about only those romances set in England, and it ignores those set in the other countries of the United Kingdom and, with one or two exceptions, those written by non-English authors, as Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have a different history and thus, in many respects, a different set of concerns and attitudes. The introduction is followed by a history of contemporary romances (that is, those romances written during the period they are set in) from the beginnings in the seventeenth century to 1975. This also includes positive criticisms of romances. Next comes a history of negative criticism of romance fiction during roughly the same period. The subsequent section is a history of the English historical novel (that is, those romances written at least 50 years after the period they are set in), again followed by a history of criticism. Each section has sub-sections describing the sub-genres prevalent in a certain period.

Contemporary romance before the nineteenth century: the beginnings

When Lady Mary Wroth published a prose romance, The Countess of Montgomerie’s Urania, in 1621 she was criticized, not so much for writing it, but because she published it. This was in an era when women were meant to be “seen but not heard,” and by publishing her novel Wroth brought public attention to herself, and was excoriated for it (Hannay).

Urania is generally acknowledged as the first romance novel in English (Hannay; Lamb; Miller and Waller). It is a radical work, in that it argues against patriarchal rules for women and marriage, by depicting love and marriage from the woman’s point of view.

Wroth wrote Urania to try and get herself out of debt. She was influenced by her aunt, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, who was one of the first women to publish her own literary works. The niece of Sir Philip Sidney, Wroth used his Arcadia as one of the sources for her own novel. It tells the story of Queen Pamphilia and Emperor Amphilanthus, who are cousins, intertwined with hundreds of sub-plots concerning their siblings and others. None end happily, including the love story of the main characters, as Amphilanthus is constantly unfaithful.

Wroth had to withdraw her book due to the scandal it caused, as it was widely thought to reference her own life, in particular her love for, and her adulterous affair with, her cousin William Herbert, Pembroke’s son. Although this first English romance contains few of the tropes to be found in later romances, it has two major similarities to later romance novels: its author was following in the footsteps of another woman’s publications, and it is the first literary endeavor to tell its story from a woman’s point of view.

Unlike Wroth, an aristocrat, Aphra Behn (1640?–89) was born in obscurity but became the first Englishwoman to earn her living by her pen, becoming a literary model for later female writers (Todd 2017).² She wrote poetry, plays, and novels, the best-known of which is Oroonoko (1688). Written from the point of view of an unnamed female narrator, it is the story of a captured slave (Oroonoko), whom the narrator claims to have met, and his love for fellow captive Imoinda. Both Oroonoko and Imoinda are dead by the end of the novel. This is hardly the “happy ever after” (HEA) ending we expect from romances these days. But many English romances up to the later nineteenth century were to end with the death of the hero for, as Anderson says, a tragic ending which parted the lovers could be satisfying for readers because “traditionally, the truest, purest romantic love is a fatal love” (26).

Behn’s earlier epistolary novel, Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, originally published in three separate volumes between 1684 and 1687, is of more interest for the history of romances. This is because it has many of the tropes that later romances used, although at this time the romance genre did not adhere necessarily to the conventions that we, in the twenty-first century, expect from a romance. Famously, Janice Radway in her Reading the Romance (1984) set out 13 points of narrative structure necessary for an “ideal romance” (134). It starts with (point 1) the destruction of the heroine’s social identity, and (point 2) the heroine reacting antagonistically to an aristocratic male, who (point 3) responds ambiguously to the heroine. In point 4 “the heroine interprets the hero’s behavior as evidence of a purely sexual interest in her” (i.e., he does not love her), to which she responds (point 5) with coldness and anger. The hero reacts to this by punishing her (point 6). In point 7 the protagonists are separated, either physically or emotionally. Then the hero treats the heroine tenderly (point 8), and she responds warmly (point 9), leading her to “reinterpret the hero’s ambiguous behavior as the product of previous hurt” (point 10), so when he “openly declares his love for [and] unwavering commitment to” her (point 11), she can respond “sexually and emotionally” (point 12). In point 13 the heroine’s identity is restored.³

Although she was analyzing twentieth-century mass-market historical romances, this 13-part summary of an ideal romance applies to many English romances, and certain aspects of it can be seen in the first two parts of Behn’s romance. The first part is the story of the seduction of Silvia by her brother-in-law Philander. As this was considered to be incest at this time, Behn here is being courageous on two fronts—not condemning the lovers for their illegal affair, and not blaming her immoral hero for seducing the heroine. Instead she celebrates the passion of the lovers and the courage of Silvia in standing up to her father, to convention and to society.⁴

In the second part Silvia disguises herself as a young man and she, her husband, and her lover flee to Holland. Silvia develops a fever, her true sex is discovered, and Philander is forced to leave her to avoid being arrested. Unknown to Silvia, Philander and his two male friends agree that Silvia will join him once she has recovered. But the friends play him false, and Silvia thinks Philander no longer loves her. She attempts suicide. Having been saved from death, Silvia decides to exact revenge on Philander by marrying his best friend, Octavio, despite the fact that she is already married. This part ends with her setting off to her wedding with Octavio. The third part becomes very complicated, and rather loses sight of the love relationships. But, as is evident from the above outline, the second part contains many of the features that Radway outlines: the destruction of the heroine’s identity (both through an adulterous and illegal seduction and by her male attire) at the start; then the separation of the lovers and Silvia deciding Philander no longer loves her (points 4 and 7); her attempted suicide (another form of separation); followed by her resolution to take revenge on Philander (point 5). The ending of marriage restores her social identity (point 13). However, this marriage is not to the hero, who has proved unworthy of the heroine as he is not faithful to her (hence his name), which is contrary to our twenty-first-century expectations.

These days it is unusual for the hero and heroine not to come together at the end of a romance, but in earlier periods the convention had not been established. Pamela Regis, however, in A Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003) upholds the convention, arguing that there are eight narrative elements of a romance all of which must be present but which can appear in any order:

1. the initial state of society in which the hero and heroine must court
2. the meeting
3. the barrier to their love
4. an account of the protagonists’ attraction
5. the recognition that fells the barrier
6. a point of ritual death
7. the declaration of love
8. and the betrothal

(30)

Again, most of these can be seen in Love Letters. Behn’s novel also contains some plot points which are common to romances of the twentieth century, in particular the heroine dressing as a male (or being taken for a boy), and a marriage of convenience.⁵

Behn herself was attacked for lewdness in her writings, and in her plays The Dutch Lover (1673) and Sir Patient Fancy (1678), and she protested against the double standards for male and female playwrights and defended her right to write as freely as any man. Even so, until the twentieth century her reputation was one of scandal and her writings seen as indecent. But Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own, pointed out that she paved the way for other female writers, who could claim that they also would be able to earn a living by their pen (see also Roach).

It was not until the late eighteenth century that the English novel, and the literary romance, really started, when the size of the reading public started to grow and, due to increased literacy, moved down the classes and across the gender divide, and romances emerged as a genre of popular fiction for women readers.

It used to be generally acknowledged that Samuel Richardson was the first English author to write a romance: Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded, published in 1740. Richardson does seem to have set the structural style for later romances, by concentrating on the courtship plot. However, it is now agreed that, although he was the first bestseller (Regis 63), he was standing on the shoulders of many previous women authors. Indeed, the eighteenth century saw an influx of women readers and writers, which caused some men to use female pseudonyms in order to get published (MacCarthy 289). As Dale Spender argues,

women did not imitate men; it was quite the reverse; many women seized upon women’s novels as an entry to a new dimension of understanding … for so many women these novels meant access to the world of ideas, to self-analysis and social issues.

(5)

Two of the authors were Elizabeth Rowe and Susannah Dobson. Elizabeth Rowe (1674–1737) was a poet, essayist, and novelist. She published two epistolary novels—Friendship in Death, in Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living (in 1728) and Letters Moral and Entertaining (in three parts between 1729 and 1732) (Backscheider). Not romances, these novels provided Richardson with the epistolary idea he uses in Pamela (1740). Susannah Dobson, who died in 1795, published translations of French works, including Sainte-Palaye’s Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry (1784) for which she wrote a preface that defends romance writers and stresses medieval chivalry toward women. Her translations made significant contributions to the revival and rehabilitation of romance (Berg; Blain, Clements, and Grundy).

Eliza Haywood (1693–1756) wrote amatory fiction: an “explicitly amorous, politically engaged, and fantasy-oriented” genre of British fiction popular during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries which is generally acknowledged as the precursor of today’s romance fiction (Ballaster 10; see also Baldus; Benedict; Bowers; Hultquist; Lutz; Vivanco). These romances were popular from roughly 1660 to 1730 and are narrated from the woman’s point of view. Heywood published over 70 works during her lifetime, including fiction, drama, translations, poetry, conduct literature, and periodicals. Her first novel, Love in Excess; Or, the Fatal Enquiry, published 1719–20, is in three parts, and set in France and Italy. It is the story of Count D’Elmont, a rake, who is eventually reformed through loving a woman. Many of Haywood’s subsequent novels end either with the death of the heroine, or her incarceration in a nunnery. But in the working out of the plot, Haywood depicts heroines who act on their own desire for a man, and she shows in the endings how women are silenced by society. Her later novels, f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: National traditions
• PART II: Sub-genres
• PART III: Methodological approaches
• PART IV: Themes
• Index