The Flame and the Flower, published by Avon Books in 1972, is widely considered the first modern romance novel*. I was thinking about how many blog posts I have read — recently — that feature a reader who wants to try the romance genre, and picks up Woodiwiss. Not because she wants to begin at the beginning of the genre, but as representative of what romance is today. Or how many articles in mainstream media refer to romances as “bodice rippers”, a term used by the publishing industry in 1972 to distinguish the new romance genre from the gothic novel.
I don’t mean to offer a Whig view of the genre’s history – that anything newer must be better. I make no claim about the relative literary merits of Woodiwiss versus the supposed “glorious present” of Roberts, Kleypas and Quinn. It’s just so odd to me that folks could think a mass market, pop culture phenomenon has not changed with the culture and the reading and buying public. If you wanted to get into video games, would you look for PONG?
So I came up with a totally nonexhaustive and idiosyncratic list of things that were different in 1972.
When the genre was born …
- Contraception for unmarried people was a felony in many states (this changed that year, thanks to Eisenstadt v. Baird).
- Abortion was illegal in most states (this changed in 1973, thanks to Roe v. Wade).
- Marital rape was not a crime (South Dakota criminalized it in 1975, and other states followed).
- Women college students could not take certain courses reserved for men, such as criminal justice. (Title IX in 1972 addressed this.)
- There were no athletic scholarships — and often no collegiate sports, period — for women. (Title IX again)
- Homosexuality was identified as a mental disorder in the DSM-II (the diagnosis was not totally expunged until 1986).
- Most medical and law schools limited the number of women admitted to 15 or fewer per school (Title IX again).
- No fault divorce did not exist in most states (divorce laws have historically been some of the most punitive for women).
- We had no ADA, which meant women with disabilities could legally be discriminated against, for example, by refusing to hire or firing a qualified employee because of her disability.
- Employers could legally refuse to hire, or fire, pregnant persons or persons thought likely to become pregnant (the Pregnancy Discrimination Act passed in 1978).
- A woman’s prior sexual history and past conduct was openly considered fair game, regardless of its relevance to the case, in a defense against rape (rape shield laws were a few years away yet).
- It was legal to refuse to extend credit to a person on the basis of her race, marital status, sex, or age. It was common for creditors to count a man’s salary at 100% and a woman’s at 75%, for example, and for stores to refuse to issue independent credit cards to married women. (This changed thanks to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974).
Cars looked like this:
Fashion looked like this:
There was no such thing as a personal computer, cell phone, or internet. Romance novelists probably used these:
Pong, the very first home video game, was introduced:
In 1974, anthropologist Sherry Ortner published her classic “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?”, still anthologized in most women’s studies textbooks, and often taught by yours truly. In it, she argues that women are seen as closer to nature than men, and somewhat lesser, or more ambiguously situated, in terms of their active participation in production, history, consciousness, etc. Ortner’s style of argument is typical of high theory in the heyday of the Second Wave, and therefore problematic, but given its date of publication, I thought I would throw it in here. Perhaps romance novels, like women, are seen as endlessly reproductive, not creative or conscious, rerunning on mindless iterations of a formula outside of time?
But if so much about our world has changed since 1972 — 39 years ago – isn’t it possible romance novels and their readers have, too?
*Regular readers will know, given my reviews of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, and my several posts that refer approvingly to Pam Regis’s A Natural History of the Romance Novel, which identifies Pamela as a romance, as well as the fact that I am currently working on a romance project with a colleague in the English dept who writes on sensation novels of the 18th century, this is not my personal view.
Grappling with this myself because I’m writing about TFATF and its depiction of the hero, but trying to contextualize it historically. I was -2 when it came out, though, so it really *IS* history for me.
Your list of how things were for women back in “the day” makes me shudder. And excellent post for all the romance naysayers out there, but something tells me they enjoy rolling in their ignorance.
Great post! and loved all of the visual aids
I’ve been wondering the same thing lately…especially given that some authors or publishers are reissuing “romance classics” either through venues like Sourcebooks, or via Amazon digital services.
Smart Bitches had a post a week or more ago about the romances that Sourcebooks are bringing back. So I read one of their newest ones, Moonstruck Madness by Laurie McBain (first published 1977). I had read nothing but rave reviews for this book and author and since I had never read it I decided to try it out. And I have to say that I was completely baffled as to why everyone loved it so much, because frankly as a romance reader of “today” I didn’t think the story translated well for a 21st century reader. Not necessarily for some of the reasons you listed above, because the heroine was fairly liberated, but the style and scope of the writing was much different than romances being published today. Many of the reviews I read indicated that they were so glad that the book was being brought back because it was one of the first romances that they read….and I have to wonder if they weren’t remembering the book with rose colored glasses on…that if they were to re read it today if they would feel the same way about it now as they did then.
I know I’m not the same romance reader I was even a few years ago, that doesn’t mean that some books shouldn’t make a comeback, but others should definitely stay in the past.
And yet it isn’t. There were lots of modern romances published prior to 1972. Some of those authors and their novels are quite famous, e.g. E. M. Hull, Georgette Heyer, Barbara Cartland, Mary Stewart.
I noticed that you’ll be giving a paper about it at this year’s IASPR conference:
What differences do you see between Woodiwiss and Rogers’ rapist romance heroes and E. M. Hull’s Sheik Ahmed (who is, of course, an earlier rapist romance hero)? Is the main difference the level of explicitness in the depiction of the rape?
I, too, was startled by how much things have changed socially for women. I knew it, intellectually. I’m old enough to remember some of it. Seeing it listed like that was really shocking all the same.
Mills & Boon had been concentrating on what we now call category romance for nearly 40 years in 1972. So I assume you’re talking about a subset of the romance novel genre?
Elsie Lee had published over a dozen books, most of them gothic and other contemporary romances, by 1972.
Electric typewriters were still pretty new and expensive in 1972; lots of people had manual machines.
In California, at least, where I was in junior high school, girls had Physical Education classes every day. We had the full range of sports (gymnastics instead of wrestling, but otherwise they were the same). I broke a finger playing flag football; it was fairly energetic.
Affirmative action was well under way in large companies, public employment and higher education. In 1972 my mother was already an engineer at AT&T, out in the field inspecting telephone cable (not climbing poles, but everything else).
Virginia Slims cigarette commercials with the “You’ve come a long way baby” theme had been running for a couple of years. It also sponsored, beginning in 1970, the Virginia Slims tennis tournaments for women. It seeded the professionalization of the women’s tour, and the WTA was founded in 1973.
Shirley Chisholm ran for President and won 28 delegates in the Democratic primaries.
I suppose it seems quaint now, but women in the early 1970s felt as if they had made quite a bit of progress and were poised to make a lot more. It was the middle of the 2nd wave of feminism, after all.
Feel free to file this comment under “old curmudgeon takes issue with young whipper-snappers today.”
@Laura Vivanco:
I know, Laura. By “widely considered” I mean “the majority of people think it is true”, not that it is true. As a philosopher, I am precise about the difference between attitudes, which are mental events, and truth, which is something else.
I hate to say it but some of those clothes don’t look that out-of-date to me. I may have to think about updating my wardrobe.
Recently reading Louis Menand’s review of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in the Jan. 24 issue of The New Yorker, these statistics from the late 1950s also shook me into realizing how much has changed:
@Jessica: Sorry, I see what you mean now.
But I still think that “widely considered to be the first modern romance novel” is casting a pretty wide net.
I then wondered if it was the first of the “epic” romance novels, or the ancestor of what AAR calls the “European historical,” but that doesn’t work either. The Angelique series was more than fifteen years old in 1972 and available in libraries.
It certainly seems to be a popular opinion, at least online, that the “bodice rippers” began the historical romance trend, but I really don’t understand why. Why not Cartland or Heyer? Just because of the sex?
Woodiwiss, Rogers, and that set of 1970s novels are certainly worth understanding in their social context, but they jumpstarted a particular type of romance novel. Not the genre. You could argue that they fused the epic historical novel with the romance genre and amped up the sex, I think.
And while a lot of things have changed, as your list indicates, a lot of what we take for granted today, especially gender-wise, was well under way in 1972, as my list indicates. So maybe 1972 doesn’t seem that far away, in terms of what romances are about, to many readers.
Those fashion pics are hilarious, because there’s a big 70s revival for spring: “70s chic”
When you mean “the majority of people” do you mean “the majority of people in the US”? I grew up in the UK and I don’t recall ever hearing about Woodiwiss or Rogers; I do recall seeing plenty of Mills & Boons, though, and my mother introduced me to Heyer.
Yeup. The first Angelique was written in 1958 and I just read it last year. In the last third of the book, Angelique is raped and/or coerced (can’t remember exactly) by a man other than her husband and, um, she…enjoys…it. There exists in her the knowledge that she’s attracted to a man who is evil.
I thought it was awesome because it was so wonderfully complicated. You’d NEVER see that in a romance of now. Or at least, not without a lot of squawking about what an unacceptable heroine she was. A lot of that emotional complexity in the old “bodice rippers” (spare me) is just gone now. That’s what we (i.e., the romance readers who’ve been reading it for decades) miss.
Reading the comments I feel that a lot of the discussion is flying way over my head, but regarding some of the static views of romance (meaning, why people think novels written in the ’70s are representative of the genre of today), I have found that a lot of people–and more so people who are not avid readers–tend to think of the written word as fixed.
I try not to lump people in to broad generalizations – but the romance-scoffing librarians I encounter tend to come in two speeds.
1) They’re uh, of a “certain age” and remember when those big, juicy bodice-rippin’ historicals were “new.” And even though they haven’t read a romance novel in 30+ years, they somehow think it’s still “just like that.” To which I counter with, “Well is the KGB still the villain in every esponiage published today? Probably not.”
2) They’re younger, fresh out of library school, and academia has brain-washed them into thinking that the genre is trashy, with no merit. Not my place to judge really – since….uh, I used to be one of these. Thank the good Lord I got over that nonsense….
Interesting, indeed. Now it occurs to me that perhaps this is somehow connected with the low popularity of bodice rippers over here. Because, although we did have romances, they were exclusively contemporary categories. (I only discovered there were historicals once I started reading in English.) I’m not sure whether that was because editors didn’t want bodice rippers, or there was simply no demand for them.
At the same time, abortion was legal, contraception as well (by the end of the seventies, we had youth sexuality centres where girls could get checkups and pill prescriptions without the parents, provided they were of legal age, i.e. over 14), not-hiring or firing a pregnant woman was illegal, and where there were quotas, they were for minimum number of female participants, not the maximum. Oh, and no-fault divorce was the default ruling, unless you specifically wanted to assign blame.
A lot of which changed in the meantime, I’m sorry to say.
Wonderful post. A somewhat related issue I find very interesting is the lag of current attitudes/values we often see in romance. I remember noting with bafflement that one of the most dated Harlequin Presents I’d ever read was published in 1991 (it stuck out in my mind because it was the year I was married) and its depiction of everyday life compared to how I remember it was like stone knives and bearskin…
As someone who read romances 30+ years ago and is rarely reading them today – I can tell you that a big part of why I don’t read them any longer is the “feel” of the books.
Admittedly I have not gone back and re-read the ones termed bodice-rippers in years (though I still own a cabinet full of them and wouldn’t part with them for all the tea in China) but I look at them and remember the sweeping emotions I felt when I read them. Perhaps it was because I was a teen and didn’t really understand life and love and sex – but they just made you catch your breath and long for the days of of yore – when men were men and protected their women. The books just seemed so epic somehow.
As an adult – mother, wife, ex-wife, independent woman, wage-earner – I don’t feel those same things when I read romance now. Could just be the difference in my age and life experiences. But for me, a great deal of it is the books themselves. Granted I don’t get the appeal of vampire, werewolf, or other paranormal stuff – but even just the straight romance genre doesn’t inject the same powerful emotions in me as the reader. It seems to be more about the sex and getting to the sex, than about the relationship between the hero and heroine that leads to the sex. A great deal of the time when I finish a romance written in the past decade, I feel as though the emotion of the story was missed; that instead the author concentrated on newer, hotter, more convoluted ways to write as many sex scenes as can be reasonably jammed into 300 pages . There has to be more than mind-blowing sex before the HEA – the hero and heroine need to earn that HEA, and so often it seems that they don’t.
There is a huge difference between romance as written in 1970 and romance written today, some of it an improvement, but not all. Reading a romance written 30 years ago and basing your assumptions about the genre on that book is doing as big of a disservice to romance as reading a book published this year and assuming that that is all that romance is about. Every genre of everything changes and evolves – both good and bad. People writing about the romance genre should be smart enough to understand that concept, and if they aren’t I feel like we can reasonably dismiss any articles they write on the subject.
@ booklover1335
I find something quite insulting and vaguely condescending about this comment, though I can’t quite put my finger on exactly what. Perhaps it is the insuination that the women reading romance 30 years ago were too ignorant to realize that what they were reading then wouldn’t “translate well for a 21st century reader.”
No, perhaps it doesn’t – but that doesn’t mean that at the time it was written it wasn’t a great book and that the emotions it engendered in its readers weren’t real and heart-felt.
It is, yes. Just as readers are different, writers are different as well. I wonder how well some of the current favorites will hold up after 30 years have passed and whether or not you will feel insulted by being derided for wearing “rose-colored glasses” in deference to your memories of some of your favorite stories or characters.
If you say that’s when the genre was born in North America, I’m nodding my head mostly in agreement. There are always books and authors on the fringes — a Frances Parkinson Keyes, Mary Stewart — but I don’t put Heyer in the Romance box (like Laura Vivanco, my source was my mum), not really. So I don’t think her books started off the genre, as you’ve described it.
Why I don’t like the book you choose is that it’s rather limiting (what about Barbara Cartland, early Harlequins) — but it feels right on another level. Well, that confusion on my part is why I don’t get paid the big bucks to figure this all out. It’s great having you on break: keep those almost daily blogs coming!
… really good point SuperWendy. Switching genres, I’ve always liked Helen MacInnes but her KGB villains don’t hold up as well as nihilists or mis-information/brain-washing types. I suppose nihilism never goes out of style.
This is antithetical to the way I read — I’ll use an overworked example to illustrate. When I like an author, I go back in time to read her best works. OK, sometimes her worst. I have just bought Lord Satan’s Bride (for a lot used) and Ruthless for barely anything used. Keeping those UBS stores in business!
@Daisy:
I’m sorry if you felt my comment to be condescending or insulting. That was not my intent. Rather, asking if a romance reader were to reread a book that they loved 30+ years ago today if they would have the same reaction to it. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t. Obviously, you are a different person than you were 30 years ago.
I guess my questioning came about from the publisher asking for “current’ book reviews for this book since it is being republished then reading comments that “I read this 30 years ago and was one of the first romances that I read and loved it” wasn’t necessarily a “current’ viewpoint…not saying that the reader might not have felt the same way if they were to reread it again, or that their original feelings of the book weren’t valid. It has nothing to do with ignorance, but perception and emotional responses.
When a rerelease pops up as a new or upcoming release that’s so far removed from “today” I think a prospective “new” readers could find the perspective of someone who has recently read the book (who loves both old and new romances) invaluable in choosing whether to read the book or not because the genre has changed so much. And I have absolutely no doubt that the many of the romances that are being written today will not hold up to the test of time, or a reread test even, because more than likely they will just be forgotten and not even be republished. I wasn’t trying to insinuate that romances today are better, they are just very different in my opinion.
I do think there are definitely books that deserve to be republished to reintroduce them to readers who weren’t reading romances when they first came out because I miss the epicness that many older romances seemed to have and I think Bertrice Small who was writing romances in the 70′s is a great example of having written epic romances that I think stand the test of time. And it is quite possible that if I choose to reread any of the romances I currently think are fabulous and are on the keeper shelf they might garner a response of “What did I ever see in this book?” that I kept it for 30 years, before tossing it in the donation bin. Could just be me though.
I’m glad you posted this, Jessica! I read TFATF when I was 12 so that would have been 1981 –not very long after it was published. I LOVED it then and I still have a sentimental soft-spot for it. I’ve often thought about its historical context when I read modern day reviewers dismissal of the book as a rapey, anti-feminist horror. When it was written I think in order to maintain the inherent goodness of the heroine (and therefore non-sluttiness because pre-marital sex was still considered a big no-no to most of the mainstream culture) the “forced seduction” was the easiest way Woodiwiss would have thought of then to engineer the forced marriage due to pregnancy. All her early books also villainize women who enjoy sex without commitment (Louisa in TFATF, Millie in “Shanna”). We’ve come a LONG way in 40 years. I also wonder if we’ll head back down the rabbit hole of prudery in another few decades and if the novels published today with *gasp* women enjoying explicitly described sex won’t be reviled as trash.
@Laura Vivanco:
In fairness, there is a fair number of romance-oriented academic and popular NF books that make the same claim. It’s even stated at Wikipedia, for goodness sake. After many discussions, I realised there is lack of clarity or standards when comes to making that kind of statements. So, since then, when I see that kind of statements on romance blogs and romance-oriented books/essays/etc – such as citing TF&TF as “the first modern romance novel” – I automatically add “… in the U.S.”
Seems easier that way, but I do admit there is a danger of having it repeated so often that could encourage general readers to assume an extension: “…in the world”.
Wikipedia’s entry on Romance genre isn’t helpful as it’s quite Americentric. It doesn’t acknowledge romantic genres in other countries (such as Hong Kong where it’s been thriving under radar since 1940s or that some of Phyllis A. Whitney’s gothic / romantic suspense novels contain a number of Japanese-influenced traits, which went on to become part of the general body of Romantic Suspense / Gothic Romance traits). I’m digressing, sorry.
Where the history of the Rom genre is concerned, I think there are actually two separate histories – a history of international (English-language) base of romance novels and a history of U.S. romance genre (e.g. it starts with U.S. publisher’s efforts to create a genre: Romance) – and those two eventually conjoined somewhere along the line of the 1990s, becoming a genre what we’re familiar with today.
So when people say “the first modern romance novel (in the US)” I tend to think that what they really are saying is, “TF&TF is the first novel that a U.S. major publisher marketed successfully as a Romance novel”.
Ann told me about an interview in a creative ad magazine featuring an art director, who talked about key points of his career. He stated that the biggest budget he handled in the early days of his career was the TF&TF campaign. Ann couldn’t remember what the budget was, but she had an impression that it was huge. It was the full-works type – radio, print, TV, etc.
And there was a number of American romance authors who heavily promoted public personas as Romance Authors in high-profiled mainstream media during 1970s. Especially Rosemary Rogers, who was quite a character. (side note: OK, there were romance authors who did the same decades earlier, through radio and television, but not on the same scale that those 1970s-era authors and publishers had.)
These romance authors and those heavily promoted romance novels – as some noted – seemed the ‘opposite’ of the second wave feminist movement, which I think makes sense as the 1970s was pretty much women’s era, wasn’t it? Anyhow, I believe that’s why there is such a fixture on the 1970s as the birth of the Romance genre.
I know I’m being simple-minded here (is that even a surprise?), but when I remove the artificial aspect (publishers/marketing) and focus on the organic journey of romantic fiction, I tend to find that there’s no real answer to the “first modern romance novel” question. Well, I can’t find it, anyway; mostly because I still don’t know which criteria or perspective to use without looking like a prat.
About the TF&TF claim itself, though?
I still don’t understand why some regard the 1970s as the ‘birth’, though. Not when there are still so many references and comparisons with the likes of Austen, Heyer, Hull, Stewart, and other authors existed before 1970s while almost all seem to completely ignore 1970s-era authors and their works today.
So it returns to the same question I had for a while — what are the origins of this “TF&TF is the first modern romance novel” claim?
Who made this claim? On what grounds did this person use to warrant the claim? What is their definition of ‘modern’? ‘Romance novel’? There are quite a few conflicting anecdotal answers, which led me to believe that the claim originated with the publisher of TF&TF. Until there is a proven answer as a result of good research, I remain sceptical about the validity of the claim.
@FiaQ: I went down the wikihole too, trying to figure this out. What I gleaned from TFATF wiki entry was that it was the first in that it (1) was an original paperback (and of course original paperbacks were rare outside pulp novels at this time); (2) it had explicitly detailed sex scenes, several of them; and (3) the cover was intentionally selected to send a new romance genre message.
That doesn’t answer your question, but it sheds some light on why the first modern romance claim has spread so widely. I have been digging around for scholarly work on romance (all your fault, Fia, because of our historical accuracy and Heyer discussion) and I ran across a book by John Sutherland (yes that one) published by Routledge in 1981 on bestsellers of the 1970s with special attention to paperbacks. He talks a bit about Woodiwiss and the growing market for romance novels in the early 1970s. Harlequin/M&B didn’t distribute categories in the US widely until 1970, but by 1975 75% of Harlequin’s sales came from the US (or so says Wikipedia).
It would be entertaining to trace the “first modern novel” claim. My guess is that one or two sources made that claim and after that it was just cited; the old “appeals to authority” method rather than actual data.
That Louise Menand article is pissing me off. Utterly ripped off from Stephanie Coontz’s new book Strange Stirrings, which is a “biography” of The Feminine Mystique. Admittedly she mentions the Coontz book, but claiming that article is her own is disingenuous.
I’m fascinated with the publicity campaign for TFaTF. I know nothing about it and need to know more for my article/book. I’m also fascinated with the “state of US romance,” for lack of a better phrase, before TFaTF. We can all list Hull, Heyer, Cartland, Stewart, even Orczy, but none of those authors are US authors. Where were the US authors before 1972 and what were they writing? That’s what *I* want to know. Even Mills and Boon and Harlequin were not US based. Famously, of course, Roberts was told that Silhouette was not interested in her because they already had Dailey as their US author (or was that M&B?).
Anyway, would love some discussion of that. Maybe I’ll post to TMT.
The best person to ask would be Pamela Regis, since she’s writing a history of the US romance novel, but there certainly were US romances. Augusta Jane Evans’s St Elmo was a massive success in its time (I’ve discussed it at TMT here and here), Grace Livingston Hill was a very important figure in the development of the inspirational romance, I’ve also blogged about one of Eleanor Hallowell Abbott’s romances, there are strong romance elements in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs, the Pollyanna novels, and What Katy Did Next. That’s just a list of what I can remember at the moment. I’m sure there were lots and lots more.
I was talking with a friend today (here in Australia). She started reading romance in the mid 1960′s. Her pre-1970′s romance reading experience wasn’t with M&B as most would think but in small (half an A4 sheet sized) stapled newsprint books published by one of the women’s magazine publishers. These were stand alone stories or serials and available in newsagencies alongside the newspapers and magazines and stationery. I remember men reading westerns and thrillers in the same format.
I think this is interesting because it presents romance stories as disposable consumer items like a magazine and not as books which are meant to be re-read and kept. I also think it relates to class, these paper-story-zines were read by the working class. I can’t remember the last time I saw one of these little paper story-zines but it seems here in Australia that romances had to evolve into books before they become a genre and began this process in the 1960′s and 70′s.
I also fondly remember reading Lucy Walker’s books as a teenager in the 1970′s with their innocent and plucky young heroines finding love with older alpha heroes in the outback. She started writing in 1959 and her last book was published in 1980. I believe there are around 35 books in her ouvre.
Books that resemble TFaTF would have been regarded as historical novels for women readers here not romances. I also thinks books only began to be an option as people had more disposable income to spend.
Maybe what TFaTF represents is the first time the norms and tropes of romance had coalesced to the point that people could point at a novel and say this is a romance story and what they meant by that would be understood.
This means TFaTF isn’t the first romance novel but the book that is amongst the first to be recognisably a novel in the romance genre.
My ‘look how far we have come stories’ are:
In my early Army days, one of my tasks one day was updating a copy of a Manual of Personnel Administration. I had to take out the sections that showed female salaries as 75% of males with the same task grade and seniority. This was in 1980 and equal pay had only been implemented in 1978.
I remember my mother learning to drive in 1970 and how this was a bid deal because she could go places without depending on my father. For the first time in her life (she married straight from home) she could leave the house without having to tell someone where she was going.
I was twelve in 1972, and living in Southern California. I read The Flame and the Flower when it first came out. (My mother read it after me; she said “Beth! You read that??? — which is why I didn’t let her read it first.) By then I had also read The Scarlet Pimpernel, Pride and Prejudice, The Prisoner of Zenda, my first Barbara Cartland, The Innocent Heiress, Heyer’s Charity Girl, Friday’s Child, and The Corinthian (my favorite book when I was twelve), and Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting and The Gabriel Hounds. Also Holt’s Menfreya in the Morning, Kirkland Revels, and Mistress of Mellyn. I was soon to read the Angelique books (I remember seeing the early Lymond Chronicles books on the shelves at the bookstore, and wouldn’t it be interesting to compare them with Angelique, although I didn’t get to them until my late forties), the rest of Heyer, a whole bunch more Barbara Cartland, Victorine, Moonstruck Madness, The Wolf and the Dove, Gone with the Wind, Beulah Land and a bunch of other plantation-set romances, Sweet Savage Love . . . By college I had moved on to mysteries and science fiction, though I still own (and continue to re-read) the Heyers and the Stewarts, along with a book I read and loved at fourteen and still love today, Grace Ingram’s Red Adam’s Lady. I didn’t get back to reading new genre romances until a couple of years ago.
Anyway, my point is just, the English (and French) books were available in America in the seventies, and American girls read them, along with Woodiwiss et al. And I really, really disliked the heroine of The Flame and the Flower, who I thought was just incredibly stupid. (And was her name Heather? Really?) I felt sorry for her, too, but mainly she annoyed the hell out of me. Any “goodness” she may have possessed was completely swamped by her idiocy. As for the hero — besides being a rapist, he was an 18th century Virginian, right? I can’t remember how Woodiwiss dealt with slavery, but either option (20th century guy in 18th century clothes, or slave-owning rapist) is pretty much a loser). And I read an excerpt on a website recently, and found the prose really just unreadable.
@KMont: Thanks!
@Booklover1335: I was focused on political and social changes in the post, but you are absolutely right to point out that the genre has undergone internal changes, as far as style goes. It’s a literary genre after all!
@Julia Broadbooks: Always glad to shock, lol.
@Sunita: Yes, I realize that the legal changes, especially at the federal level, often occur late in the game as far as social changes go. But this would have been a much longer post if I had tried to track changes at the state and local levels, and I doubt anyone would have read it.
@Jeanne Pickering: On fashion: the big sunglasses, the platforms, the mary janes, the peasant blouses… a lot of it has come back, as @Victoria Janssen notes!
@Laura Vivanco: The US. I had hoped that was implied by the fact that I only referenced US culture and politics in the post.
@Moriah Jovan: there are probably a lot of reasons romances aren’t “complicated in a good way” today, but I think one difference is that when something new emerges — and I do think TFATF was something new, although maybe not the birth of the genre per se (more on that below) — it’s a bit of a wild west for a while, until certain things get settled. There are cycles of rigidity and fluidity, and maybe right now we are in a cycle of rigidity due to market issues in publishing?
@azteclady:
This is a great point. It maybe wouldn’t actually be so bad to think of the genre as fixed if folks thought it started out great and never changed.
@Wendy:
Oh I was trying to come up with an example from thrillers or mystery — this is great!
@Milena:
I’m sorry to hear this. I think it is very hard to match up changes in a literary genre with cultural changes, but there has to be some connection, even if we can only trace it at the level of individual books and readers, because romance is a mass culture phenomenon.
@willaful:
Right, the genre doesn’t move as a one legged creature. Many feminists think of the romance genre’s popularity as a form of feminist backlash, a buffer for traditional women against the storm of feminism (in the US). I think it is absolutely possible that for many readers and writers it functions this way, while for others it functions in more liberatory ways.
@Daisy:
I was thinking about this after you made a comment on another thread about the sex. Something a lot of feminist theorists have been concerned about the for past, well, 20 years (and more) is the pornification of culture. The idea is that porn is everywhere, not just in a film designated by a label as “porn”. So porn is used to sell puppy food, or cars, or professional sports, etc. Pornification tends to — er — not be celebrated by people who used the word “pornification”, as you might guess. There are a lot of arguments that it is objectifying, etc. As a part of our culture, as a literary genre that is very close to its readers’ desires, it makes a kind of sense that it would be affected too.
The other way to look at it, is that women, through writing and reading romance, are seeking a way to negotiate porn culture on their own terms.
Of course, either way of looking at it places the “looker” at some distance from the writer and reader, tends to undermine the agency of the reader especially, but the question of what the right distance is for a good view is one I can’t answer.
@Janet W: Thanks Janet, you are in very good company in this thread for taking me to task on the issue of when the genre was born!
@pamelia:
Oh for sure. I think in particular we will look back at some of the paranormal with more than a shudder, lol: “they thought reading about having sex with cold dead vampires was a good thing?!”
This is why I was careful to say that I am not assuming the genre is better now. It all depends on what you mean by “better”.
@FiaQ:
Thanks for this. In this post, I really am looking at the genre in terms of pop culture, and backburnering literary questions.
I am utterly convinced that the genre is much, much older than 1972. It did not spring wholly formed, ex nihilo, in 1972 but has important literary roots at least as far back as Jane Austen. But in this post, I was really trying to focus on “what most people in the US think, when they think at all about this”, and what they think is: Woodiwiss and Rogers, specifically, or “bodice ripper” in general.
You have been really helpful giving examples from Wikipedia etc that this is in fact what people think, and I can give many more just Googling and surfing the web.
I’ve also been reading Janice Radway and she makes the claim that TFATF is where the genre begins, a claim she defends by focusing on what Woodiwiss’s editor and publisher actually believed, and what readers at the time believed, namely, that it was something new. Radway doesn’t count the earlier gothics, like Mary Stewart, although she talks about them, because they were, from the industry’s and readers’ point of view, gothics, not romance. She also doesn’t count Harlequins, although she notes their existence and importance in their relationship with readers and marketing strategies, because TFATF was the first single title novel to be published and become a runaway bestseller without prior hardcover exposure. The Harlequins, despite making good money for the company, were not bestsellers, and were sold more like magazines, than like books.
I don’t agree with her, especially in terms of literary tradition of romance, although I think she is onto something in terms of the way the success of TFATF changed publishing and marketing (look at how the popularity of Twilight has impacted the YA genre. A single bestseller can do things like propel a category of fiction into the stratosphere) , but her view is widely shared in the popular culture.
One last point, a general one:
I think what’s happened here is that I had my fun blogging hat on when I wrote the post and many readers had their academic hats on. I was really trying to make a very simple point, which is that romance, like the world, has changed over time, and that reading a romance published in 1972 — even if it is excellent on any measure you care to use – is not going to inform you about what the genre is doing today. In an effort to write a fun, readable enjoyable post, I did not add all the disclaimers, caveats, and details I would have if it had been a more serious piece of writing.
@etv13:
Me too!!! Except I was sixteen
@Laura Vivanco:
I love this post & thread. Among earlier US romances I’ll put in a word for Gene Stratton Porter. A Girl of the Limberlost has a huge romantic element and was one of my first romantic and favorite reads growing up. A discussion about a “first” is always as unending as it is enjoyable. I’ll buy all the arguments that TFATF (which I must get around to reading) inaugurated the Modern Romance Era.
@Sarah Frantz:
Not sure if it fits, but how about Kathleen Winsor? Particularly Forever Amber (1944)? My gran, my mum and their friends referred this as a romance novel, long before those American Zebra hologram books and Amanda Quick’s books hit Britain between its eyes.
— EDIT Wait, wasn’t there a best-selling American romance author who had a radio or TV of her own about romance novels, some time between 1920s and 1940s? I think her first name is something like Faith? —-
I’ll dig up info about the TFaTF campaign as soon as I’m out of this deadline hell. Also, I think there is a mention in this oversized romance reference book I mentioned a while ago. Title… my brain is blanking on me, sorry. Love Lines? I’m reasonably certain that the author’s name is Rosemary. Publisher might be Facts on Books or something like it. I’ll look it up tonight.
@Sunita and @Jessica: Thank you! I’m due to become a “woman of leisure” full time in a month’s time so I’ll use the spare time from there on to investigate.
@FiaQ: I think the book is Love Lines: A Romance Reader’s Guide to Printed Pleasures, by Rosemary Gulley, Facts on File 1983.
OK, deep breaths (I have lost 2 comments already!) … third time’s the charm!
1. Yes to Stratton Porter — and her books would make a great American style Masterpiece Theatre. The Girl of the Limberlost was pubbed in 1912.
2. This writer, especially read thru prism of decades later, is fascinating. Is her “forced” stuff a way to get around what could and could not be written at the time? Her worlds are steeped in the authentic details of the time — there’s a strong religious thread. Worth checking out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Parkinson_Keyes
3. Faith Baldwin, I think. A lot like current inspirational authors.
Here’s a bit of what Rosemary Guiley’s Love Lines has to say about the history of the genre (this comes after paragraphs which mention Richardson, Austen, the Brontes, Heyer, and Mills & Boon:
I suppose if a concern with feminism and liberated sex seems “strident” then sex-by-rapist might seem a nice alternative.
@Merrian: Your description of newsprint books suddenly made me remember reading a story in a long-defunct U.S. magazine called Ingenue. It must have been in 1971 or 1972. I loved the story and could never find it again. It turned out to be an abridgement of a Rosamunde Pilcher novel. I can’t believe I forgot about her in this discussion. Before Pilcher wrote doorstop family sagas, she wrote lovely little contemporary romances, very British in style (not surprisingly). I still have them and reread them periodically. They stand up quite well. She also wrote for M&B as Jane Fraser.
ETA: Ingenue was periodically killed and then revived, but I think it’s gone for good now.
In the context of romance in magazine form, it seems worth mentioning the romance comics. Sequential Crush is a blog dedicated to them: “Sequential Crush is a blog devoted to preserving the memory of romance comic books and the creative teams that published them throughout the 1960s and 1970s.”
I did get your point, Jessica, and (while the academic debate is interesting), I think it’s an important one. This just from recent personal experience. My sister was avowedly “not a romance reader” — she read mostly detective fiction and suspense, so she read some things that I would consider cross-over or romantic suspense, but she scoffed (nicely) when she saw me reading a historical or contemporary romance. I gave her a little grief for knocking what she hadn’t tried, and she assured me that she HAD tried. Turns out that, in an effort to “get” my taste (she was confused why her big sister with the graduate degree read “trash”), she asked a bookstore employee to point out a “typical” historical romance, and she was directed to (you guessed it) Woodiwiss. It never occurred to her to check the publication date. She’s younger than me, was not addicted to Catherine Coulter and John Jakes like I was growing up, and she did not like the book at all. So absolutely, it happens that today’s readers encounter old school romances, find them not to their taste, and decide that the genre as a whole is not for them.
Luckily our story has a happy ending. Sis got a Nook and became a much more voracious reader; she quickly ran out of books in her comfort zone and warily asked me for recommendations that were “not trashy or bodice-rippers.” I bit my tongue, counted to ten, and recommended Naked In Death. Jackpot!
She burned through the books in that series, then slid over into Nora’s single titles with suspense elements, and then into the trilogies. She wanted more contemporary recommendations, so I made a few, and she liked them. In the process of reading Victoria Dahl’s Tumble Creek books, she got Dahl’s latest historical, A Little Bit Wild, kind of by accident. When she read it, she called me up asking “why didn’t you tell me there were GOOD historical romances?” So value judgments aside, she now reads all over the genre (with the exception of PNR, at least for now). But she only reads 21st-century books.
@Laura Vivanco:
As a long-time comic reader, I hang my head in shame for forgetting that. You’re right. Extremely popular during 1950s and 1960s, weren’t they? A couple of romance comic collectors – also romance readers – told me that many of those fulfilled all requirements of a Romance Novel by today’s romance genre. Heroine and hero meet, conflict, blah blah, HEA. I think it was during the 1970s that it was switched to photo love stories, right up to early 1990s?
It’s occurred to me earlier we haven’t quite mentioned teen romance novels, like these two successful romance lines during the 1980s (and onwards?): Bantam Romance’s Sweet Dreams series and Harlequin’s Silhouette First Love.
I know there were earlier ones but I know sod all about them, I’m afraid. But I wonder where do YA romance fit in in this case? Those books had me to clamour for “bigger” romance novels when I got bored with the limitations and repetitiveness. Such as Zebra historical, Leisure historical and I think Kensington historical? – all available through WH Smith – and also, American category romances like Silhouette with its subscription service. One time, I mostly avoided M&B because it was heavily associated with ‘grandmothers’.
I have an impression that – from past reader discussions, particularly among British readers – I wasn’t the only one to experience this transition from YA romance to (American) romance novels.
@Sunita: Thanks.
@Laura Vivanco: Thank you. I forgot that part. I just had a skim through Love Lines and I think I was thinking of a different book since LL doesn’t mention the advertising/marketing aspect of TF&TF.
@Janet W: I’m not sure if it’s actually Faith Baldwin, but thanks for introducing me to her.
(Are you JanetNorCal on Twitter? I’ve been meaning to ask this for ages.)
@Merrian: Lucy Walker FTW!
Radway, in Reading the Romance, mentions that Avon had been experimenting with paperback originals. I found an excerpt of the relevant chapter in another book and you can read it via Google Books.
I noticed the range of comments yesterday and figured it was the mark of a good post to have readers with such a variety of perspectives sparked to respond. My own focus was on your statement
Recently I came to the same conclusion, but from a different direction, and it was prompted by a binge in reading “older” contemporary romances. Time and again I found myself enjoying books filled with situations that were cringe-worthy by today’s standards. I was even embarrassed by the pattern until it struck me that I was reading a reflection of my own history.
I was one of 12 women in my medical school class and we were constantly pressured to quit. In the 70′s I was part of a successful class-action lawsuit for gender disparities in employment after our employer acknowledged we were paid 33% less than our male counterparts for the simple reason that we were single females. I used the $38.19 received in settlement (so pitiful as to induce laughs to this day) to take my significant other to a Dionne Warwick concert! My list could go on but there is no need because (1) it would just be one woman fleshing details to the list you gave us and (2) those details would show vast improvement over the past 40 years.
So after reaching my conclusion, I let myself relax while reading Old Skool books. The fact that the old stuff can induce cringes means that great majority of us have moved on and no longer have to fight the old attitudes. And that fills me with a sense of anticipation for reading romance decades in the future. Which attitudes in current books will induce cringes 20 years hence? I live with hope.
You guys are awesome. That is all (for now)!
@Kathryn
I love to re-read my old Harlequins, mostly from the 60′s and 70′s. Maybe some of the situations are cringe-worthy, but I just consider them to be historicals.
@Miranda Neville:
I have to ‘me too’ this book as well!
About A Girl of the Limberlost — I read an abridged Puffin edition (with an introduction from famous Penguin editor Kaye Webb). Did either of you read the unabridged version? I wonder if I wonder have liked it as much if I had.
@Janet W:
Thanks for persevering
I have to ‘me too’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Parkinson_Keyes I read all her books as an adolescent and it is only in retrospect that I would now focus on the romantic elements.
I also recall Anya Seton as an author whose books I glommed now that I am thinking back.
@Janet W:
I read an old hard back. The cover had lovely gold embossing with moths – almost aesthetic in style.
The person who loaned it to me also shared some Marie Corelli spiritualist novels too. I don’t think they stand up to the 21st century but were wildly popular in her lifetime.
I’ve found a thesis about her online that has something to say to us romance readers. Here are some quotes:
I love that description of what makes a romance novel…
the romance genre described…
Isn’t this what romance as a genre does for the generations of women who have reached adulthood after 1970?
She invented fated mates….
All those books with sheiks and billionaires and tycoons we can think of share the same concerns about money…
The thesis is by Robyn Hallim and called MARIE CORELLI: SCIENCE, SOCIETY AND THE BEST SELLER
http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/2123/521/2/adt-NU20030623.11115902whole.pdf
Has anyone mentioned Frank Yerby? What about Fannie Hurst, Edna Ferber, Olive Higgins Prouty, or any other popular author whose books were turned into movies during the 1930s and 1940s and marketed as “women’s pictures”? I’ve made it a habit of tracking down the novels on which classic films are based, and many of them share the scope, the concerns, and usually the sort of characters and situations seen in today’s (American) romance novels.
@Merrian: About Marie Corelli, I read and meant to review Ziska (the Problem of a wicked Soul), terrific, fascinating book, an ancestor to paranormal romance. You’ve inspired me to finish that post.
I was just reminded of the chapter on newspaper serial romances in My Sister Eileen. That was written in the 1920′s, IIRC, but the plots as described were pretty similar to Harlequins from the 70s. The more things change…
Loved this post—my comments are a bit of this and that.
Like etv13 I was 12 when TFATF first came out and although growing up in Michigan. Much of her reading list (including Red Adam’s Lady—loved that book!) is familiar. Other pre-TFATF authors are Barbara Metz (Barbara Michaels/Elizabeth Peters) whose early books were labeled gothics or suspense, Elswith Thane whose Williamsburg historical series I recall as having strong romantic elements and Patricia Maxwell (Jennifer Blake), whose early books were labeled gothics or historicals, and Jan Cox Speas. I recently saw a reissue of Christy by Catherine Marshall (and originally published in 1967) sitting in the romance section of a local bookstore—it’s a book that I haven’t seen since I was in my teens. And there was of course Anne McCaffrey who wrote of course mainly fantasy/science fiction romances, but also did a few straight gothic romances novels (Mark of Merlin and Ring of Fear). I know that there were other American authors—but I can’t recall their names off the top of my head.
So it wouldn’t take much to show that “romance novels” existed before TFATF, even in the US—but I also wonder if one of the things that TFATF did influence was the categorizing of these books in U.S. publishing and bookstores—that is, romance as an actual publishing/marketing category where one slotted certain books aimed at women might have come into existence because of TFATF and its sister novels. Certainly was a sudden explosion of mass-market and category books being written by authors such as Janet Daily (1974–the first American author in Harlequin/Mill and Boons category world), Rosemary Rogers (Sweet Savage Love, 1974), Anne Stuart (first pub. 1974), Laurie McBain (first publ. 1975), Jayne Krentz (first publ. 1979). And these books were deliberately categorized, marketed, and shelved as “romances” as a way to sell them to women.
There were also a whole bunch of YA authors whose books included strong young women characters and romantic elements such as the Canadian Lucy Maud Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables series, The Blue Castle, etc.), Patricia Clapp (Constance: A Story of Early Plymouth), Elizabeth George Speare (The Witch of Blackbird Pond), Elizabeth Marie Pope (Perlious Gard), Andre Norton (Witch World series). Along with all the other ones other people have mentioned.
A woman’s prior sexual history and past conduct was openly considered fair game, regardless of its relevance to the case, in a defense against rape (rape shield laws were a few years away yet).
Nothing to add to the conversation except that the gang-rape of the 11-year girl in Texas and the news coverage of the crime (even in the NY Times) would seem to indicate that we have an awful long way to go yet. At least the journalists and newspapers are being called out but what about the cultural conditioning that still remains in a certain portion of the US population? I’m not always sure that we have made strides in this regard, although intellectually I know (*hope*) that we have.
Oy!