In this post, I’m going to talk about my own paper. I presented on authorship with a colleague. We have project going that traces a Romantic conception of authorship in women’s writing about authorship from the Minerva Press era (late 18th-early 19th century) through today’s popular romances. Actually, it traces resistance to that authorial mode. I am sorry to say that although we offered to take only one slot, and were very game to do it this way, we underestimated the impact of the time constraints (10 minutes each) and weren’t able to even mention connections and disconnections between the two eras our work. In the future, I would either ask for double time or not present. Lesson learned.

There were three papers presented in my session. The first was by McDaniel alumna and romance/women’s fiction writer Lisa Dale. Since I was going to speak after Lisa, I did not take notes, but I can tell you she shared a wonderful meditation on responsibility and authorship. I became intrigued by her books, and have since read her most recent, Slow Dancing on Price’s Pier. I really liked it, and hope to review it later this week or next. The third paper was by Angela Toscano, and, as usual, she offered a highly original and thought provoking take on an aspect of popular romance, this time the cliche.  A line (or idea) from that paper, “‘I love you’ is our amen” became  the most widely retweeted of my conference tweets.

My colleague Elizabeth went first, talking about Minerva Press writers and models of authorship in two of Minerva Press novels.

Here’s my paper, presented in outline form:

I. Romantic conception of authorship. In general, it is important to note that there are many tensions and outright contradictions within the Romantic conception of authorship. It was never hegemonic, it never captured the complexity of what Romantic era authors were doing, and it often lied outright about it. The story we tell ourselves today about the Romantic conception of authorship makes a lot more sense (is more coherent and rational) than it was at the time, or ever has been. So, recognizing this is a story we tell ourselves, here are some salient themes in the Romantic era conception of authorship, themes (or clusters of ideas) which still influence us today:

a. Purity: The Romantic era author gained cultural capital by disavowing capitalism (during a period in which the patron model gave way to a capitalist model of literary artistic production). He didn’t write for money and didn’t “work.” The “valueless value” of the literary work could only be produced by an “Author” who had no financial stake or interest. Terry Eagleton has said that this disavowing of commerce was a  “spiritual compensation” for the humiliation a writer might feel at writing for money.

b. Independence: Just as the “self” in general (in philosophy, politics, economic, religion) was newly developed and empowered in the 18th century, the “authorial self” was increasingly aligned with self-creation and autonomy — independence from commerce, from other authors, from his readers, from his own life, and personal interests.

c. Originality/Genius: The author doesn’t mirror the world as in classical mimesis, but “half-creates” it (as Wordsworth’s formulation). The idea here is the author as “ahead of his time” who can’t possibly be writing for an audience, as he must “create the taste by which he is enjoyed”.  This genius is fundamentally mysterious, supernatural. There is no “reason” why genius is able to create art, no clear cause and effect.

d. Self-transcendence: One of many paradoxes within Romantic era conception of authorship is the emphasis at the same time on the author, and on the effacement of the author. So, the essence of genius is to self-transcend. One way this gets ashed out is in the admonition to never put personal life into work. Consider Joyce’s famous formulation in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the author “like the God of creation remains within or behind or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

II. Romantic era conception of authorship continues to exert significant pull. In this section, which I’ll skip, I talk about Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (2004) and some contemporary authors.

III. What conception of contemporary authorship emerges from romance novels? I focused on one subgenre, contemporary romance, and one decade (the aughts), and on books in which the heroine is a writer, especially of romance novels.

Books (primary set)
Brazen and Burning, Julie Elizabeth Leto (2003) [Harlequin Temptation]
Improper English, Katie MacAlister (2003) [Dorchester’s Love Spell]
My Hero, Marianna Jameson (2005) [Signet Eclipse]
I’m In No Mood for Love, Rachel Gibson (2006) [Avon]
Talk Me Down, Victoria Dahl (2009) [HQN]

Others (not romance writers):
*The other books in Gibson’s “author friends” quartet: Sex Lies and Online Dating (mystery, Lucy and Quinn 2006), Tangled Up In You (Maddie –true crime, and Mick, 2007); Not Another Bad Date (Adele, SFF, and Zach, 2008);
*See Jane Score, Rachel Gibson (2003) (heroine writes “Life of Honey Pie”, a pornographic serial for a men’s magazine)
*Welcome to Temptation, Jennifer Crusie (2000) (heroine is filming a porn movie)
*This Heart of Mine, Susan Elizabeth Phillips (heroine writes children’s books) (2002)

Themes that emerge (match to Romantic author themes above):

a. Capitalism: That they are producing a product to be sold is always salient. Money always a concern for these self-supporting single women. They all, to some extent, write for money. Even where the heroine is wealthy, as in Julie Leto’s Brazen and Burning, or Rachel Gibson’s I’m In No Mood for Love, getting paid for writing is significant to the heroine’s independence, sense of self-worth, and social status.

b. Collaboration — not radical autonomy – is key, in several ways:

(1) Collaboration with friends, especially author friends, with editors, critique groups, etc. For example, Rachel Gibson’s Idaho series features four writer friends – mystery, romance, true crime, and science fiction –who frequently meet up to discuss their writing process. In Marianna Jameson’s My Hero, Miranda Lane works closely with her agent, Amy, to craft a novel that will satisfy her publisher.

(2) Relationships with readers. Readers are very present and important. Author often shown at booksignings, reading reader email, participating in online chats with readers.

Ex. 1 In Talk Me Down, Molly says “Most [reader] emails were kind and generous, the type of mail that kept her writing.” (loc 3833)

Relationships with readers are not presented uniformly, and are not idealized. They often provide an opportunity to highlight the heroine’s grasp of and emphasis on the distinction between fantasy and reality.

Ex. 1 In Gibson’s Sex, Lies, and Online Dating, a crazed man-hating fan commits murders Lucy writes about, saying “You told me to kill those men.” She also takes the liberty of stealing Lucy’s rough draft and critiquing it. (!) “My books are fiction, Lucy said. “They aren’t How to Manuals.” (p. 335)

Ex. 2 Talk Me Down: Brenda, Ben’s secretary and receptionist says “She is not good enough for you. She’s a liar and a pornographer. Do you know how she earns her filthy money?” Brenda assumes the heroine is a “slut” because she writes erotic romance.

In both cases, these readers failed to recognize boundaries between real life and fiction.

(c) Collaboration through formula. They are all explicitly writing in within a literary genre, attuned to expectations of genre, as parlayed via editors, publishers, agents, and audience. Although inspiration is vitally important, as is originality (“formulaic” is referred to as an “f word” in the Jameson), there is little focus on radical originality or supernatural genius. In contrast to Romantic conceptions of a mystifying process of producing an utterly unique novel, these authors heroines share a self-conception as romance authors. The practical process of writing is also made transparent, including research, editing, rewrites.

Ex. When Miranda, in My Hero is told by her publisher to write an “alpha male” hero, she “skimmed the entire Stephanie Plum series, an every Suzanne Brockmann book she could find, and every Linda Howard, just to study their alpha-to-the-max heroes.” (p. 45)

That said, there is usually a threat to the status of the heroine writer. Someone disapproves, a mother, a former lover, a stranger writing hate mail. So there is usually good opportunity for both a recognition of the existence of literary hierarchies, and for a defense of the genre

Ex 1. In Dahl’s Talk Me Down, the heroine, keeps her career as an erotic romance author a secret from pretty much everyone.  Talk Me Down, Ben says, “How the hell could you justify climbing into my fucking bed without mentioning that you’d been writing smut about me? “It’s not smut” she muttered. “Oh, I’m sorry. You prefer the word porn? Or trash? Or perverted fantasy?” “Screw you.” …”It’s not smut, she said again. “ I understand why you’d say that, but if you’d just read my work—“

Ex 2. In My Hero, Miranda’s best friend, while admitting, about romance that “everyone reads them”, still says, it has always struck me that you should be writing something else. I don’t know, something bigger. And don’t start in about making the New York Times list. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

Ex. 3 In My Hero, Miranda pleads “I am a southern writer” when her editor asks for a Northern set novel. The response? “Eudora Welty was a southern writer. Harper Lee is a southern writer. [You] are a romance writer. [You’re] generic. Plug and Play.” Later this attitude is explained thusly, “Look, she’s adjusting to the genre. She came from a literary imprint.”

Ex. 4 In I’m Rachel Gibson’s I’m in No Mood For Love, romance writer Clare had always known how her mother felt about her writing, but Joyce had always ignored her career, pretending instead that she wrote ‘women’s fiction’. [Clare’s mother] pretended that Clare’s career choice was a passing phase, and that once she got over her fascination with ‘trash, she’d write ‘real books. … Literature worthy of the [home] library.”

Sometimes, the author heroines evince a kind of distancing of their own professional attitude from “dabblers”, subverting the idea of women writers as “scribbler”:

Ex. In Gibson’s Sex, Lies and Online Dating, Lucy, a true crime writer, in referring to other women says, “I don’t know how serious either woman is about her writing or whether they’re just dabblers. … a person who talks about writing but never actually finishes more than a few chapters” (p. 255)

d. Self-transcendence: Although these author heroines tend to agree with the Romantic era admonishment against self-insertion (they are emphatically not writing their own stories), their subtle and deep understanding of the interrelationship of their work and personal lives results in a set of ongoing and complex negotiations. In each of these novels, boundary issues between writing life and real life are salient. The author heroines acknowledge the connections between their work and their lives, but reject the implied notion that somehow the writing flows without imagination, effort, or craft from their daily experiences.

Ex. In Gibson’s I’m In No Mood For Love, Clare deliberately teases the Sebastian with the thought that she has to personally research her own sex scenes. Afterwards, she thinks, “It was called romantic fiction for a reason, but if she were given a dollar for each time she was asked where she got her ideas for the love scenes she wrote, she could supplement her income quite nicely.” (loc 906). Clare’s teasing retort to Sebastian is contrasted in the text with examples of the actual historical research she performs, for example about pirates, a book on peerage (“she had to make sure she knew the correct titles of the Italian aristocracy” loc 2705).

Interestingly, a common relationship obstacle is the way the heroine has incorporated information about the hero, especially sexual situations, into her book. In both Dahl’s Talk Me Down and in Jameson’s My Hero (as well as Gibson’s See Jane Score, Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation, and, to a lesser extent conflict-wise, SEP’s This Heart of Mine) a major conflict arises when the hero discovers the heroine’s writing is loosely based on him. An entire project could be framed around this last point.

And finally, social punishment for writing “sexy” stories reveals a way in which the female writer’s authorial persona and daily life intermesh without her consent. In some cases, as in Talk Me Down, the use of pen names and secrecy reveals a version of self-effacement deployed as a strategy for negotiating with misogynistic attitudes of a culture with a repressive sexual ethic, not as an aesthetic choice.

For each of the items above, I could have offered half dozen of more examples, but time was short. I do want to give a fun shout out to Leto’s Brazen and Burning, in which the heroine’s attitude to everything is basically, “I’m a New York Times best selling romance novelist. I know how to do this”, where “this” is anything from curing a man of amnesia, having mindblowing sex, investing in the stock market, or foiling a plot to steal sensitive architectural plans. I loved her.