romantic fiction

romantic fiction. This capacious and much-contested category could be said to pre-date the novel—as in the medieval verses of courtly love written in the vernacular, the ‘popular’ languages derived from Latin—or to coincide with its origins in the 17th cent., when the first novels are romances of illicit love. If the English novel's literary canon begins in the 18th cent. with Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa, these, too, are classic romantic fictions: the first, a story in which our heroine tames the rapacious rake through her intelligence and virtue; the latter, one in which she fails to do so and must, tragically, pay with her life.

As literary generations succeed one another, there is a tendency for the realism of one epoch to look like romance to the readers and writers of the next. Currencies or novelties grow remote, past social forms seem exotic or idealized, language overblown. Remoteness, exoticism, idealization, excess in language or emotion are all characteristics which render fiction romantic. In her literary history of 1785, The Progress of Romance, Clara Reeve already makes a distinction between the ‘novel’ which deals with everyday life and the ‘romance’, a more elevated form concerned with high emotion, high life, and past times.

Nonetheless, the term ‘romantic fiction’ remains slippery and its use through time replete with ironies. The venerable Sir W. Scott, who self-consciously wrote romances, criticized Jane Austen for not being romantic enough. This would surely surprise all viewers and readers of Jane Austen, who consider her period pieces the very stuff of romance for all her witty balancing act between love and property. Indeed, it is from Austen's work that the contemporary popular romance of the Harlequin Mills & Boon, happy-ever-after variety derives its key storylines.

As the size of the reading public grew from the 18th cent. onwards and spread down the ladder of class, so too did the size of the public for romance, particularly the female public. Because of the gender and mass of its readers, critics are quick to lash out at the form and accuse it of corruption. ‘He who burns a romance purifies the human mind,’ wrote Richard Carlisle, the radical 19th-cent. publisher. ‘Those damned romantic novels of romantically damned love!’ echoes a Guardian review of 1967, guarding our public morals against the possibility of female transgression. It is as if women readers—wives and daughters and servants—will be led forever astray once their imaginations have been fired by the likes of Ouida's capricious heroine Cigarette in Under Two Flags, or, indeed, the passionate Anna Karenina, or the audacious Scarlett O'Hara.

Certain women writers have often been equally scathing about romantic fiction, itself much of it written by women. The didactic anti-Jacobin writers of the late 18th cent.—for example Mary Ann Hanway and Jane West—in their attempt to consolidate ideals of bourgeois domesticity, inveighed against the passions and romance, only now and again to find themselves writing what everyone else called passionate romances. In Northanger Abbey Jane Austen parodied the excesses of the Gothic romance. George Eliot—whose Daniel Deronda borders on romance—wrote a scathing attack on ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, pointing out their absurdities, ‘the particular quality of silliness that predominates in them—the frothy, the prosy, the pious or the pedantic’. Like the great mass of fiction, romance is not always well written, but unlike the great mass of what could be called male romance—stories of pistols and pirates and wild beasts, of criminal life, of spies in exotic locations and hard-boiled detectives—it has had more than its share of opprobrium. In part this is undoubtedly due to cultural fears about and for women, both as readers and as writers.

Since an exploration of the life of the emotions is romantic fiction's predominant theme, any map of the genre must be a large one. Innumerable pseudonymous, anonymous, and forgotten novels as well as more famous ones find a place there. A quick historical charting of peaks and fertile valleys would have to begin with Richardson, who set out a psychological style plus the two storylines and two central characters which became archetypal. Through her sensitive, young, middle-class heroines, with their sharp eye for the mores of the world in which they will meet their match, Fanny Burney introduced a new note and combined romance with the novel of manners. Jane Austen perfected the form and made the story of the young woman's courtship, the misunderstandings during it, and the growth in self-knowledge which attends the process a model for English fiction.

All of Austen's fictions end with the desired goal of marriage. In one sense the Gothic romances, which were the great vogue of her day, provide the dark side of the post-marital coin. The strange, ghostly landscapes and frightening, claustrophobic castles of Ann Radcliffe, or her even more sensational and lower-brow kin Charlotte Dacre (1782–c.1841), are settings where the innocent bride's fears and fantasies about terrifying husbands and fathers can be acted out. Amongst many other fictions, Daphne du Maurier's famous Rebecca (1938) owes not a little to the Gothic romance. The more pedestrian side of post-marital relations is explored in an abundant list of domestic romances which sentimentalize the duties of the good wife and faithful daughter, but not without underlining problems and the occasional tug of a would-be seducer. The prolific Margaret Oliphant, and E. D. E. N. Southworth are two in a long line which leads to the contemporary Aga saga of Joanna Trollope.

Towering over the romantic fiction of the mid-19th cent. are the Brontë sisters, in particular Emily and Charlotte, who with Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre set a standard, the first for the novel of doomed love, the second for the novel of the young woman's climb towards moral independence and a passion underscored by equality. The much-read and much-castigated sensation novelists of the end of the century, Wilkie Collins and Mary Braddon amongst them, are indebted to these.

At the turn of the century, Henry James hijacked romantic fiction and transformed it into the art of the novel of high consciousness. Meanwhile, scores of women wrote and read variations on the old themes. The romantic fiction of the 20th cent. may be pure exotic escapism, like Ethel M. Dell's The Way of an Eagle (1912), E. M. Hull's The Sheik (1919), or the many novels of Danielle Steel and Catherine Cookson; or historical escapism, at its best in Georgette Heyer's Regency romances; or the simplest but phenomenally successful Mills & Boon brand of romance, which sells 13 million books a year in the UK alone. Or it may—with more or less sensationalism or refinement, and marriages with the novel of manners, or domestic life, or the thriller—chart shifts in the place of women and the relations between the sexes. This is the terrain of the best-selling blockbusters of the 1980s and 1990s, written by Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Jilly Cooper, Rosie Thomas, and Sally Beauman, or, in a more psychological vein, by Lisa Appignanesi and Susan Gee. One could say that it is also the terrain of Anita Brookner, Mary Wesley, and the Margaret Drabble of The Millstone or The Waterfall. Whatever its critical reception or height of brow, by focusing on women and giving them the power to adventure or to tame the threatening male, romantic fiction is clearly a form readers enjoy. In the hands of playful postmodernists, such as David Lodge in Small World: An Academic Romance or A. S. Byatt in Possession, it has even, once again, been turned into literary fiction.