Honestly, this is almost too embarrassing to write about. I don't mind at all militantly enjoying genre fiction, and not of the literary kind. I am happy to burble on about science fiction, and classic mysteries (Christie, Sayers, mostly), and police procedurals, as long as they have an interesting setting, and oh, man, the historical mystery series I have devoured. Even cozies, though I do cringe a bit, there. But I stumble when it comes to copping to reading romances.
I think I started reading romances when I was in middle school, and it started with the worst of the worst. God knows where I got them. I mean, the library. I certainly didn't buy them at age 11 or 12 or (oh, god, really? still by 13?) (but yes, definitely through high school, though with increasing feelings of guilt). I read Barbara Cartland romances. I must have liked the fact that they were "historical", but they're so utterly godawful that it's hard to remember how I could possibly have enjoyed them. They all end with a (first) swooning kiss and a betrothal. The men are all masterful ASSHOLES. The women are all kittenish-and-or-bashful sprites, often put upon by evil stepsisters. They are Lords and Ladies. There is no breath of sex. The absolute worst one, which finally broke my shameful habit was definitely the one where the author involved the suffrage movement in the plot somehow and clearly came out against women suffrage. I have suppressed the plot, otherwise. I thought that it was absolutely perfect that Diana Spencer was Barbara Cartland's (apparently not much liked?) step-granddaughter.
By which I basically mean a plague on both their houses; they deserved each other, Diana and The Queen of Romance.
So, after that horrible start, I went on to line romances -- Harlequins, Silhouettes (I think that was a Harlequin imprint, too? No, I see it WAS but was later bought by Torstar), Harlequin American romances (these were much longer)... and some downmarket rivals once in a great while, like, god, what were they called? I literally cannot recall them, and I did a brief Google Search just now, but no dice. Oh, one was Loveswept. These were appallingly badly edited.
The only things I remember well about line romances were that as the 1980s rolled on, there was more sex, and that there were a few, a vanishingly few, authors who were good writers and who gave setting and context some priority. I mean, different from having the hero have a shitload of money. There was one author who wasn't bad who has my actual first name, which was a turn up for the books! VERY FEW people have my actual first name. There was also a series that was uneven, but interesting, because it had the conceit of setting each of ten or twelve books in a distinct decade, from the 1900s, through the 1910s, '20s, '30s, '40s, '50s (it even involved McCarthyism! You know I enjoyed that one!
Stranger in Paradise by Barbara Bretton), '60s (two of them, to show, uh, both sides of the 1960s, the silent majority girl whose brother, I think, was killed in Vietnam? I don't remember. I hated that one. And the semi-protester girl one which I also hated because it did such a bad job with that history), '70s, '80s (SO PAINFUL to read; either this one or the '90s one, which was contemporary at the time, involved, I think, a Kansas computer campus and "sci fi" attributes and a solar powered bicycle if I remember correctly, and the astonishing fact of early internet and email.) Anyway, a few of them were interesting, but they were also basically the end of my journey with line romances.
From there... by that point I was in graduate school in Columbia, Missouri. I alternated reading Deborah Gray Ellis and E. P. Thompson with reading Mary Balogh and Georgette Heyer. I had discovered not just historical romance bodice rippers, which I didn't actually like much, but Regency romances. I still read Regency romances to this day.
I read them, and pretty much exclusively Regencies, if we're talking about explicit romances, and not other genres which have a side focus on romance (some historical mystery series, some YA books, lots of LGBTQ books, etc).
But I am picky. You really could count the authors I like on... well, probably on both hands and maybe both feet. I am going to find out, by listing them.
Georgette Heyer -- the first author to take the period and the basic bones of Jane Austen, and get rid of the social observations and literary ... I do not know how to put this. I don't want to say pretentions: Austen is amazing. Frills? I dunno. Just, Georgette Heyer was not trying to be a Great Author, though I guess she did want to be a commercially successful lady novelist.
Mary Balogh -- good GOD she's written a lot. And I have read pretty much all of it. I mean, I've read everything Heyer wrote, too, but there are not nearly as many Heyer Georgian and Regency romances as there are Balogh books. Balogh is currently republishing all her early one-offs and smaller, shorter early related books. And she writes a new multi-entry long-assed series all the damn time. I think she is FINALLY starting to sound a bit tired and repetitive, but she had an absolutely amazing run, writing Regencies that were well-balanced, historically pretty accurate, with explicit sex-scenes, many premarital (though it always always ended in a marriage, of course)... but with one sticking point -- until quite recently, the woman was a firm proponent of the vaginal orgasm, and it was weird reading so many of those, with no other possibility entertained. Honestly, it took her from the 1980s to the 2010s to get with that program. Still, she is a reliable author of Regencies. (I guess on the other side of this, I should say I wouldn't read a Julia Quinn book further than the first few pages, if you paid me -- she's the one whose series started the Netflix drama
Bridgerton.)
Carola Dunn She writes a mystery series, too, one of the very many young-flapper-detects-crime-in England subgenre, of which there are a million. Hers are pretty good, though -- Daisy Dalrymple is the heroine, and a couple of her titles are great:
Anthem for Doomed Youth; nice shout out to Wilfrid Owen, and
Superfluous Women. But she also wrote a ton of Regencies, a couple of which are mini-trilogies. She enjoyed the settings as much as the historical byways she pursued -- so, one of the trilogies involves the Rothschilds during the Napoleonic wars.
Carla Kelly -- Okay, I am ambivalent about this one, because she does write Regencies, but she is REALLY into the glory and heroism of not just the Napoleonic wars (plenty of Regency writers foreground it, from Heyer on) but specifically the different armed forces -- not just Wellington's Peninsular army, but the Royal Navy, and the Royal Marines. And she's a Mormon. So. Reading them is ... odd. I think, the first one I encountered got me -- it was about a younger sister of a wastrel who was at Oxford, who impersonated him in order to attend lectures and write papers for her tutor on Shakespeare.
Ms. Grimsby's Oxford Career. Anyway, I've probably read all of hers even when I was gritting my teeth.
Mary Jo Putney These are larger, longer books, and verge perilously on the bodice ripper genre, but are still Regencies. One or the other (or maybe even both; it's been a while since I read them) of this author and the next have 'exotic' settings, mostly in China and India.
Jo Beverly Pretty similar to Mary Jo Putney, really. Maybe more tangled in plot and writing? As I said, it's been a while since I read any of these, but I generally was left with a reasonably good impression.
Laura Matthews I read her
The Loving Seasons (TERRIBLE title, but a quite good, leisurely book) with three interlocked romances, all of school friends who emerge to enter society, but with less focus on a bewildering succession of balls and fancy clothes and so on, and more on fairly low-intensity developments. Slow burn, I guess? Anyway it was years before I found out that Elizabeth Walker (the name under which that book was published) was the same as Laura Matthews, and I promptly got all her other Regencies, and they are all good, though generally shorter than the first. I reread these (and Balogh, and Heyer, and Dunn, a LOT).
Sheila Bishop And finally there is this author, which is where I am going to end my written wanderings, as it is this author that made me think about writing this post in the first place. Years ago, in graduate school, probably at this huge echoing barn of a store in a strip mall that exclusively sold AND EXCHANGED used romances, I encountered this one book. I still have a very detailed recollection of the place: cheap gray carpeting, cheap grey metal shelves along all three walls, and a quiet hush of women in there, trading used books for store credit; it was quite a place.
Sheila Bishop's
A Well-Matched Pair was similar to Elizabeth Walker's
The Loving Seasons in that it was slightly longer, it did slow burn, and it involved somewhat uncommon tropes -- in the Walker book, the heroine absolutely makes out with a rake, for several months, gets engaged to him, and then DOESN'T reform him, but marries the slow burn guy, who is fine with all of this. In Bishop's story, the young heroine thinks a guy is flirting with her, only to find out it's almost a Devonshire story where he is having an affair with a Duchess, whose pregnancy is discovered, and the heroine is drawn into the Duchess's life (and eventual tragic death) which allows her to marry the widowed Duke. That is weird. But it was a one-off. I could never find another of her books -- not at that strange bookstore, not in libraries, not once Amazon started republishing older titles in Kindle. But the Internet Archive just came to my rescue! Most of her books appear to have been scanned and uploaded and available. I've read... four or five in the past two days.
A Speaking Likeness (bastard child raised by a compassionate young widow; semi-accidental encounter with not the father, but the grandfather, (a young grandfather, mind you) whom she eventually falls for and marries);
The School in Belmont (impoverished by an entailed estate, not-quite-bluestocking young woman and her objectionable usurping cousins' governess decamp to open a school in Bath; they make every mistake in the book and hijinks ensue);
The Rules of Marriage (rocky start to a whirlwind marriage, which is a common trope but well done, here);
Lucasta (which is almost a Heyeresque title, but here involves what almost seems like a gothic murder mystery, but is not). And now, another stab at a semi-mystery,
The Wilderness Walk. I am enjoying new mysteries by an author I like, so much!
Of course, there are also the meta considerations, of romance as a genre. I found an excellent Vox article about the detonation of longstanding racist gatekeeping practices of the Romance Writers of America, after an incident in 2019 (which I think I had barely heard of, at the time?) and I will put the link in here, because it's a good survey of the genre and the writing and publishing side of it. I don't remember how to do a URL with a title over it, it's been so long.
Vox Article "Bad Romance"There, a post which is not based on the Prompt-a-Day. Oh, and I DIDN'T exceed the number of Romance authors one could count on two hands. I wondered.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
