More than any other literary genre, the romance novel has been misunderstood by mainstream literary culture—book review editors, reviewers themselves, writers and readers of other genres, and, especially, literary critics. Deborah Kaye Chappel has characterized critical response to the romance novel as a “dogged insistence on containment and reduction” (5). Even the most cursory survey of criticism of this genre yields a ringing condemnation of it: critical characterization of the romance novel is overwhelmingly negative. The titles alone of critical works on the genre attest to widely based censure. Romance novels are badly written: consult Rachel Anderson’sThe Purple...

Romance novels end happily. Readers insist on it. The happy ending is the one formal feature of the romance novel that virtually everyone can identify. This element is not limited to a narrow range of texts: a marriage—promised or actually dramatized—ends every romance novel. Ironically, it is this universal feature of the romance novel that elicits the fiercest condemnation from its critics. The marriage, they claim, enslaves the heroine, and, by extension, the reader. In this argument the heroine’s quest—which is to say her adventures, vicissitudes, or the events that she confronts in the course of the...

As this definition is neither widely known nor accepted, it requires no little defense as well as some teasing out of distinctions between the term put forward here, “romance novel,” and terms in widespread use, such as “romance” and “novel.” I begin with the broadest term, “romance.”

The term “romance” is confusingly inclusive, meaning one thing in a survey of medieval literature, and another, not entirely distinct, in a contemporary bookstore. Ask at a bookstore for a copy of theMorte Darthurand the clerk will take you to the “literature” section; a glance at the book’s introduction will inform...

Thus far interpretation of the romance novel has focused heavily on the ending in part because the other essential narrative elements of the form have remained unidentified. A romance novel—a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines—requires certain narrative events. They are essential, for without them the work is not aromancenovel. In this chapter I expand my basic definition to identify and define the eight essential narrative elements of the romance novel as well as the three incidental elements that sometimes occur and are typical...

The eight essential elements of the romance novel represent the core of the genre. In addition to the three optional elements which appear in some, but not all, romance novels, other kinds of material, other sorts of scenes, are often incorporated. As long as the focus stays on the core, essential elements, the work is a romance novel.

When the writer focuses on other kinds of narrative elements, the novel is another kind of thing, a member of another genre. In all genres, however, love plots of various kinds are the norm rather than the exception. Considering only popular forms,...

In Part III I trace the history of the romance novel in English from the beginning of its modern ascendancy in the mid-eighteenth century to the twentieth century when the form becomes a wholly popular one. Most critics writing about “the romance” pay, at most, lip service to the forebears of contemporary works. This practice robs the genre of its most distinguished representatives, marooning it in the present, and reducing it to the few works that a given critic has chosen to analyze. As we have seen, the typically narrow selection of texts has not stopped critics from making sweeping...

My exploration of the history of the romance novel in English begins withPamela; or, Virtue Rewarded(1740), the story of the courtship, betrothal, wedding, and triumph of lady’s maid Pamela Andrews to Mr. B, the master for whom she works. Nominating a first novel in English is arbitrary, butPamelais one of the works named to that honor. With it, Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), already a successful London printer and editor, advanced the quality of prose fiction, providing an early instance of the exploration of character that the novel would become known for. Ian Watt, an influential historian...

Jane Austen is the master of the romance novel. She published six but had she written onlyPride and Prejudice(1813), her command of the form would be indisputable. For this reasonPride and Prejudiceserved as the case study in Part II to illustrate the elements of the romance novel. I return to her here in part because the brief discussion in Part II of barrier and point of ritual death, the lenses through which I focus my analysis of the romance, deliberately ignored a large segment of the barrier and did not deeply explore the significance of the...

Charlotte Brontë’sJane Eyre(1847) received the same sort of popular acclaim asPamelaandPride and Prejudice(Allott 20). The critic writing for theNorth American Reviewdescribed the book’s popularity in New England as “Jane Eyre fever” (Allott 97). Thackeray, who was issuingVanity Fairin monthly installments at the time, called Brontë a “genius” and explained in a letter to the person who sent himJane Eyrethat he could not put it down: “I lost a whole day in reading it…. Some of the love passages made me cry” (Allott 198, 70). Brontë’s biographer, Winifred Gérin,...

InFramley Parsonage(1861) Anthony Trollope enjoyed his first popular success. It is the fourth of Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire—a set of six novels that share a fictional geography, interlaced characters, and a thematic preoccupation with the church in a Cathedral town. N. John Hall, notes: “From the first most people have over the years given pride of place to the six novels of the Barchester series…. Trollope’s contemporaries set great store byFramley Parsonage” (505).

Framley Parsonagecontains a first-rate courtship plot—a complete romance novel within the larger work—which has as its heroine the redoubtable Lucy...

Lucy Honeychurch marries George Emerson at the end ofA Room with a View(1908). We see the heroine and hero for the last time in a pension in Florence, in an attitude of worship—on their knees, each whispering the other’s name. E. M. Forster may have ended this novel happily, but he was by no means sanguine about happy endings in general. In hisAspects of the Novelhe takes a pragmatic and skeptical stance with regard to love in the novel: “Love, like death, is congenial to a novelist because it ends a book conveniently. He can...

In Part IV, I examine the courtship in a shelfful of the most popular romance novels of the past century. These twenty-five titles by five writers provide the beginnings of a canon for the twentieth-century popular romance. The five writers who belong in any list of canonical twentieth-century romance writers are Georgette Heyer, Mary Stewart, Janet Dailey before her self-admitted plagiarism, Jayne Ann Krentz, and Nora Roberts.

I choose these writers for three reasons. First, each has substantial individual accomplishments—the quality of her books is high. Analyzing the work of the best romance writers provides the beginnings of a...

Beginning in 1921, Georgette Heyer (1902–1974) wrote one and sometimes two historical romance novels per year until her death in 1974. A 1984 survey taken in Great Britain of the public libraries reported that between four and six copies of her novels were borrowed on any given day (Glass 283). Copies in public libraries in America have been borrowed and read until their covers fall off. Perhaps the strongest evidence of her continued popularity is that much of her backlist is still in print. This body of work is her legacy to the history of the romance.

Her influence...

Mary Stewart (1916–) is the mother of twentieth-century romantic suspense. Between 1955 and 1967 Stewart produced, at the rate of about one per year, ten novels in this subgenre. All have entered the canon of twentieth-century romance. Eight of the ten are still in print, and there is a lively market for used copies of the two that are not (Amazon.com). Kay Mussell praises the “originality of her literary sensibility” and notes that “reviewers consistently praise the quality of her prose.” Mussell concludes that Stewart is “a writer of uncommon … grace” and that her novels are “inimitable” (“Mary...

In 1975, when Janet Dailey (1944–) sold her first novel to Harlequin, the center of the popular romance novel began to shift away from Great Britain. There the form had been important to the development of the British novel. There the form had been popularized and distributed widely to an enthusiastic audience. And there the most popular romance writers had lived and written, writers such as those we have examined in Part III, as well as E. M. Hull, Georgette Heyer, and Mary Stewart. Just after the turn of the twentieth century, historian Joseph McAleer tells us, British publishing...

Jayne Ann Krentz (1949–), whose pseudonyms include Jayne Taylor, Jayne Castle, Guinevere Jones, Amanda Glass, Stephanie James, and Amanda Quick, lists more than 130 romance novels in her bibliography. More than seventy are short contemporaries or their somewhat longer cousins, all issued by Harlequin, Silhouette, the now-defunct Candlelight, or other “brand-name” publishers. Like Janet Dailey, Krentz is a beneficiary of the training ground that short contemporaries provide. She too has made the transition from these little books all the way to mainstream, hardback titles. Thirty-one of her titles have appeared on theNew YorkTimes Best Sellers List (Jayne...

Since 1981, Nora Roberts (1950–) has published over 150 novels, most of them romance. As J. D. Robb she has written a series of police procedurals set in the New York City of the future with a female homicide detective as a heroine. She wrote at least one early title as Jill March (Fallon 174). Roberts has proven to be prolific, inventive, and extremely flexible. She writes in virtually every romance subgenre. She is also very popular. She is, simply, a master of the romance novel form.

Like Dailey and Krentz, Roberts began her career writing short contemporaries, in...