Dangerous Books For Girls: The Bad Reputation of Romance Novels Explained

by Maya Rodale

  I imagine that many romance readers are not reading the New York Times Book Review, but I also bet there are a fair number of smart, intellectual romance readers that are, and they have gotten the message that one type of book they enjoy reading is not “fit for print,” so they don’t speak publicly about it. Again, this only reinforces the stigma.

  Of course, the genre as a whole is doing just fine without mainstream attention, and prestigious book reviews will hardly make or break Nora Roberts’ career. If readers want reviews of romance novels, they can turn to Amazon pages or any one of the thousands of blogs devoted to romance reviews. “The only reason you need mainstream criticism is just to improve the quality of work so people know what’s good,” Mayer says. And, I would add, so new readers easily learn what’s good and feel that it’s acceptable to read it.

  In the past year, things have started to change. NPR now includes coverage of romance novels. The Washington Post features a monthly column of romance book reviews, penned by romance author Sarah Maclean. USA Today does have an online blog solely devoted to romance. The New York Times has published op-eds in defense of romance from bestselling authors Eloisa James and Sarah Maclean. But this coverage is still collected together and kept separate in way that other books aren’t. Romance can be covered en masse as part of a Valentine’s Day theme or in a separate column, but it’s still rare to see a full-fledged, standalone review of one romance novel.

  Romance in academia

  In a notable media appearance for the genre in July 2009, USA Today ran an article entitled “Scholarly writers empower the romance genre.”[44] That scholars are romance authors is considered a newsworthy angle says it all—it’s unlikely that one would see an article entitled “Scholarly writers empower literary fiction.” The article even begins, “Thirty years ago, ‘Ivy League romance writer’ was like ‘jumbo shrimp’—an oxymoron.” This isn’t necessarily true, and there are a lot of other potentially contributing factors about women’s roles and education thirty years earlier (in 1979!). The point is that the popular perception of romance readers and authors is that they are uneducated at best or just plain stupid. It’s not true.

  In my survey of nonromance readers, I asked them to select what they thought was highest level of education achieved by most romance readers. Only 8 percent thought a master’s degree; 37 percent believed it to be a bachelor’s, and the rest thought they had accomplished some high school (or none) or an associate’s degree. In my study of romance readers, 66 percent had achieved a bachelor’s degree or higher. This is not perfect methodology by any means, but it shows that nonromance readers generally believe romance readers to have less education than they do—and presumably they are less intellectual or just plain dumb as well.

  When questions of education and romance come up, people love to point to Eloisa James (Harvard/Yale/Oxford), Julia Quinn (Harvard/Yale), Stephanie Laurens (PhD in biochemistry), Lauren Willig (Yale/Harvard Law), or countless others. But what matters isn’t necessarily how many readers have advance degrees or how many romance authors went to the Ivy Leagues.

  What matters is the academic study of the romance genre. “It’s been institutionalized as anti-intellectual,” says Bobbi Dumas, the founder of Read a Romance Month. It’s due in part to the lack of formal academic attention to the genre. This sends the message that it’s not worthy of study or that there is nothing about it to study.

  When I was an undergraduate at New York University studying women’s role in fiction, both as writers and characters, it was my mother—not one of my professors—who insisted that I include romance novels, “the most popular and profitable books by women for women.” After she went to great lengths to convince me to read one, I then had to convince my professors to allow me to include these books in my independent studies, because there was no course on romance novels. The closest was a class on love in literature, which devoted more time to reading and discussing the sob fest The Sorrows of Young Werther than romance novels; half a class was spent on an excerpt from Janice Radway’s hate-read classic Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, which hardly portrays popular romance in a flattering light (and which has since had its methodology questioned by other scholars).

  Romance is largely absent from the school curriculum, and not just in my own experience. Forty-six percent of survey respondents said it was covered in school, but digging deeper, I discovered that the main works covered were Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, which have become acceptable as literature, not as romance.

  Yet, it’s not impossible to get romance covered in academia—a student often just needs to ask. My professors weren’t hostile when I approached them about including romance novels in my thesis—in fact, they were curious and open. But then a new set of problems presents itself: a current lack of scholarship on the genre to study. Jennifer Probst, a bestselling contemporary romance novelist, describes her experience writing her master’s thesis on happy endings: “I think I found maybe one really good journal article,” she told me. There are some academic books on romance, but they’re limited in scope. “They’re analyzing Harlequin,” Probst says. “This is nothing against Harlequin. They’re judging an entire industry on Harlequin romance novels, and let’s just be honest, that’s just a small segment.”

  Professor Pamela Regis notes the same flaw in research on the genre: “These authors of three of the founding texts in the criticism of the romance novel all generalize hastily.”[45] Many critics focus exclusively on a small subset of the genre—Radway focuses just on the long historical novels of the 1970s, and Tania Modleski cites just nine Harlequin titles—and many draw conclusions based on the whole of the romance genre after reading only a handful of books.

  Similarly, as I was doing research for this book, I was hard pressed to find books about the genre that were recently published—most dated from the 1980s and 1990s. Given how quickly and significantly the genre can change, I see this as a major problem.

  However, this is starting to change. Dr. Sarah Frantz Lyon, editorial director with RipTide publishing and a “recovering academic,” teamed up with scholar Eric Selinger to create the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance to promote studies on the genre and legitimize it as a field of study.

  “What we were trying to do with our association, conferences, and journals is to establish a background that grad students could then take to committees and programs to say ‘look there is this body of scholars studying this,’” she says. “That gives them legitimacy to propose a dissertation about popular romance fiction because there is a body of work behind them.” This means more journal articles and other works for scholars to draw from—and hopefully more and more professors will incorporate romance into regular curriculum, if not offer specialized classes in it.

  The romance in academia movement is growing, and it’s being driven by organizations like the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance and professors like Pamela Regis, an English professor at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland. She also directs the Nora Roberts Center for American Romance at McDaniel, which offers a degree program in writing romance novels—something you’d be hard-pressed to find included in most MFA programs.

  Other universities aren’t shying away from romance. In 2009, Princeton University—that posh Ivy League institution—hosted an academic conference entitled “Love as the Practice of Freedom? Romance Fiction and American Culture.” It’s a significant step for the genre, which, as you might expect, hasn’t gotten a lot of class time or office hours devoted to it. “When I saw the invitation to speak at Princeton, I said, “Holy crap, we have arrived,’” says Regis.[46]

  While romance novels should be included in the scholarly conversation, we also need to be aware of how we talk about them—and it can’t be defensively, Frantz Lyons points out. In fact, it all has to operate on the “fundamental belief that romance is worth studying.” Think about it: Most works on the genre start o
ut justifying it as a field of study by quoting the numbers (a billion dollars, a million readers, etc.). But Frantz Lyons points out how limiting that can be, even though it’s well intentioned: “We got a whole bunch of new ways of thinking about romance when you aren’t spending a quarter of your article trying to defend the fact that this is what you are studying to begin with.”

  As romance becomes more accepted in academia—thanks to pioneering professors, scholars, and determined students—it will be interesting to see how the perception of the genre changes once it’s studied alongside the traditional canon. Notable Ivy League romance writer and Shakespeare professor Eloisa James says, “I think that romance is in a sense being rehabilitated by young women scholars who are studying the genre. Mystery really rehabbed when it moved into the college curriculum. Romance is in the curriculum now, too.” Before long, it might just be in the mainstream.

  Coming out at cocktail parties

  One of the best perks about writing romance novels is that you almost always have the coolest job at a party—that is, if you dare to mention it when people ask what you do. I always answer truthfully and only once did I get the pinched face of disapproval (from a very done-up middle-aged woman at my grandmother’s country club). Usually, people—and women especially—are fascinated, and I’m not alone in getting this reaction.

  Tessa Woodward, a senior editor at Avon (and my romance editor!), describes how the genders react differently when she tells people what she does: “I get a lot of guys who just want to talk about it. It’s the most fascinating thing they’ve ever heard of. And then I get a lot of women who just sit there, and then later they corner me to say ‘Okay, so secretly I love romance. What do you recommend?’”

  Kensington romance editor Esi Sogah has noticed a similar pattern of conversations when she tells people what she does for a living: “After the first 30 seconds of skepticism and jokes, people get really, really interested. Like genuinely curious and surprised when I tell them various writers’ backgrounds and vast variety of books out there. And I have converted many a friend to a happy romance reader.”

  Have readers so internalized the idea that they should be ashamed of reading romance that they don’t dare mention it in polite company? In my survey, half of readers report feeling like they should keep their romance reading a secret. When asked if they’re “out” with regards to their reading material, most said yes, but a significant number, 36 percent, said “only with certain people.” And 85 percent of readers think the genre has a bad reputation. No wonder people can be reluctant to bring it up in a group of strangers.

  The world may not actually be as snarky toward romance as readers of the genre perceive it to be. But by assuming we’ll get a certain reaction (jokes about bodice rippers, trashy books, and Fabio!) and trying to avoid it by keeping silent, romance lovers are missing an opportunity to engage people in conversation—and perhaps start changing the perception of the genre.

  Sogah often sees readers keep quiet about it until they realize they’re in a like-minded group. “I’m assuming you think this is a bad thing so I’ll go along with it until told otherwise,” she summarizes. Or if romance reading is mentioned, it is done so in the same breath as more prestigious works. It’s like “Before you can criticize me...I was reading Voltaire yesterday,” Sogah says. This dynamic of keeping silent until it’s “safe” suggests that romance readers are aware that their reading material is considered something to be ashamed of. It also shows that we can be defensive about it—or just plain weary of having to defend it and explain it to people. Who really wants to combat the snark at a party?

  But Sogah points out something that echoes my own experiences—people may ask about “trashy books” or “bodice rippers” but “it’s not said in a way that’s meant to be insulting. They’re not offended by romance novel’s existence. I would say those same people generally have no real exposure to romance novels.”

  TRASHY BOOKS

  It’s hard to avoid the phrase “trashy books” when talking about romance novels. To be fair, other mass media like tabloid magazines and reality TV are often deemed trashy entertainment. But this disparagement seems to be somewhat affectionate and is tempered with a mention of guilty pleasures (“Trashy books are my guilty pleasure.”) We tend to understand this as a judgment on the quality of the content, but how these books are produced contributes significantly to the perception of these books as somehow substandard.

  When it comes to the romance industry, much of what has made it so successful (read: profitable) is exactly what condemns it to the pile of cheap, trashy books. When romance novels are created, manufactured, marketed, and distributed, they are cheaply produced and cheaply sold in large quantities. Traditional ways of conferring value to a product such as expense, craftsmanship, or exclusivity are not relevant when it comes to the physical or digital production of romance novels. For better or worse, romance novels exemplify commodity literature.

  A tale of two books

  When comparing a typical mass-market paperback and a hardcover book, the difference in the physical quality of the product is immediately apparent. One has a solid, durable cover, perhaps wrapped in a glossy dust jacket, with high quality paper pages inside. One has a cover that’s only a little thicker than the lightweight paper the contents are printed on. A hardcover looks and feels like it’s built to last, while a mass-market paperback feels like you could chuck it in the recycling with the daily newspaper.

  “How many romance authors end up in hardcover?” asks bestselling author Courtney Milan. “Fewer than in any other genre.”

  Hardcovers are, of course, more expensive. To make money on cheap books like mass-market paperbacks, the romance industry relies on volume. This requires authors to churn out manuscripts for readers to voraciously devour. While approximately 30 percent of Americans read between one and five books[47] a year, 35 percent of romance readers read more than five books a week. The esteemed and celebrated author of the novel The Art of Fielding, took ten years to write that one book. Nora Roberts publishes an average of six books per year.

  Just because they are written relatively quickly and cheaply produced doesn’t mean they aren’t beloved. Some of the most popular cheap books in earlier centuries were literally read to pieces as they were passed from reader to reader. The inexpensive cardboard covers and low quality paper literally disintegrated from being read so much. But it’s the hardcovers, made with quality and preserved on the library shelf, that are more likely to have survived through the ages.

  Judging a book by its packaging

  “There’s a certain commoditization of romance that you don’t see in other genres,” says Jane Litte, of the popular blog Dear Author. Let’s face it: The books are largely and reliably the same. To an extent, we see this in the content but it’s especially clear in the physical book. Most are published in the small, lightweight mass-market paperback format and bear strikingly similar covers and titles. It’s not a coincidence that they all look so alike; it’s the most effective way to produce and market a large number of books to a particular audience.

  This is true now and it was true in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, too. The commoditization of literature was a deliberate attempt to maximize profits and minimize risk. It was achieved by standardizing the physical product and the content of the stories, the audience to whom they were targeted, and marketing efforts based on the book’s similarities rather than their uniqueness. They’re all interconnected.

  It starts with paper in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

  Paper was expensive, and it was made by hand from old cloth, often picked off dead bodies on European battlefields.[48] In England, paper was also heavily taxed and those regulations prevented the supply of paper in quantities of less than half a ream (a ream equals approximately 516 pages).

  Publishers based their edition sizes on their raw materials, particularly paper. In his exhaustively detailed book The Reading Nation in th
e Romantic Period, William St Clair writes that “since publishers had to estimate the amount of paper needed for an edition to the nearest half ream, they sometimes asked authors to lengthen or shorten the text, or to add smaller pieces to bulk out a volume as late as the proof stage.”[49] Sometimes publishers wouldn’t even ask the author; they would just stop when they ran out of paper, sometimes letting books end in midsentence!

  But when authors are funding the publication of their work, whether in the eighteenth century or twenty-first, they exert “almost total control over their works, which were then conceived as the unique products of their own individual intellects,” writes Janice Radway.[50] This shows the tensions between the romantic era idea of art as divinely inspired and the practicalities of making a product for profit. Presumably you don’t amend or silence an artistic truth for something as banal as the cost of paper.

  But publishers did have to account for the cost of paper, taxes, and the number of copies they could reasonably expect to sell. Not only did they have to conform to the tax laws, but in order to generate a profit, they had to make efficient use of the resources available. Paper was expensive and a publisher could not afford to waste it. An author could not afford to anger the publisher by refusing to comply—and to what point? There was only so much paper—and plenty of aspiring authors. So stories were cut or lengthened on demand. Artistic truth answered to the demands of the market, and this was a repellent idea to some people. One nineteenth-century author writes disparagingly of this cheap literature:

  No divine influence can be imagined as presiding over the birth of his work, beyond the market-law of demand and supply; no more immortality is dreamed of for it than for the fashions of the current season. A commercial atmosphere floats around works of this class, redolent of the manufactory and the shop.[51]