Lisa Kleypas as Bodice Ripper Lite™

part V: bodice avoidance

Content warning: In this newsletter, I discuss bodice rippers at length. Bodice rippers are romance novels that feature the heroine experiencing sexual violence at the hands of the male main character, who will eventually be her consensual romantic partner.

This is the fifth part of an updated and revised version of a project originally published in 2022, responding to and complicating the conventional wisdom that suggests the existence of marital rape exemptions in the 1970s explains the popularity of bodice rippers during that decade and in turn, explains the structure falling out of fashion with marital exemptions being removed from statutory codes by the early 1990s.

Part I is about the legal history of the marital rape exemption. Part II complicates the idea that marital rape was newly considered a harm in literature in the 1970s in romance novels. Part III discusses The Flame and the Flower’s positioning as a “starting point” for romance and provides a close reading for the representations of consent as a legal and emotional concept in the book. Part IV explains why I’m jumping from the 1970s to the 1990s and what is going on in the intervening years and how the range of romances published in those intervening years are flattened by this marital rape theory.

It’s a doozy! This part jumps to Lisa Kleypas, one of my introductions to romance and for better or worse, one of my baselines for understanding the shape of the genre.

The Rape of the Sabine Women, by Giuseppe Porta (1550-1555) via

Lisa Kleypas as Barometer

One of the things that keeps me interested in Lisa Kleypas, despite rolling my eyes at some of her gender and class politics, plotting decisions, and devotion to Sebastian St. Vincent cameos,¹ is her longevity in the genre and ability to write a Kleypas novel in 1993 that I recognize as Kleypas and one in 2020 where I could do the same, and shift those novels to fit the winds of historical romance taste. 

Many historical authors of the 2010s and 2020s²³⁴ cite her as a genius and a favorite. Dabney Grinnan of All About Romance suggested that before Bridgerton came out on Netflix, Kleypas might have been the most “famous living historical romance author.”⁵ I see her vision of masculinity, plotting, and worldbuilding in much of what I could consider the median historical romance published today, though I often find her books more interesting than her progeny. Her bibliography is like a tree core sample of white and Regency/early Victorian historical romance for the last thirty years, for better or for worse.

Her first book, Where Passion Leads (1987), is certainly a bodice ripper, though her later books move away from this explicit mode. Interestingly, Kleypas only lists her books starting in 1992 on her website, excluding Where Passion Leads and its interconnected sequel, Forever My Love.⁶ She’s not exactly renounced these books, but they’ve not been reprinted. She states in her FAQ about her first books: “When I was 21, I sold to NAL, and they published my first four books. Although I had a wonderful time writing those first four titles; Where Passion Leads, Forever My Love, Love Come To Me⁷, and Give Me Tonight, they were definitely part of a learning process. I suppose I could sell the rights and have them republished. However, they are so vastly different from the books I’m writing now (more than twenty years later), that readers expecting a “Lisa Kleypas” novel would not be getting what they thought they had paid for.”⁸

In this way, Kleypas has two beginnings as a romance author, 1987 with a bodice ripper, and 1992 with a series that readers acknowledge has a “bodice ripper” feel, even without on-page rape, that represents the beginning of her career that is available to all but the most devoted eBay hunters of out-of-print titles.

By looking at Kleypas’ books across three decades of romance (1990s, 2000s, and 2010s), we can see shifts in how consent is written. But again, to push back on the idea that this trajectory is one-directional and Kleypas’ books are more evolved when she ceases to write bodice rippers, I want to look at where bodice ripper aesthetics remain. We know that Kleypas has an interest in bodice rippers and is, overall, a fairly formulaic author. Across her series, parallels between characters and scenes can be drawn by the reader and are actively encouraged by Kleypas, considering how she links her series together. Some of the changes that happen between her series are how she writes sex scenes and what she uses to signal to the reader that consent is present.

But I would call many of these signals almost “steam pressure valves” of the threat of a rape scene, while retaining the aura of narrative danger and sexual violence. While there are structural and textual elements to announce consent, other elements recall bodice ripper rape scenes. It is like Kleypas is borrowing language and stakes of bodice rippers and then flipping a switch, winking an eye to indicate to the reader, “No, no, no, don’t worry, this one is okay.” Is she evolving with the times, or is she managing to invoke the appeal of bodice rippers without ever having to spend time on the fallout from a violent scene?

I mean this neither as a condemnation nor an endorsement. I enjoy Kleypas books, in part because I think her methodology here is deployed with aplomb, which keeps me reading and believing in the romance. But I point it out to say, to me, this is not a wholesale step forward from something like The Flame and The Flower, where a sexual violence victim and preparator both name the violence as rape. These are different approaches to writing scenes and readers have different reactions to them, but I think when we look at the language and structures of Kleypas scenes, we can still see bodice ripper scaffolding in many of them. Or scenes that could easily be cast as rape scenes with a few changes, if Kleypas did not retroactively assure consent later in the narrative.

Then Came You (1993)

Kleypas of Kleypas™ Brand probably starts with Then Came You (1993). This is the introduction of Derek Craven, whose gambling hall has plot ripples through the rest of Kleypas’ historicals, tangential or direct, and the beginning of Kleypas’ nesting of universes, where characters from her earlier books can turn into the heroes and heroines of later books, or just reappear with cameos. In this book, we see the beginnings of a classic Kleypas method of using bodice ripper elements while undercutting them. One of her main methods is holding tension between objective and subjective understandings of intent and consent.

I am using the words “subjective” and “objective” here in a legal sense. An objective standard in a legal rule is one that the court is trying to ascertain what a reasonable person, viewing the facts, would conclude. Some standards allow for a subjective understanding, where the mind of the actor is considered. An example of an objective standard is self-defense; generally, it does not matter what the person who uses the defense thought about the danger to them, the court looks to a hypothetical reasonable person in the same situation. Subjective tests look to the state of mind of the individual, independent of what a reasonable person would think in the scenario. Subjective standards can be much harder to meet!

I am not using these words as stand-ins for “truth.” It has more to do with the structure of the information in the book—subjective referring to information that is shared from the inner thoughts of a character, so only the character and reader have access to that state of mind evidence, and objective from behaviors that are externalized, so that someone watching the situation (including the other romantic partner) would be able to draw a conclusion.

In Then Came You, Kleypas does not have strict perspective shifts that typify both her and much of historical romance. Particularly during sex scenes, she uses a narrative style closer to free-indirect discourse, where we can jump into the minds of either Alex or Lily at any time. Whose mind we are in at any given moment is important for the information-sharing aspect of subjective and objective intent and consent. Kleypas develops Alex and Lily’s sexual relationship by writing scenes that retain bodice ripper structure tension, primarily by having there be a gap between Alex’s subjective and objective intent, as he is alternatively threatening and seducing Lily.

Lily Lawson is a notorious woman in late Georgian England. She was jilted by her fiancé just before a society marriage, subsequently lived in Italy for a few years with a progressive aunt, and returned to England with her aunt’s fortune. She appears to be independently wealthy and receives protection from society’s scrutiny from her friend Derek Craven, a notorious gambling hell owner. Her association with him is generally assumed to be a sexual relationship, keeping other men from approaching her for an affair. She has been secretly using her fortune to try and recover her daughter Nicole, who has been kidnapped by her father, Lily’s former Italian lover.

Alex Raiford, Lord Wolverton, is engaged to Lily’s demure younger sister, Penelope. When Lily becomes convinced that Penelope loves another man and has been bullied into this society marriage, she sets out to stop the marriage to Raiford, arranging it so her sister and her lover can elope to Gretna Green. The earl feels little for Penelope, but since he is mourning the death of his late fiancée, Caroline, he thinks he would prefer a loveless marriage to a passionate one. Lily’s methods involve provoking and dressing down Alex, which stir sexual feelings in him.

One of the reasons that Lily sets out to end the engagement between her sister and Alex is that she becomes convinced that he is a violent bully, and Alex initially does little to dissuade this notion. During an early interaction, while the reader is in Alex’s POV, when Lily insists on riding in a hunt, Alex takes her horse’s reins—something he thinks of as “a demeaning act.” Alex recalls his late fiancée’s death in a riding accident and cannot conceive of letting Lily ride, but when he refuses to let go of the reins, Lily lashes her whip and hits him underneath his jaw and bolts away.

Once the perspective switches to Lily on her ride, she is thrown from her horse. Alex reaches her, and when she comes to, she realizes “she was held securely in the lee of his muscular thighs. She was as limp and helpless as a doll.” Alex once again is overcome by memories of his late fiancée’s death and holds Lily too tightly (“His hand was tight on the back of her her neck…too tight…hurting her.”) She thinks of him in turns of her weakness relative to his (“If he chose, he could snap her bones if they were twigs”) and she identifies a “murderous gleam” in his eyes.

From Lily’s point of view, he is being an overbearing, potentially violent man, seeking to control her simply because she lives outside of society’s bounds. Alex (and the reader) know that Alex has a very emotional and sympathetic reason for being terrified of a boisterous woman participating in the fox hunt, and we also know how attracted he is to Lily at this point. This gap between Lily’s subjective understanding of Alex’s actions and the objective one available to the reader, who can occupy both Lily's and Alex’s perspectives, is what creates tension in the book. But it rests on Lily believing that Alex could hurt her—if Lily is not afraid of Alex, the book has not plot.

Alex’s points of view moments repeatedly express emotional and anxious sexual interest in Lily, but she has put him in a box in her mind as a violent, callous man. Lily’s history with men, primarily the father of her child, has taught her to be immediately suspicious of threatening and dominating men, even as she finds herself attracted to them. With this gap, what Kleypas gets to write are scenes that read like a bodice ripper because Lily earnestly fears that Alex is going to be violent, while the reader knows what Alex is truly feeling, which is not totally non-violent, but more complicated and sympathetic than Lily thinks.

Alex’s sexuality does have a rough quality to it, like when he kisses Penelope and pushes the genteel peck into something more. She slaps him and he thinks, “Not exactly a slap. He would have welcomed a vigorous, hearty slap. This was more like a reproving pat on his cheek.” Later, after dreaming of Lily, Alex thinks about how he could go to Penelope’s room and “bend her to his will” and “bully her into allowing him into her bed.” He turns away from the idea not because of disgust for the coercion, but because he “recoils” from the idea of making love to Penelope. So Lily’s assessment of violence within Alex is correct, and Kleypas has not yet abandoned the trappings of a bodice ripper villain-hero.

When the main couple first kisses, it is after Lily goads Alex about still being in love with his late fiancée. She realizes she has gone too far and thinks “He was going to kill her” and says “No” while “thinking he might break her neck” as he rushes toward her. But instead, he kisses her so hard that their teeth draw blood from their lips. Lily resists, but the only thing that stops the assault is when Alex accidentally calls her by his late fiancée’s name, shocking them both out of the moment. Lily is now even more sure that she cannot let Alex marry her sister.

To help her sister elope to Gretna Green, Lily manages to kidnap Alex and tie him to his bed at his London home. This scene is fraught with sexual tension as Lily, who has primarily been used by men, has Alex in such a submissive position. She returns the assault from the library, asking, “Have you ever been kissed against your will, Alex? Perhaps you’d like to know how it feels.” She explores his body while he is tied up, but is called away. Lily leaves him in a state of sexual frustration, and he is determined to get his revenge on her. Since Penelope has eloped, he no longer has a reason to avoid his attraction to his ex-fiancée’s sister.

After being freed from his ropes by Lily’s butler, Alex sees her again at Derek Craven’s gambling den, attempting to win money to pay off her daughter’s father’s blackmail attempts. He enters the game and wins a night with her, which is furnished by Derek Craven when he gives the couple the use of his private apartments. Lily absolutely views the bet as coercive and fears Alex hurting her in the bedroom: she thinks “Don’t do this to me…What choice?….What damned choice?” and pleas with Derek to save her by saying “he’s going to hurt me, Derek.” She believes that he is going to get revenge based on the embarrassment he felt at her hands. Kleypas attempts to clue the readers in by giving us Alex’s thoughts, including “But he wasn’t going to hurt her. Suddenly he was impatient to make her understand that revenge had no part of this.” Alex isn’t embarrassed as much as he is horny and falling in love, but Lily has no access to that thought.

But of all of Kleypas undercutting, the scene still very much reads like a rape: “a strange passiveness came cover [Lily], a weariness she couldn’t withstand” when she decides to go to the bed. Alex is described as “ruthless” and “violent,” nearly in the same moments as he is whispering to her, “Sweet…hush, I won’t hurt you,” and his actions are described as gentle. This scene might be characterized as a “seduction,”⁹ where Lily is convinced to consent through Alex’s attentions, but Kleypas repeatedly makes it clear that Lily is scared of Alex and having sex with him. The scene might be not written as a rape, in that Lily never would call it such, but it does recall a bodice ripper rape scene.

In a later scene, when the relationship is still fraught, Alex literally rips Lily’s dress. They’ve been to a costume party, where he is dressed as Lucifer and she as Eve (recalling Clayton and Whitney’s costumes from Whitney, My Love, where he is dressed as Hades and she is Persephone). Lily is once again attempting to gamble for blackmail money, and Alex forces her away from the tables and to one of his properties. He rips her costume as she tries to leave, and as before, Lily resists sleeping with him. Internally, she is resisting because she is worried about entering in a kept woman relationship with him, which would hinder her search for her daughter, but the language of fear and being trapped mirrors again a rape scene in bodice ripper. Kleypas retroactively solves the problem by having Alex propose marriage to Lily, instead of a mistress arrangement—a result that was always clear to an objective viewer (it is even mentioned by a gambling den goer, an ultimate objective viewer with no insight into either character’s state of mind, during one of the couple’s public confrontations), but not clear from Lily’s subjective perspective.

After the proposal, hints of Alex’s bodice ripper precursors are fewer and farther between. He rips her clothes again in a later scene, but there Lily’s consent is much more straightforward, and the ripping is just an act of foreplay. He later also cruelly accuses Lily of being a “whore” based on a misunderstanding, which comes across as villainous, but corrects himself and believes her explanation with typical third-act Kleypas celerity.

Then Came You is not a bodice ripper, but this book, published by an author who is going to define much of white, Regency romances for the next two decades, is certainly not giving up the structures of non-consent in romance scenes. Alex is described as violent and coercive, and Lily is described as scared and violated. But what does not happen is the scenes ever being described as rape or assault or something that Alex needs to apologize for. Contrast this to something like The Flame and the Flower, where Brandon’s acts are absolutely characterized as violent and something he needs to correct before he can have consensual sex with Heather or earn a happily ever after. The thing that Alex needs to correct is not his violence, but his communication of his feelings, cluing Lily into what the reader already knows about his feelings for her. We’re moving in the direction of something gained, but something is lost as well, and things continue to shift in the next decade of Kleypas’ work.

It Happened One Autumn (2005)

Probably the famous example of problematic consent in her works is the first sex scene in It Happened One Autumn (2005),¹⁰ the third book in the Wallflowers series, made so famous in part by Kleypas’ edits in the re-release of the title in 2021. The heroine, American heiress Lillian Bowman, and hero, Marcus, Earl of Westcliff, have been trading barbs over the course of a house party. She has worked herself into a state of anxiety over their banter and a few sensual kisses, so one afternoon, Lillian goes to the Stony Cross Park library and drinks a large amount of pear brandy. Marcus finds her, with her inhibitions lowered, kisses her, and then takes her upstairs to his bedroom where they sleep together.

Lillian is unequivocally sauced in this scene—she slurs her words and seems to be in a dreamlike state, thinking “A dream, yes…One could do anything one wished in a dream. There were no rules, no obligations…only pleasure.” She is an active and enthusiastic participant in the lovemaking (when Marcus attempts do a traditional “once we do this, there’s no going back” speech, very typical of a Kleypas hero, Lillian interrupts him and says “Now…come inside me. Now.”) But her participation seems predicated on her thinking it might not be totally real. Even the next morning, she startles when she realizes where she is, thinking she had dreamt the encounter.

I understand the distaste for the scene. I think it demonstrates growing pains in shifts in what was considered forgivable behavior or what was considered sexual violence.¹¹ Lillian is drunk, and many people and readers would agree now that she was incapable of consent in that scene, or at least, Marcus’ behavior is reprehensible. But Kleypas gives us her Kleypas Release Valves, this is just an example of them not quite working as convincingly. The dream state, where Lillian can participate enthusiastically, is one of these valves. It’s a classic Kleypas mechanism to flip to the heroine’s perspective after a hero’s “dangerously” coded seduction to confirm consent.

Experiencing Lillian’s interior thoughts here might not soothe the reader because we also see the level of her continued inebriation, though, based on many contemporaneous reviews, this was enough assurance for some readers. The scene warrants no mention in All About Romance’s A- review from 2005 and is mentioned favorably in a B review from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books from the same year, even while acknowledging some readers got the “squicked out” by it.

Beyond the interiority, Lillian also retroactively tries to apply consent when she tells Marcus that no matter how much brandy she drank, she would have only slept with him if she had wanted to. But it is not as if her drunken state is a non-factor in the stakes of the scene. Independent of what Lillian does or thinks in the moment, Marcus certainly knows he has done something wrong, at least in part because of Lillian’s inebriation (“I took advantage of you…My actions were unforgivable”), though her status as a guest in his house (“An innocent girl, the daughter of one of his guests…Good Lord, he had gone mad.”) and a virgin (“I’m sorry to have caused you pain…It won’t be as difficult for you next time.”) also affects his level of shame.

Still, Marcus’ shame point is certainly not lingered over by the narrative; they’re engaged to be married and having sex again with 20 pages of the book and 24 hours of the timeline. The rapid shift here suggests, in Kleypas’ view, that the release valves she includes from Lillian’s perspective mean that his behavior can be forgiven without much narrative or character work.

I think the pace here really undercuts Marcus’s in-character seduction of Lillian. Throughout the book, he has demonstrated a lack of feeling for how his hot and cold attentions might confuse or upset her. So, him taking advantage of her lower inhibitions seems like something he would do, representative of his primary character flaw in the book. And Lillian’s processing of her feelings about the seduction, certainly colored by her fear of a marriage blessed by her controlling parents (who are over the moon at the idea of their daughter marrying an Earl) is cut short because Kleypas has the narrative move on so quickly.¹²

So the 2005 book has bodice ripper elements, including an actual coerced sex scene, without any of the bodice ripper follow through, like restoration, repair or groveling, or even acknowledgment of the sexual violence. Seemingly because during the original publication, Kleypas felt like she solved that with the information we get in Lillian’s perspective.

In 2021, the book was quietly re-released with edits. Before this newsletter, I’d only ever read the original—the ebook I read from my library in Indiana never got updated, it seems.

The changes in the story that “improve” the consent make this pacing problem I identified worse. My primary issue with the book is not that Marcus seduces Lillian when she is inebriated, but that it effectively handwaved away for greater external conflict (a kidnapping plot) to have room in the narrative. Instead of naming the problem of Marcus not communicating and running roughshod over Lillian’s feelings and desires when he chooses to finally act, which in the original publication, results in sexual violence, this internal-to-the-relationship conflict is tied with bow with seemingly little work.

And in the new edition, when Marcus neatly deposits Lillian in bed and proposes because she’s been “compromised,” even though they didn’t sleep together. So the pacing problem still exists because we still have to get to the kidnapping and the scene now has little to do with the character flaw that has been driving the conflict.

That this is the book that Kleypas chose to rewrite and reissue feels exemplary of a misunderstanding of what makes noncon or dubcon work or not work in a romance. Kleypas’ release valves ceased to work on readers here, or never did completely. But these awkward edits that exacerbate the pacing problem reveal how integral the bodice ripper signals and structures are to the plot. And other books, published later, have similar suspect consent moments, though in them, Kleypas perhaps succeeds more at deploying the structural release valves, since she has not felt the need to edit them upon rerelease. One such book is Cold-Hearted Rake, from a decade later.

Cold-Hearted Rake (2015)

Cold-Hearted Rake is the first of the Ravenels series and was the first Kleypas I read, and I think about it nearly every time I read a bodice ripper. The precipitating event of the series is Devon Ravenel inheriting an estate, Eversby Priory, and a title, the Earl of Trenear, from a reprobate cousin, Theo. Up until this point, Devon and his brother were living in iniquity and disrepute, after growing up with abusive and distant parents. 

With the house comes the widow of Devon’s cousin and his three sisters, all living at the Priory. The sisters are now his legal wards, so he has some responsibility to pay for their housing, at the very least, but he has no legal duty to the widow, Kathleen. 

Of course, Kathleen is the female main character, and she and Devon fall in love. But within the structure of the book, the way Kleypas deals with problematizing questions of power between Kathleen and Devon is significantly less probing than some bodice rippers I have read, and she relies heavily on Kathleen’s point of view chapters to assure the reader of Kathleen’s subjective consent. Where Then Came You established a gap between Alex’s objective and subjective intent, the gap here comes from Kathleen’s consent, more similar to the structure in It Happened One Autumn. Kathleen may appear to give dubious consent when we are in Devon’s mind, but once we switch to her, we see an enthusiastic participant.

There are at least three sort of haunting questions of Kathleen and Devon’s relationship that Kathleen has great anxiety about. When these questions get addressed, they are resolved quickly and without being given much narrative weight, despite being the questions that are driving the plot forward and ones where Devon has significantly more power in the situation than Kathleen.

Firstly, Kathleen is deeply worried that Devon might decide to sell Eversby Priory. The estate was improperly entailed by her late husband, so Devon is uniquely allowed to do this.¹³ Kathleen also has anxiety about guilt that she “killed” Theo—they argued before he rode a horse drunk, and the horse threw him, causing him to break his neck. She is afraid that Devon will blame her for his cousin’s death and punish her by kicking her out of the house. And lastly, Kathleen and Theo never consummated their marriage, so she fears that she is committing some sort of fraud by styling herself as Theo’s widow and staying in Eversby Priory at all because their marriage was not yet “complete.” Kathleen has no real home to go to other than Eversby Priory, so her staying in Devon’s good graces is instrumental to her safety as a widow. She is also worried about her three unmarried sisters-in-law becoming wards of a well-known rake. For all she knows, he and his brother could abuse them or marry them off to their unsavory friends.

The couple’s first moment of real intimacy happens when she discloses that she and Theo fought before his ride that led to his death. Devon retrieves Kathleen from the estate’s lands in a storm, and overwhelmed by the danger of the situation, Kathleen shares her secret. Kathleen seems to truly blame herself for Theo’s death and expects blame from Devon as well. In this precarious position, where she already believes he might be kicking her out of her home soon, Kathleen has little reason to disclose this anxiety to anyone, much less the person whose mercy is needed to avoid the precarity. 

But Kleypas characterizes this as a part of Devon’s seduction of Kathleen: something about him is just immediately worthy of disclosure and trust. Devon’s behavior during this first disclosure edges right on references to non-consent scenes from bodice rippers. He opens her bodice, though he has the excuse that Kathleen has fainted, a much more decent reason than the circumstances of Alex’s bodice ripping in Then Came You. Of course, when we flip to Devon’s POV, we learn that he had wanted to seduce her in that moment. The decent reason does not preclude his rakish reason also being present in his mind. This moment also leads to Devon’s internal decision to allow Kathleen to stay and not sell the estate. There are good reasons to keep the estate, which Devon lists to his brother West to justify it, but the causal chain is as follows:

wanting to sell the estate →

Kathleen being in his arms and disclosing private thoughts she has shared with no one→

wanting to keep the estate

Devon’s sexual fascination with a woman whose fate he controls is right out of a bodice ripper plot, but he is never violent or strictly coercive with Kathleen. Kathleen is, in fact, surprised multiple times that Devon does not “attack” her lustfully. But while within Kathleen’s limited POV, she is surprised he is not launching himself at her, Devon is thinking about her in terms of possession. When he first kisses her, it is after his “control begins to fray.” He waits for her protests, but she first surrenders “helplessly,” only to flee the scene. All of this language around Devon and Kathleen’s interaction belies inequitable consent, but once the reader is back within Kathleen’s mind, we learn that what she is primarily worried about is the propriety of wanting sex and the shame she feels for her desire for Devon, especially after being so recently widowed. 

Before the second time Kathleen and Devon have sex,¹⁴ Kathleen is in a state of undress in a barn, and Devon offers to help her with her overskirt, and she firmly says “No,” emphasis included in the original text. This negotiation feels like an allusion to the bodice rippers—we get an emphatic no in a sex scene, but Kleypas side steps the issues of sexual consent because the no is adjacent to the actual sex. 

As Kathleen shirks away, Devon says, “Kathleen…if you hold still, I will help you with your skirt. But if you run from me, you’re going to be caught…and I’ll make you come for me again,” referencing an earlier sexual encounter. Kathleen bolts and Devon catches her. Is the difference between rape and seduction proper notice for his intent? Once he catches her, she blushes at the thought of their setting, a carriage house, so he gives her a choice: in the open or in a carriage. When she says nothing, he proceeds to start in the open, which prompts her to enter a carriage. 

All of this, up until this point, matches beat for beat a forced seduction. The chase, the false choice, Devon’s internal monologue of not being able to control himself. But then, in the next chapter, the reader gets to be inside Kathleen’s head and see that though she may be confused by her desires, she is enthusiastically consenting to this encounter. 

What Kleypas never does is link the objective power dynamics between Devon and Kathleen that make up the plot of the novel—that he has the power to kick her out of her home, blame her for her husband’s death, or disavow her privileges as widow of the estate over fraud—that worry Kathleen at many different parts of the books, with her subjective anxieties about her consent of a relationship with Devon. Her anxieties about a sexual relationship with him are limited to 19th-century prudishness and trauma from her first husband. The anxieties are interpersonal, rather than structural, and Devon is the solution to them, not the source of them. 

Kleypas uses these objective, structural anxieties to move the relationship forward, having Kathleen and Devon discuss them before moments of intimacy, but how those might shape the contours of that intimacy is an abandoned question. My theory is that Kleypas recognized readers’ desire for the aesthetic markers and structural underpinnings of a bodice ripper, and Cold-Hearted Rake is one of her attempts to write a bodice ripper for a market that has moved away from clear depictions of sexual assault. 

But upon reading my first bodice ripper, To Have and to Hold by Patricia Gaffney (discussed in a future part of this project), something immediately clicked that a book that characterized these first encounters between owner of a home and a woman whose right to be there was only at his pleasure as initially inherently non-consensual, even if it is not violent, was in many ways being more honest about the dynamic between these characters. What happens when Kleypas relies so heavily on Kathleen’s subjective consent is that the questions of objective consent remain unexplored and unresolved. Devon’s power to kick out Kathleen is a hiccup, rather than a defining contour of their dynamic. Again, something may be gained when authors write equitable consent in sex scenes, but something is lost when these dynamics go totally unnamed, particularly when an author retains the language and markers of a bodice ripper sex scene.

Kleypas is great at writing big, grand gestures and dramatic moments that lead to intimacy; this is why I love so many of her books. But to say that 21st-century historical romances categorically are all more resolved on issues of consent than 20th-century historical romance, when Kleypas’s real method is to ignore possible issues of consent, is inaccurate. They are just different modes and focuses. Kleypas’ retention of bodice ripper language and trappings suggests continued reader interest in at least part of what bodice rippers gave us, walking narrowly close to the cliff of a fictional rape fantasy, without ever having to name or process the potential violence in the relationship.

Changes happened in the second thirty years of erotic historical romance—Kleypas’ pivot for bodice rippers to non-bodice rippers reflects that, along with the edits she felt she needed to make in the rerelease of It Happened One Autumn. But books like The Flame and the Flower discuss consent in ways that simply go unexpressed in Kleypas’ work. I mean to state this value neutrally, but to say that the genre has moved in one direction towards “unproblematic” consent is an oversimplification of the movement of the concerns of the genre. And for all that has changed, a major author, thirty years after she last wrote a bodice ripper, retains the language and emotions borrowed from a bodice ripper sex scene.

The next part of the project will look at a book that I do think of as a singular step forward in how rape scenes are written and deployed in historical romance. From 1995, Patricia Gaffney’s To Have and Have Not represents to me a clear evolving beyond what was available in narratives in the first two decades of romance, but it is not a height that is achieved over and over again.

1. My number one opp, Sebastian St. Vincent.

2. Maya Rodale calls her “one of the greats.” Maya Rodale, For July, 3 Romances Packed With Pulse-Pounding Peril, July 26, 2021

3. Sarah MacLean’s podcast, Fated Mates, has an annual holiday dedicated to Derek Craven, hero of Dreaming of You

4. Evie Dunmore has called her “an icon and a legend.”

5. All About Romance, the ask@ARR: What do we think about Lisa Kleypas?, 07/22/2022

6. I used the Wayback Machine to check when the change happened. It appears that the two early bodice rippers stop being included around 2005—though they were out of print before then.

7. Love Come to Me (originally published in 1988), was reissued in 2011. One reviewer on Goodreads: “Thank goodness Kleypas hopped on the consent train and her writing modernized.

8. Lisa Kleypas, Q&A, https://lisakleypas.com/readers-ask/

9. I mean “seduction” here narratively. I think between the gambling the night away and Alex’s attention, if Lily were a real person and felt like she wanted to call this evening with Alex a rape, she could. Importantly, in the book, she never looks back on the evening as one of coercion, ultimately.

10. For some reader reactions to the changes made to the book, here and here.

11. To recreate my understanding of the conversation around consent, I look at articles from my preferred teen magazine when I was in high school (2005-2009), Teen Vogue. Cover models included for context—I pored over this magazine as a teen and remember reading all of these articles. These are all from around the time that It Happened One Autumn was first published.

In the December 2004 issue, with Kirsten Dunst on the cover, there was an article about date rape drugs, which states “Alcohol itself is the number one date rape drug. Experts say a cup of Kool-Aid with several shots of Everclear (190-proof grain alcohol) is as likely to knock a girl out as a roofie and a beer.”

In the August 2005 issue, with Evan Rachel Wood on the cover, there was an article titled “Whether it's power hour, flip cup, or beer pong, drinking games can have devastating results.” The article mentions a nineteen-year-old (with a Gucci clutch) playing a golf-based drinking game where she has to drink nine drinks. She blacks out and offers to take off her pants for two rugby players. But the article characterizes her as “lucky” because she does not die from her binge drinking.

The main thrust of the article is about the dangers of binge drinking on health, though there is a statistic from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, indicating that drinking “contributes to about 70,000 cases of sexual assault each year.” Other statistics included: “400,000 students a year have unprotected sex while drunk” and “over 100,000 are so inebriated they don't know whether they consented to sex at all.”

In the March 2006 issue, with Camilla Belle on the cover, an article about spring break invokes the murder of Natalee Holloway on a trip to Aruba about the dangers of young women drinking while traveling.

Consistently, the danger is framed around either blacking out or date rape drugs like rohypnol which create a state like blacking out.

Contrast this to an article published in August 2014, with Kesha on the cover, the fall after I graduated from college. The opening story is about a case of rape on a college campus and no use alcohol was mentioned. The article is primarily about how college campus disciplinary procedures hurt victims. The article also cites a law professor and asserts “It could be because victims are often unsure if what happened counts as rape, fearing they're partially to blame if they were drunk, or passed out, or had engaged in consensual sex before the crime. Absolutely not, [Nancy Chi] Cantalupo [professor at Georgetown Law] asserts. If you haven't given consent, it's sexual assault.”

The distinction I see here is small, but even the acknowledgment that being drunk and being passed out are two different states, seems telling. Additionally, in June 2016, with Cameron Dallas on the cover, the publication had an article about organizations doing work to teach men about obtaining consent, rather than women avoiding assault. The article, titled “Boy Problems,” states, “Traditional prevention strategies often highlight what women can do to protect themselves, and girls are frequently taught to "dress appropriately" and to not put down their cups at parties, for fear of being drugged.”

In between 2004 and 2009, Teen Vogue suggested that young women “watch their drink” and “learn self-defense” (December 2004, Watch your drink. The use of date rape drugs is on the rise), “buddy up,” “insist[] on a condom,” “don't let your cup out of your sight” (March 2006, Wild Things: Is Spring Break out of Control?), “park in well-lit areas,” “don’t overburden yourself with packages,” and read “The Gift of Fear” by Gavin de Becker (A book that includes the quotation “Though leaving is not an option that seems available to many battered women, I believe that the first time a woman is hit, she is a victim and the second time, she is a volunteer.") (June 2006, “Fear Factor: Teens have the highest risk of violent crime including rape, assault and robbery.”

My point is that in the ten years between 2004 and 2016, Teen Vogue changed how it covered and framed sexual assault. They once were, well-meaningly, a purveyor of “safety tips” and emphasized the dangers of blacking out and date rape drugs over the subtleties of the ability to give consent when intoxicated versus the inability to do so when incapacitated.

12. Because we have to get the third act kidnapping, another classic Kleypas move.

13. The legal construct that starts the conflict in Pride and Prejudice and has had readers asking for two centuries, “Why would you even do that to a house?” is provided with a counterexample here. The house is supposed to run with the title of Earl of Trenear, but because Devon’s cousin passed away so quickly after his inheritance, it was not re-entailed before Devon inherited. Why this happens has to do with the law against perpetuities, which I won’t get into, but it prevents entails from existing forever without a new heir opting in to this scheme. 

14. Kleypas novels generally follow a very heteronormative, baseball metaphor, order of operations when it comes to sexual activity. I’m going by grown-up rules and just considering sexual encounters to be sex.