roman d'amour

toward a definition of a romance novel

This newsletter is going to be about a lot of things: film noir, construction of legal rules, Sir Walter Scott, dual POV, and me trying my best not to annoy every romance novel reader who is so rightfully protective of this genre. 

it’s straight down the line for the both of us. remember?

film noir

Film noir is a term coined in France in 1946 to describe a genre of movies unique at the time to the United States. Noir has always been easier to give examples of than define: The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, The Lady from Shanghai. The term was not widely used until 1955, with the publication, again from France, of Panorama du film noir américain 1941–1953 (A Panorama of American Film Noir), written by Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton. 

In attempting to define film noir, beyond the canon of around 20 films that they list as definitively noir of this American period, Borde and Chaumeton identify a set of values that film noir espouses, as well as discussing the aesthetic markers that set off film noir from other films might simply be detective or crime dramas. But the authors recognize from the jump that these defining qualities will not be present in equal measure across every noir. 

We'd be oversimplifying things in calling film noir oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel. All these qualities are present in the series, but sometimes it's the oneiric quality that predominates — and we get The Shanghai Gesture; sometimes eroticism — and we get Gilda; sometimes the cruelty of a strange act. Often a film's noir side has to do with a single character, a single scene, a single decor. The Set-Up is an excellent documentary on boxing: it becomes film noir in the sequence of the final showdown, that terrible beating at the end of a blind alley. The spellbinding sadism of a psychological film like Rope links it per se to the noir series. On the other hand, The Big Sleep, This Gun for Hire, and The Lady in the Lake seem to be typical thrillers. This problem of definition will be evoked first, by referring to productions the critics have most often deemed to be "film noirs."

Definition is a “problem” for Borde and Chaumenton, and they start not with the boundaries of the label, but with the films that have earned that label, even if they are skeptical of their genre boundaries. The second chapter of the book is even called “Toward a definition of film noir,” indicating a process that is beginning, but will not be completed in this endeavor, or perhaps ever. Borde and Chaumenton frequently define noir by exclusion. 

A film noir is not a police documentary, a film noir tells the story from the perspective of within the crime, while a police documentary tells the story of a “murder from without,” so from the outside looking in. This is the difference between two films even from the same director (Jules Dassin’s The Naked City and Night and the City, for example) which might share many visual cues or auteur markers. 

A film noir is not a melodrama. Leave Her to Heaven from 1945 exists on this edge between melodrama and noir, where in ways it looks like a Douglas Sirk film, with its edible Technicolor and focus on the domestic and isolating world of a female main character. But Ellen, played by the otherworldly beautiful Gene Tierney, is a femme fatale. Not a femme fatale that is actually victim, like Rita Hayworth in Gilda or an invented femme fatale like Gene Tierney in Laura. An inveterate villain. What to do with a film that looks like a melodrama, is built like a melodrama, but has a femme fatale dropped into the middle of it? (People argue about this all the time.)

The structure of the book is to look at the sources of noir, and then go through the 20 or so films that they accept as film noirs, and mention about 80 that are on the edges. A reader could try to come away with a series of rules about what is a film noir and what is not. But the more interesting thing, and this is true of this book, and of the genre defining exercise as a whole, is the debate. Is noir style, substance or ethos? Can a film give too sympathetic a portrait of the police to ever be considered a film noir, even with all the Venetian blinds and Dutch angles in the world?

The debate about noir eventually catches up to the productions of these films. Despite Borde and Chaumenton’s title, which gives the cut off of 1953, of course, noirs still are produced post this Hollywood heyday. But they start to become self-referent, aware of the genre that once grew organically without a name.  What once was an incidental genre--directors and studios setting out to make detective films or crime pictures or melodramas, making up a genre that was distinct, though not necessarily immediately self-aware--becomes intentional. Once language is established, both the term film noir and an understanding of what makes something a film noir, an artist can set out, purposefully to make a film noir. This is how we get to the neo-noirs of the late 1960s and 1970s, along with French films like Godard’s Alphaville, so acutely aware of the conversations around the bounds of film noir.¹

This preceding discussion is certainly not exhaustive and I’m not an expert on film noir, though I love the genre. But the scale of discussions about what is noir or what is not noir, along with the attempts of definition that focus on factors on many vectors, like aesthetic markers, structural ethics, or literal plots, rather than attempting to list “requirements” for something to be a noir, appeals to me on a definitional level. 

But I want to use this background as a potential model of definition on something else, that I am equally not an expert on, but I love even more: romance novels. I think the film noir model toward definition is a useful one for romance--a genre that once grew incidentally and organically out of other genres (sentimental novels, comedies of manners, fairy tales, gothic novels, historical non-romance novels) and then starts being written more intentionally and exclusively, with a self-referent awareness of its origins, especially in the historical subgenre. 

I think to attempt to define romance on a binary (in or out), without consideration for reader response is a fool’s errand and basically ahistorical for how the genre worked and works. Even the word “romance” that in English is almost always connected to love is connected to the word for “novel” in many Romance languages,² because a novel is a popular work written in the vernacular. It comes from the Old French word “romanz,” which could mean a “story told in Old French,” as opposed to one in Latin. On an etymological level, romance novels are given a name and meaning based on being accessible to many people. To me, the tenor of the definition of a “romance” should reflect this. The definition should be able to expand and contract around work, but also the reader who is holding the book. 

What we’re working with

The oft-repeated definition of a romance novel is that it must center on a romance and it must end with a happily ever after (expanded to a “happily for now,” often in contemporary set romance novels). The Romance Writers of America, a professional organization for romance writers, narrows it a little bit, though I am not sure they would describe it as narrowing, but we’ll get to that. 

RWA lists the two elements of the definition as 1. central love story and 2. an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending. This is already narrowing beyond the received wisdom. Maybe it is the contrary lawyer in me, but “happily ever after” does not necessarily mean that the ending is emotionally satisfying or optimistic. 

But then in their explanation of these elements, they expand on each the meaning of each, again narrowing the elements. A central love story means “The main plot centers around individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work. A writer can include as many subplots as they want as long as the love story is the main focus of the novel.” This element is supposed to distinguish books that feature love stories from romance novels. For example, A Court of Thorns and Roses series--features a love story, that very well may be the main reason many people read the book!--but it is not a romance novel because it is mainly a fantasy series and is just as much about Feyre (and the other heroines) exploring the world and going on a hero’s quest. 

Sure, fine. Genres need boundaries, for marketing reasons and for reader selection reasons. I do think some sort of relationship needs to be at the center of the plot and the primary conflict should come from questions about that relationship. 

But I still don’t love the RWA definition of a romance novel. Romance Writers of America is an organization that I don’t admire or respect all that much to begin with and I’m not one for upholding any institution without a whole of critique. This newsletter is not going to be a takedown of RWA, though check the footnotes for some things I found in my research about defining the genre that I think are important for romance novel readers to read, especially when RWA is such a big voice is how the general public talks about romance novels.³ 

For all my issues with RWA, there is no perfect, ideal organization that I would give a pass to define exclusively this genre in this way. My issues are twofold: fundamentally, to me, this is not how definitions work! Definitions do not only set the bounds, but simultaneously reflect the usage. There is by necessity of language a push and pull between the organic use and the delineated bounds. They inform each other, but one is not supreme. I think this is especially true when defining something as responsive as a genre. I also take issue with the structure of RWA’s rule. 

Where RWA’s definition rubs me the wrong way to the point where I go back to the beginning and think, “let’s consider if this really ought be how we are doing this” is the second element. I already don’t love “an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending.” It feels too subjective for the style of definition RWA is espousing, where a book either is or is not a romance. If I, the reader, don’t find the ending emotionally satisfying or optimistic, does the novel cease to be a romance? I’m thinking about a book like My Daring Duke by Stacey Reid,⁴ which had one of the least satisfying endings of a book I have ever read and upset me so much in its pessimism about emotions and connections available to humans through romantic relationships, it threw me into a minor depression. 

But I would never argue that My Daring Duke is not a romance novel. It was written with the intent to be a romance, marketed as a romance, and I believe many readers probably read it and find the ending satisfactory! So do I look to the author’s attempt at an emotionally satisfying ending as meeting the threshold question of the test? I’m too much of a formalist for that. I don’t want to point to authorial intent about romance novel structure as the definitive answer, plus that would cut out authors like Jane Austen, for whom contemporary use of the word romance as a genre is really quite distinct from what we think of it now, independent of the exact definitions.⁵ Maybe the answer lies with the reader placing themselves in the shoes of the character? Is the ending emotionally satisfying for them, even if I find it depressing?

A common anecdotal rule that I have seen repeated is “Jane Eyre is a romance novel, Wuthering Heights is not.”⁶ Because Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester are “rewarded” with marriage at the end of Charlotte Brontë’s book. But Heathcliff and Cathy are “punished?” with death because they are “bad”? I won’t even get into how the idea that Eyre and Rochester are good and Heathcliff and Cathy are bad runs counter to everything I’ve ever gotten from a Brontë worldview. But I think this Brontë example is illustrative of how frustrating a binary categorization can be. 

Wuthering Heights is a part of the “romance” tradition, from when romance and novel were distinct nouns, rather than an adjective describing a noun. So I want to be careful here and make it clear that I am not directly conflating “romance” as defined by Sir Walter Scott in 1824 as “a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvelous and uncommon incidents” with a modern romance novel. Scott wrote this in response to Samuel Johnson’s definition “a military fable of the middle ages; a tale of wild adventures in love and chivalry.” Scott thinks the only useful vestige from this definition is the “wild adventures,” because Scott is distinguishing “romance” from “novel.” A novel is, again to Scott, “a fictitious narrative, differing from Romance, because the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events, and the modern state of society.” Scott acknowledges that a single work can be both, and if otherworldliness is a spectrum, Wuthering Heights is farther toward atmospheric, while Jane Eyre rests more in the corporeal. Wuthering Heights might be closer to Scott’s romance and Jane Eyre closer to his novel. 

But I am saying that I think Wuthering Heights shares some characteristics with romance novels, in the modern sense, that Jane Eyre totally misses. I think there is more weight placed on the couple, both as individual characters and as a unit. So much of Jane Eyre is about our narrator’s schooling or her relationship with the Reeds. Parts of it function like a coming of age story or like a mystery plot, uncovering Mr. Rochester’s secrets. The reader experiences acute intimacy with Jane because of the first person perspective that is never extended to Rochester, and while not a requirement, the dual structural weight given to each romantic lead, especially through POV, is a mark of many romance novels. 

This is not to say that Wuthering Heights is actually a romance novel and Jane Eyre secretly isn’t. Just that if we look past the binary elements, or think of the more abstractly, Wuthering Heights has a lot in common with books no one would argue about being romance novels.

blithe spirit (1945) @emmkick

some romance novel readers argue that Wuthering Heights is actually not a romance novel because no HEA, but that is anti-roaming the moors of hell with your soul mate propaganda. what is more HEA than that?

Not to be too recursive, but as referenced in my last newsletter, I think Emily Brontë is thinking about the optimistic ending on a macro scale outside of the main romantic couple--sure, Heathcliff and Cathy are condemned to wander the moors together (why, though, is this not optimistic? I feel like that was both of their goals the whole book!), but at the end of the novel Cathy Linton and Hareton Earnshaw plan to marry and leave Wuthering Heights for good. Everything is set right, in both the living and the ethereal realm. What could be more optimistic or satisfactory than that?  I’ll admit it is an edge case, but I think Jane Eyre is an edge case too--is it optimistic that our beloved Jane ends up with Rochester, wife-imprisoner? My mom, who has always identified with Jane, might say yes, and be able to work through moral mechanics necessary to see it as an optimistic romance. Many readers can. I, who have always seen myself more in Brontë women like Cathy Earnshaw, or Bertha Mason, struggle with it.  I think it is also hard to look backwards at novels that predate modern publishing of genre fiction and group them as romance/non-romance if the only available map of the genre is a retroactive binary one.

By pushing back against the definition, I don’t want to let in romance tragedy either! One of my favorite novels is The English Patient, which would not fit into RWA’s definition and I would not categorize it as a romance novel either. I think actually this binary elements test of a romance novel excludes a lot of books that are marketed and read as romances, particularly bodice rippers from the late 20th century, or even more modern dark romance (I think many bodice ripper readers would describe bodice ripper as emotionally satisfying because they are cathartic, but are they optimistic? That is not a word I necessarily see readers apply to those books.) and some nuanced romances that explore the idea that conditional love (conditioned as reformation, conditioned on a reframing of identity, conditioned on a sincere apology that is then lived as truth) can actually be more equitable. 

I want to propose not a new definition of romance, but a new framework of defining. I’m not abandoning happily ever after, I’m problematizing it. And apologies, I have to talk about the law in order to do this. (Occupational hazard!)

Construction of legal rules 

Part of my issue is that the RWA definition is written like an elements test. Bear with me, I’m going to explain a legal concept, but I think it is illustrative. 

Some legal suits or crimes have elements in determining their prima facie case. It functions like a list of things that have to occur in order to get over the threshold of filing the claim or bringing a charge. A negligence claim is a good example and one a lot of people are familiar with. 

In order to prove negligence, you have to show that the defendant owed a duty, that there was a breach of that duty, that there was an injury that was caused by the breach, and the plaintiff suffered damages.. When you make a negligence argument, you go through these four elements, attempting to prove each one. When you are studying for a torts exam, you walk around muttering “duty, breach, causation, damages.”  If you are defending against a negligence claim, you attack these four elements. 

In order for the defendant to win, they just have to prove that one element was not there. Maybe the injury happened, but the breach didn’t cause it. Maybe there was no duty to begin with. One element falls, the whole legal argument collapses and there is no negligence  suit available to the plaintiff. 

RWA’s definition is written like this now: a romance central to the plot and an optimistic ending (with their added narrowing of “emotional justice and unconditional love”) and you’re in. One of these things is missing, you’re out. 

But there is another way to construct a legal test. You can construct a factors based test (Sandra Day O’Connor is known for writing legal rules this way, incidentally. Scalia hated them.) A factor based test allows for a case-by-case analysis. It also gives more power to a judge, and perhaps makes precedent less predictable because no one item is determinative. They are weighed against each other. 

An example of a factors based rule is the fair use rule in copyright. There are four factors to determine fair use: 1. the purpose and character of the use (including if it is commercial or for nonprofit educational purposes), 2. the nature of the copyrighted work (so what is being borrowed from), 3. the amount and substantiality of the portion that is being borrowed, relative to the copyrighted work as a whole, 4. the market effect on this fair use on the value of the copyright work. 

Case law makes it clear that none of these factors are dispositive. And in most jurisdictions (the Ninth Circuit is slightly different), fair use is an affirmative defense. This means that first copyright infringement must be proven by the Plaintiff or conceded by the Defendant. What this means in practice, is that no one “has” fair use in anything until a judge says they have fair use. Until they are 1. sued for copyright infringement 2. the case for infringement has been established 3. the judge grants fair use as an available defense 4. that defense wins, the defendant does not have fair use. 

The way the judge determines fair use is by reviewing those factors, but none necessarily are the deciding factor. Appropriating copyrighted material for educational purposes or for non-commercial purposes are often cited by laypeople as evidence of “oh, don’t worry, it’s fair use.” But this is not an element test! All the other factors must be considered. A teacher likely can’t appropriate the whole of a textbook and put it on Blackboard, the same way a fanfiction author couldn’t publish the entirety of the Ravenels series on AO3 with all the reference to Sebastian St. Vincent excised. 

The point of this is not to expound on my thoughts on fair use, but explain how a factor test works. It puts power in the hands of the fact finder to determine on a case-by-case basis if something falls under the purview of the rules or not. In the law, sometimes we don’t want this. It might make things less predictable (fair use rulings and copyright law in general can be kind of unpredictable!)

But in an area of determination that is not setting legal precedent, like genre definition, why not aim for a factor based test? I think film noir provides a useful model for assuming genre definition is a perpetual project, one that will be argued over by devotees, and one where no one element is dispositive. The fact finders (the viewers of film noir) can give weight to different factors, within the scheme. A film noir viewer still must operate within an established framework--they couldn’t say something like “a film noir absolutely must have Venetian blinds casting shadow on the face of a detective” and still be a reasonable voice in the discussion. But they could argue that Gene Tierney as Ellen the femme fatale in Leave Her to Heaven functions likes a tipping point from melodrama into noir, the way the final alley scene in The Set-Up tips it from boxing documentary to noir. But someone could also argue the opposite point. That the argument is part of the fun (again, maybe this assessment is being colored by my JD.)

The rest of this newsletter will attempt to offer some factors, particularly for historical romance. I know romance readers are wary of people doing away with HEA as a tenet--how many of us have been recommended romances, with romance marketing, only to realize that the couple isn’t even together at the end of the book? Or that the romance is secondary to a fantasy adventure plot? Again, this is not an undoing or an erasing but reframing. I hope from my discussion of RWA’s definition, you can already see that the elements test, as written by the organization that gets cited to when people wonder “hey what makes a romance novel a romance novel?” already fails, if it is read as exactly as it is written, to include many examples of romance novels, both in terms of internal form and external marketing. 

And my factors do not have to be your factors! I think actually one of my big frameworks as a reader is to consider what factors the author is prioritizing--what makes a Balogh romance novel is different than what makes a Kleypas romance novel is different than what makes a Thomas romance novel. The genre dialogue is multi-user, both from the authorial side and the reader side. 

some offered factors

Ethical values 

A central ethos based in restoration from harm: I’m biased here, this is what my whole thing is, hence this newsletter. But this one way I can see the union of something like dark romance or bodice rippers and more standard romances. In a bodice ripper that begins with a rape, the offer of marriage and sharing a bed as married couple is a form of restoring harm to the virgin who has been done wrong. (The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss). An offer of marriage can also be literally legally owed to someone because of damage to their reputation. (Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase). Sometimes the harm does not exclusively come from a partner, but from a character’s family who has abandoned them or mistreated them and a partner will help facilitate that family reconciliation. (Most Mary Balogh books). The harm may be based in anxiety about being from different classes, so a main character will push the other one away out of a misplaced sense of duty. Even sometimes, the harm comes from a character accidentally framing the other for murder and ruining his life. (No Good Duke Goes Unpunished by Sarah MacLean).

This ethos often extends to other relationships beyond the main romantic one. For example, in Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase (my personal greatest novel of all time), Dain must offer to marry Jessica because he has ruined her reputation, even though they have not slept together, and she threatened to sue him for damages. This threat of legal suit is what prompts him to propose. They marry and their begrudging affection begins to grow organically. But once she discovers that Dain has abandoned an illegitimate child, Jessica unleashes more fury on him than at any point in the novel (including, in my opinion, when she shoots him). What gets them to a happily ever after is when he accepts his position as his son’s father and welcomes him into their home. Welcoming his son also helps Dain understand his own parents’ emotional and physical abandonment, so he is righting multiple vectors of harm in his life. He is able to get a happily ever after by restoring his son into his home. 

Some level of miscommunication/internal to the relationship conflict: I don’t want to make anyone mad, but I think nearly every romance novel has some form of miscommunication. I know the phrase “miscommunication trope” gets a lot of play and complaints, but I think there has to be some communicative disconnect within the main relationship. People will rail against miscommunication in romance, but it is a term I have seen be applied in the least consistent way in romance novel spaces. I’m using it to mean struggles communicating with each other, whether that involves a misinterpretation, or a retitience to share feelings, or a lack of introspection about their feelings. 

I am sure there are counter examples of exclusively external conflict or ninety percent external conflict. I feel like Medieval and Highlander romances and Elizabeth Hoyt’s Maiden Lane series are the main ones I am thinking of that also rely on outside forces to amp up the conflict. And of course, Lisa Kleypas last minute kidnappings. But that is just the thing--the external conflict amplifies conflict, rather than being the source of the conflict. That is what keeps Maya Banks' Highlander book from really being an adventure book. 

form or structure

The Journey: This charming blog post graphs the Joseph Campbell hero’s journey (through abridged) onto the plot points of a romance novel. There are a lot of resources that expound upon this. Romance novels now are a mass market product--they are written to be within a form, if not necessarily formulaic. All the steps before the HEA are as much a part of the genre to me as the happily ever after. These can be edited or subverted or excised or amplified, but this is the base form of the stories that we are reading. Focusing just on the HEA as the threshold question erases the scaffolding that gets us there--and like I described earlier of how a HEA might look different for different couples within a book (and might not look like that emotionally satisfying or optimistic ending that RWA says we need), the explanation of why that ending would work for that book would be found in these preceding structural moments. 

Dual POV: Not every romance novel is dual POV. But I think it would be foolish not to acknowledge that this is a huge part of how romance novels are built and is a hallmark of the genre. When I am reading a romance novel, one of the main things I am interested in is how the author deploys POV chapters. If a romance novel is a single POV, I need there to be a reason for that choice.⁷

Similarly, when there are POV sections with characters outside the main couple, I want there to be reasons for abandoning this form. I want there to be intention behind what information is shared in which POV, and the author to be aware of what each character knows and what the readers know.

Interiority: This is one that I think goes with dual POV, but the dynamism between interior thoughts being shared with the reader and dialogue between the couple is another huge piece of what makes a romance novel a romance novel to me. Authors have different approaches to this. But I think the questions of “who knows what and when, of each other’s thoughts and feelings, of their own thoughts and feelings, how does that affect their decisions, how does that affect reader sympathy for them?” are central to a genre that is about intimacy between people and learning to know and love each other better. 

Aesthetic Markers 

(these are the fun ones and mostly limited to historicals because I am just riffing on books that I love)

• calling someone by a nickname that is a pun of their name, especially if it means something else in another language 

• a hellion best friend being the lead of the second book in the series and reminiscing about how his best friend used to be a good time, and now is wife guy and thank goodness he hasn’t been tied down like that schmuck 

• he’s a rake, she has a hot girl hobby 

• a heroine looking increasingly beautiful to the hero because she is able to dress herself appropriately for her coloring/body type as she gains access to freedom/money and can go to the modiste

• secret inheritances solves the problems, unexpected inheritance causing the problems

• marriage of convenience but one of them is secretly in love and has been for years

• investment in a very specific sexual morality interpretion of the time period the book is set it (for better or for worse) (sometimes it is for worse, imho!)

• the heroine independently inventing a blow job 

• “his unfashionably long hair fell across his face” 

Maybe someone else would call these hacky tropes, but some of my favorite books either indulge them, or flip them on their head. It reminds me that this is a genre in conversation and that our best romance novel writers are really really big fans of the genre as readers of the genre. 

You don’t have to adopt my definition of a romance novel. That really wasn’t the goal of the exercise here. If anything, the biggest success would come from anyone reading this being encouraged to think about what makes a romance a romance to them. In a genre that is so self-referential, when I am reading, I am often thinking about the mental map of how these books connect to each other. This map is three dimensional and dynamic--I want the way that I talk about romance novels to match that. I get most excited listening to other people talk about romance novels when they seem invigorated to do the same--taking this genre seriously and spending time thinking about the map. I want a definition (or hundreds or thousands of definitions) that match that level of energy. 

1. I have a hunch that another example of genre defining that could be useful in this conversation is how sci-fi is defined. But I am not a sci-fi reader by any means--just not my jam. But I think the genre has a similar macro history as romance novels, where it has its origins in 19th century novels like Frankenstein, plus some earlier speculative fiction stuff like the works of Lady Margaret Cavendish, and then it sort of narrows down into a mass-market genre that is frequently in dialogue with its origins, other iterations with similar value sets, like in movies or television, and other mass market books. But science fiction as a genre approaches definition in a not dissimilar way to film noir--as a problem that cannot be solved with one answer, but can approach solving through discussion. I’m not the person to do a deep dive on this at all, but the Wikipedia article, “Definitions of science fiction” does a great overview for a non-sci-fi reader. I just can’t do a deep dive here because it is not my genre fiction of choice!

2. French: le roman, Italian: il romanzo, Spanish: il romance (la novela is also used); Portuguese: o romance. Even German: Roman (borrowing from the French), where we get the compound word Bildungsroman, which has made its way back into English as a term for a coming of age novel. I’m not attempting to conflate all the words that come from the rom- stem, but acknowledge that they aren’t necessarily as siloed as we might like to think.

3. Suzanne Brockmann Speech at RWA, July 21, 2018, Unpacking the Racist Drama Roiling the World of Romance Writers (an interview with Courtney Milan from January 2, 2020), Blogpost about RWA including the definition of a romance novel “one man, one woman” in a promotional poll from 2005. The apology is from 2016. There are defenses of RWA that I see that suggest that the definition was ONLY ever used in a poll and not actually adopted, so what do they have to sorry for? It is pretty clear that the poll was measuring reader response to an “old” definition (one man, one woman), versus a “new” definition, which is much closer to what currently appears on their website. And any review of RWA promotional materials from this earlier period show an exclusive promotion of monogamous, heterosexual romances. 

4. Spoilers for My Daring Duke: the thing that made me so upset with this book was that it was about a hero who was impotent. This stemmed from a physical injury that he incurred during a house fire. His impotence was his great shame and the reason he kept the heroine at a distance. Romance novel heroes are NEVER impotent. If anything, they are preternaturally virile. I read the book because I thought “how novel! In a genre about learning to be intimate and responsive to one another, why couldn’t there be a depiction of an impotent hero? Especially when depictions of female pleasure in romance novels are increasingly realistic in that they do not focus on penetrative sex.” What disappointed me so much to the point of depression was that the solution for the intimacy issues caused by his reticence to get close to her because of his impotence were ALSO a literal cure for his impotence. I was so disappointed that this affliction was used as a plot device to get to a conventionally virile romance novel hero, instead of exploring how relationships are multivalent and could be available to people of all abilities. 

5. Two illuminative entries from the OED definition of romance for this definition: “A fictitious narrative, usually in prose, in which the settings or the events depicted are remote from everyday life, or in which sensational or exciting events or adventures form the central theme; a book, etc., containing such a narrative. Now chiefly archaic and historical” are as follows. Richard Brinsley Sheridan wrote 1772: “When I read for Entertainment, I had much rather view the Characters of Life as I would wish they were than as they are: therefore I hate Novels, and love Romances.” and in 1831, Sir Walter Scott wrote: “The very moderate degree of local knowledge..which he has endeavoured to embody in the romance of the Pirate.” The first year that the definitions that relate to love affairs are from 1844, 1858. The first appearance listed in the OED for the definition “A story of romantic love, esp. one which deals with love in a sentimental or idealized way; a book, film, etc., with a narrative or story of this kind. Also as mass noun: literature of this kind.” is 1901.

6. Baltimore Sun, 2002, Book Riot, 2014, Vox, 2018 even our queens of feminist critique Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar refer to Jane Eyre’s “happily ever after,” even though they problematize it. 

7. Uncertain Magic by Laura Kinsale and A Bride for a Prizefighter by Alice Coldbreath are 100% single POV. Seven Secrets of Seduction by Anne Mallory and In Total Surrender by Anne Mallory (my POV queen! I’m obsessed with how she does it) are both about 80% single POV. All of these books have very good reasons for these unequal weights between the characters’ perspectives.