the trend line will not hold

part IV: bodice responses

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 fourth 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. I’ve greatly expanded my research since the original publication.

Part I is about the legal history of the marital rape exemption. I explored the legal history to show that the understanding of marital rape as a harm is distinct from it being considered rape by statute and that considerations preventing and punishing the harm did not start suddenly in the early 1970s.

Part II complicates the idea that marital rape was newly considered a harm in literature in the 1970s in romance novels. Romance novels were not the first media to depict rape within a marriage as a harm and the romance genre is in conversation with a long history of rape in literature.

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.

The Invasion by Charles Christian Nahl (1871)

Under the theory of marital rape exemptions as a determining factor in the popularity of bodice ripper romance, the early 1990s are often given as a period¹²³ when depictions of consent started to shift. This trajectory often assumes a linear, progressive, and enlightened growth in the taste of consumers, from seeking “erotic historical bodice rippers” to seeking “depictions of explicit, announced consent.” In this part, I am going to discuss both how this strict timeline is fallacious and how books well into the 21st century retain bodice ripper structures and motifs, even when the sex scenes are no longer characterized as assault.

Sometimes in reportage of data points on this timeline, dates are fudged in ways that serve a narrative of linear progress, from books with rape in the 1970s to books without rape in the 1990s. In Book Riot’s “History of Consent in Romance” by Nikki DeMarco, a discussion at the 1985 Romance Writers of America conference is cited, as reported in Carol Thurston’s The Romance Revolution: Erotic Novels for Women and the Quest for a New Sexual Identity (1987), where one panelist announced “I love a good rape scene!” which prompted some attendees to storm out, while others stayed behind to discuss “what rape really is.” But in the article, this anecdote is preceded by the assertion: “The mid-1980s is where the change started gaining momentum, and by the 1990s romance started including conversations about consent en mass [sic].” A heated discussion at the leading professional organization in 1985, to me, seems like a critical mass of discourse, not the beginning of things to come. Examining the source cited, Thurston’s book, it is clear that many other trend points show a more complicated history of depictions of consent in the fifteen years between the publication of The Flame and the Flower and when Thurston’s book came out.

In Romance Revolution, Thurston covers the ebbs and flows of the late seventies and early eighties in more detail that I can discuss here. But I think, importantly, in a book published in 1987, Thurston acknowledges seemingly contradictory trends amongst the readership, with only a few years’ hindsight. It is easy and convenient to collapse the intervening years into a single regression line with a thirty-year distance, but Thurston proffers many discrete shifts in what the median romance book looked like at any given moment between 1972 and 1987.

Thurston cites a date as early as the late seventies of when readers started show resistance to the saturation of “rape and violence, to the long separations the lovers were subjected to during their wide-ranging adventures, and to passive-teenage-virgin heroines.”⁴ She points to institutional responses coming in the early eighties with publishers starting lines of contemporary romances with sex on page, like Dell’s Candlelight/Ecstasy (December 1980, helmed by Vivien Stephens) and Richard Gallen/Pocket Books’ (April 1981, led by Star Helmer.)⁵ These books featured contemporary working women, often older than the teenage virgins of historicals.

These books did not have uniform sexual and consent politics either and scenes that are framed as “seduction” in-narrative might read like coerced sex or rape. But there were also many books without coercion or violence, depending on the publisher and the year.⁶ These contemporary set lines seem like a reaction to an audience wanting sex-on-page romance without the violence associated with erotic historicals. The lines being established in the early 1980s and their popularity suggest reader distaste for the ubiquity of bodice rippers a decade earlier than the 1990s.

But within historicals, a range of depictions of consent exists too, challenging the idea of a flat landscape of consent in the early decades of sex on page historicals. Thurston does not mention this romance in her analysis, but by 1977, Moonstruck Madness by Laurie McBain had come out, which features violence, but not rape by hero of heroine, already moving away from the assaults in bodice rippers. Even Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, author of ur-bodice ripper The Flame and the Flower, writes a Regency without a rape scene in 1982 with A Rose in Winter.

Thurston’s work challenges a leading paradigm at the time of dividing erotic romances, with one type having a heroine with multiple sexual partners (savage romances) and the other having a heroine with a single sexual partner, a true love (sweet romances).⁷ Instead, in a chapter where she conducts an empirical study of reader response to a set of historical novels, she write of her methodology: “The character of the sexual act itself is more important in terms of classification, since it is in the quality of this interaction that significant change in the way female sexuality is portrayed is most evident.”⁸

But while depictions of positive consent were happening earlier than sometimes suggested, on the other end of the spectrum, Thurston points out that Bertrice Small’s Skye O’Malley (1980) was a book that “rock[ed] even long-time readers of bodice rippers back on their heels.”⁹ Skye O’Malley features a heroine with multiple true loves, in the thick of Tudor politics, who is a perpetual survivor, bounding from one intrigue to the next, never languishing over the almost camp level of violence of the world. I’m reading this book right now, and there’s a high level of violence and trauma in this epic, sweeping romance. But it is also filtered through the most purple prose and propulsive pacing. I can absolutely see why it was a huge bestseller, even as some romance audiences were expressing bodice ripper fatigue. The experience for me as a reader is more like watching an exploitation or rape revenge film from the 1970s than other bodice rippers I’ve read. I’m rooting so strongly for Skye O’Malley and her indefatigable survival instinct, and while the content is salacious and over the top, the violence is disembodied in a way.

Thurston also identifies a “reversal” of the trend away from erotic historicals in the early 1980s with the publication of Stormfire by Christine Monson (1984), the bodice ripper I’ve read with the longest litany of depicted traumas.¹⁰ The way Monson writes Stormfire feels so earthy and grounded compared to Small’s Skye O’Malley. For all the propulsion in the narrative I feel in Small’s world, I had to stop many times while reading Stormfire because I found the depictions of violence so harrowing.¹¹ Another move back toward erotic historicals was the development of the “sexy” Regency, like Whitney, My Love by Judith McNaught (1985), a book that many readers would unequivocally say has a rape scene in it, though the McNaught disagrees.¹² McNaught’s work contrasted the typical page length, heat level, and style of books set in the Regency, which were effectively an entirely different genre than erotic historical, with an entirely different audience.

So according to Thurston, the trend away from bodice rippers gets a response from contemporary romance lines starting, nearly as the same time as the publication of a bestseller heralded as a “return” to the violent erotics of the early 1970s, and erotic historicals start coming back into vogue a few years after that. The takeaway: no one thing is going on at nearly any point in romance.

Thurston’s research even obliquely addresses the main question of this project and conceptions of rape and the popularity of these books. In looking a sample of historical romances, Thurston identifies that over half of the books, published between 1972-1981, featured a rape. She connects this to the oft-quoted and infamous 1976 Ms. Magazine article from film critic Molly Haskell, where she argues that “one of the few instances in which society seems able to condone sensuality in a woman is when she is ‘taken’ and overwhelmed by the male. It is under these circumstances, in which the male assumes total responsibility for the figurative rape, that a woman can shed her guilts about enjoying sex.” Haskell’s quote is in alignment with the marital rape theory of the popularity of bodice rippers—that violence needed to happen for readers to accept a female character experiencing sexuality. That pleasure needs to be violently extracted from a woman, expaling the popularity of a rape fantasy in media marketed to women.

But Thurston immediately points out that while over half the books she looked at feature rape, a much smaller minority characterize the rape as a sexual act, where the rape is “an act of seduction in which the heroine ultimately finds pleasure and even reaches orgasm.”¹³ The majority of the books featuring rape instead have it as one of the traumas the heroine has to overcome, in books that are as much about a heroine making her way in a violent world as they are about finding romance.

My correction of Book Riot’s article fudging the years from Thurston’s work may come across as too granular. But for my purposes, the important perspective here is that at the time of publication of this book (1987), there’s a much broader baseline for what consent could look like in a romance novel, and how people were talking about consent sounds more similar than dissimilar to how we talk about romance now. Looking at documentation and analysis from closer to this period suggests more back and forth, rather than the arc of the romantic universe pointing in a single direction. Between 1972 (publication of The Flame and the Flower) and 1993 (the year marital rape was a crime in all 50 states), a range of types of romances were being published and read, with a range of depictions of consent.¹⁴

A final quotation from Thurston reads like copy pitching a historical romance in 2025:

To simply call [the heroines] victims would be to miss the crucial point, however, because hardship is the device used to set the stage for what readers prize almost as much as the developing love relationship — the heroine as a woman of indomitable spirit and wit, a fighter who “gives as good as she gets” and overcomes by “holding her own ground,’ as readers often describe her. Erotic historical romance heroines are an extremely strong and determined lot, bent on throwing off the yoke of self-sacrificing subservience imposed on them by the society and time in which they are imprisoned.

The more things change, the more important it is for romance to make sure you know that now we’re doing it in an empowering way, not like before.

I have given this context in part to explain a jump that I am about to make in the books I am examining, since I am responding to a theory that I find faulty, rather than the entire history of romance post-1972. The books published and read between 1972 and 1992 are multivalent and manifold. But if the early 1990s is when both marital rape exemptions were finally “extinct”¹⁵ and supposedly when we abandoned the structure and motifs of bodice rippers, I’m going to jump ahead to those years. This part will be about an author whose first book which she still claims on her website was published in 1992: Lisa Kleypas.

(Part V¹⁶ is coming later this week!)

1. Nikki deMarco, “The History of Consent in Romance,” Book Riot, February 2, 2022

2. toriloves_HEA, “Reminder: Bodice rippers *were* revolutionary because they allowed women raised in the mores of the 40’s and 50’s (the “good girls don’t” era) to explore sex and pleasure while still letting them maintain their “good girl” status. Which is why there was so much non-con (cause bodice ripper authors were raised in that period too!). Second wave feminism (the sexual revolution) was something your writers in the 90’s grew up in, which is why you start to see a shift in consent!” Threads, May 12, 2025

3. Ema Klugman, Rape-and-Forgive Trope “They Are Like Printing Money”: Sex, Rape, and Power in Romance Novel, Unsuitable: Conversations about women, history & popular fiction @Duke University, (2017)

4. Carole Thurston, The Romance Revolution: Erotic Novels for Women and the Quest for a New Sexual Identity, 51

5. Thurston, 52-53

6. According to Thurston, there are a few rapes in the early iterations from the Gallen/Pocket Books lines, but they quickly fall by the wayside in the line as a plotting choice, while Harlequin had books like End of Innocence (Abra Taylor, 1980) a contemporary novel with elements borrowed from many a historical plot (“exotic” location in Spain, centered on bull-fighting and a honeymoon rape). But Harlequin’s borrowing more of these tropes of 1970s is cited as a reason their market share dips in 1982 and 1983, with a change of course in that year, including hiring both Stephens and Helmer to work on Harlequin lines.

7. Sweet Savage Flame, a great resource, repeats this division here with robust lists of examples.

8. Thurston, 71

9. Thurston, 78

10. Thurston, 177

11. But it is a great book that is so, so much more complicated and political than people give it credit for. Obviously check out the Reformed Rakes episode on it!

12. “Though many consumers had been reading both series and single title romances for some time, by the end of 1984 a rise in the popularity of the erotic mainstream historical romance was apparent, beginning a surge of reader crossover from category to mainstream romance novels —a reversal of what happened during 1981. A number of editors and authors apparently interpreted this renewed interest in the historical romance as evidence of a return to the “good old days” of the bodice ripper, sparking a revival of titles such as Savage Ecstasy, Savage Whisper, and Savage Heart, and the reappearance of the virgin heroine who often is forced into a sex act that cannot be confused with seduction, as in Christine Monson’s Stormfire (Avon, 1984).”

13. “I’d read past the scene in question and had gotten to the drunken scene between Stephen and Clayton, where Clayton confesses only that he hurt Whitney and had not believed she was a virgin. And then, to my utter disbelief and chagrin, I read the following line. It is Stephen’s reaction to what Clayton has confessed: “It was unbelievable (to Stephen) that Clayton, who had always treated women with a combination of amused tolerance and relaxed indulgence, could have been driven to rape…”

Rape? Rape?! I couldn’t believe I’d carefully altered the first scene so it wouldn’t constitute rape, but I’d forgotten to alter Stephen’s reaction/response to it. By letting Stephen draw that conclusion, I automatically prompted readers to draw the same conclusion. To put it more succinctly, I shot myself in the foot.”

Judith McNaught with All About Romance, stating that she believes that readers believed the original scene was a rape because of the later naming of it as a rape by a secondary character. To me, the original scene absolutely reads a rape, without the clue later in the book.

14. And I’m focusing mostly on erotic historicals! This is to say almost nothing of what is going on in categories and contemporaries, all of which would be experiencing the same outside forces of societal perceptions of consent and sex.

15. Marital rape is now a crime in every state, but exceptions and different definitions still apply in some jurisdictions, with lower punishments or evidence burdens for marital rape.

16. Oh my god, get a grip, girl.