Emma this was so interesting! You also made me laugh at least three times. I am so looking forward to the rest of this series. And what a great kick for me to finally read Whitney, My Love.
Loved this! Have to say I find the (often American) Romance novel preoccupation with British aristocracy so bizarre - esp because it’s not even like there are all that many aristocrats in Austen or other classic novels that influence the genre? The 18th & 19th century novel (/the novel more broadly) is a pretty bourgeois form in general, which is maybe why I find the aristocracy thing generally so tonally odd? I’m thinking a lot about this more broadly at the minute - the ways the stories of the rich dominate in historical narratives across genres and forms… many are good but I long for something more ambitious in its view of history, esp of women’s history!
Yes! This is what had me questioning the history of this character in the genre pretty early in my reading. I came to historical romance from being a fan of 19th century novels, not from contemporary at all. And just, based on how people talked about Bridgerton and the genre, I almost expected Jane Austen fan fiction. Even Georgette Heyer, who is our real source of this setting, who is interested in Austen as a direct antecedent, writes way way more aristocrats than Austen or her contemporaries did.
This is a little bit of a spoiler for the conclusion of this project, but it wasn't always like this either. I was spurred to turn this into something bigger after I read a bunch of Carla Kelly's category romances from the 90s. Kelly is often billed as writing "dukeless romances" and reading her books was the most excited I've been about romance in over a year. Highly recommend if you are remotely interested in checking out some romances that often a different model of who we are concerned with.
This was excellent! I look forward to the rest of the series.
I recently read Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women and North American Romance Writers, another compilation of essays - both fascinating reads. In NARW, Kathleen Gilles Seidel wrote an essay called "I Can't Pay the Rent: Money in the Romance Novel" and it has one of my favorite footnotes in the book about alpha males and the way wealthy men (in romance) use their power for good: "These men are excellent employers, responsible landlords, conscientious lairds, and so forth. Capitalism's 'enlightened self-interest' explains some of the men, but a feudal ideal probably is closer to the mark."
Love this—lots of food for thought, as a long-time reader of romance novels. Side note: billionaires won't come up very often in title searches because for a long time, millionaires were rich enough. Having "millionaire" in the title was also a rarity for single title contemporary romance; I'm willing to bet you'll see quite a few hits for category romance, though, especially Harlequin Presents and Harlequin Romance. "Playboy" also serves as a handy proxy if you ever want to do some digging; all of the titular playboy heroes were also millionaires.
Just as an explanation of methodology: I used FictionDB's search for the summary/description field, which searches basically the blurb on the back of the book. I figured this captured books that used either "duke" or "billionaire" as part of the selling point of the book. I was thinking about the reader browsing a bookstore and choosing a title (nostalgic for the days when that was a main mode of book selection!) For dukes, it did create some false positives/negatives (see footnote 12), but for the back of the envelope statistics I was doing, I called it a wash.
Especially because I believe I underreported the # of duke heroes, erring on the side of conservative data, since I only took effort to control for false positives by manually eliminating books that clearly did not include a duke hero. (A few series always include the word "duke" in the blurb, like Madeline Hunter's A Duke's Heiress series. Only one of these books actually features a duke hero, so I eliminated the other two from the data set).
But thank you for the insight for vocabulary! I am really significantly less familiar with just the mechanics and conventions of contemporary. As a person who primarily reads historical romance, I balked as the frequent conventional wisdom that billionaires and dukes are structural parallels. I imagine there's overlap, but I just don't see them as having the same role in their respective genres or the ability to function in the same range in their individual books.
Also, man, what a throwback, seeing a mention for Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, which I read a few times while co-writing Beyond Heaving Bosoms. I...disagree strongly with just about every essay in there, haha, and Kinsale's essay is no exception, largely because some of the assumptions about how and why people read romance are so baseless—the urge to slap [citation needed] everywhere is strong. And yes, lots and lots of Gender Stuff that aged like fine milk within, like, months of publishing.
Thanks, Emma. I write a completely different kind of fiction, but found your thoughts helpful and relevant. I've long thought that reader identification is nowhere near as simplistic an issue as is claimed, particularly by those who take a patronising stance vis-à-vis the romance genre. My own guess (based at least partly on reader comments on my own series), is that readers play along with POV, but subliminally override it, so that they're at once duke and deserving heroine, Rochester and Jane, and surf the wave of tension between them. About the dukes, could it be that you need a historical period of comparative stability and prosperity (Victorian, Regency), so that the duke is not only at home, but has the time to pursue matters of the heart, and attend social functions (however ungraciously). In other words he's being a full-on duke - white blouse with lavish décolletage, taut breeches, icily curled lip - but he's not having to deal with the hard-core politicking, plotting, insurrection and summary executions that occupy dukes during more troubled times. Anyway thanks for a great read!
I do think there is something to the at least perceived retrospective stability of the Regency period as an attractive for writers! Definitely not as dangerous to be a duke in that period as it was in the 14th century. It is just on the end of early modernity, post-Enlightenment, pre total industrialization. While there is plenty of Continental conflict to tap into, every day life in England is pretty removed from it, by virtue of their supremacy as sea and protection against Napoleonic invasion.
What I'm hoping to explore in the rest of this project is how that exact image of a duke that you describe came to be codified in the genre as the default hero, when it hasn't always been there and some reasons why. Politically active dukes do exist--I just read a book where a duke's mentor was Lord Sidmouth, reactionary Home Secretary and part of the duke's arc is disengaging himself from those anti-reform politics (because he's fallen in love with a Cyprian! since it is a romance we're talking about). And the genre used to have way more non-aristocrats, whether they be landed gentry, so still having access to some level of leisure, or working people, whose jobs are integrated into the plots.
This was an absolute delight to read!! Thank you for writing it and for your meticulous research. I really need to read Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women now. I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about Kinsale’s argument there and I’m itching to explore it more
The whole book is so interesting! It is very 1992 in a lot of the arguments (you can see that in even in the Kinsale quote that I pulled), but it is fascinating that it exists and is so wide in the topics and authors they got in the book. Such a time capsule of how romance talked about itself.
I read it recently and +1 to how Emma describes it! It's a great read, and it's so fun to see a bunch of names I know on the list of authors, but it is verrrrrry 90s feminism and really preoccupied with defending how romances treat virginity.
(And a +1 to this being a delight to read, I'm excited for part 2!)
Emma this was so interesting! You also made me laugh at least three times. I am so looking forward to the rest of this series. And what a great kick for me to finally read Whitney, My Love.
Chels is going to flip when you read it!
Loved this! Have to say I find the (often American) Romance novel preoccupation with British aristocracy so bizarre - esp because it’s not even like there are all that many aristocrats in Austen or other classic novels that influence the genre? The 18th & 19th century novel (/the novel more broadly) is a pretty bourgeois form in general, which is maybe why I find the aristocracy thing generally so tonally odd? I’m thinking a lot about this more broadly at the minute - the ways the stories of the rich dominate in historical narratives across genres and forms… many are good but I long for something more ambitious in its view of history, esp of women’s history!
Yes! This is what had me questioning the history of this character in the genre pretty early in my reading. I came to historical romance from being a fan of 19th century novels, not from contemporary at all. And just, based on how people talked about Bridgerton and the genre, I almost expected Jane Austen fan fiction. Even Georgette Heyer, who is our real source of this setting, who is interested in Austen as a direct antecedent, writes way way more aristocrats than Austen or her contemporaries did.
This is a little bit of a spoiler for the conclusion of this project, but it wasn't always like this either. I was spurred to turn this into something bigger after I read a bunch of Carla Kelly's category romances from the 90s. Kelly is often billed as writing "dukeless romances" and reading her books was the most excited I've been about romance in over a year. Highly recommend if you are remotely interested in checking out some romances that often a different model of who we are concerned with.
Carla Kelly is wonderful! I hope you enjoyed her.
Favorite new to me author this year, bar none!
This was excellent! I look forward to the rest of the series.
I recently read Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women and North American Romance Writers, another compilation of essays - both fascinating reads. In NARW, Kathleen Gilles Seidel wrote an essay called "I Can't Pay the Rent: Money in the Romance Novel" and it has one of my favorite footnotes in the book about alpha males and the way wealthy men (in romance) use their power for good: "These men are excellent employers, responsible landlords, conscientious lairds, and so forth. Capitalism's 'enlightened self-interest' explains some of the men, but a feudal ideal probably is closer to the mark."
Love this—lots of food for thought, as a long-time reader of romance novels. Side note: billionaires won't come up very often in title searches because for a long time, millionaires were rich enough. Having "millionaire" in the title was also a rarity for single title contemporary romance; I'm willing to bet you'll see quite a few hits for category romance, though, especially Harlequin Presents and Harlequin Romance. "Playboy" also serves as a handy proxy if you ever want to do some digging; all of the titular playboy heroes were also millionaires.
Just as an explanation of methodology: I used FictionDB's search for the summary/description field, which searches basically the blurb on the back of the book. I figured this captured books that used either "duke" or "billionaire" as part of the selling point of the book. I was thinking about the reader browsing a bookstore and choosing a title (nostalgic for the days when that was a main mode of book selection!) For dukes, it did create some false positives/negatives (see footnote 12), but for the back of the envelope statistics I was doing, I called it a wash.
Especially because I believe I underreported the # of duke heroes, erring on the side of conservative data, since I only took effort to control for false positives by manually eliminating books that clearly did not include a duke hero. (A few series always include the word "duke" in the blurb, like Madeline Hunter's A Duke's Heiress series. Only one of these books actually features a duke hero, so I eliminated the other two from the data set).
But thank you for the insight for vocabulary! I am really significantly less familiar with just the mechanics and conventions of contemporary. As a person who primarily reads historical romance, I balked as the frequent conventional wisdom that billionaires and dukes are structural parallels. I imagine there's overlap, but I just don't see them as having the same role in their respective genres or the ability to function in the same range in their individual books.
Also, man, what a throwback, seeing a mention for Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, which I read a few times while co-writing Beyond Heaving Bosoms. I...disagree strongly with just about every essay in there, haha, and Kinsale's essay is no exception, largely because some of the assumptions about how and why people read romance are so baseless—the urge to slap [citation needed] everywhere is strong. And yes, lots and lots of Gender Stuff that aged like fine milk within, like, months of publishing.
Thanks, Emma. I write a completely different kind of fiction, but found your thoughts helpful and relevant. I've long thought that reader identification is nowhere near as simplistic an issue as is claimed, particularly by those who take a patronising stance vis-à-vis the romance genre. My own guess (based at least partly on reader comments on my own series), is that readers play along with POV, but subliminally override it, so that they're at once duke and deserving heroine, Rochester and Jane, and surf the wave of tension between them. About the dukes, could it be that you need a historical period of comparative stability and prosperity (Victorian, Regency), so that the duke is not only at home, but has the time to pursue matters of the heart, and attend social functions (however ungraciously). In other words he's being a full-on duke - white blouse with lavish décolletage, taut breeches, icily curled lip - but he's not having to deal with the hard-core politicking, plotting, insurrection and summary executions that occupy dukes during more troubled times. Anyway thanks for a great read!
I do think there is something to the at least perceived retrospective stability of the Regency period as an attractive for writers! Definitely not as dangerous to be a duke in that period as it was in the 14th century. It is just on the end of early modernity, post-Enlightenment, pre total industrialization. While there is plenty of Continental conflict to tap into, every day life in England is pretty removed from it, by virtue of their supremacy as sea and protection against Napoleonic invasion.
What I'm hoping to explore in the rest of this project is how that exact image of a duke that you describe came to be codified in the genre as the default hero, when it hasn't always been there and some reasons why. Politically active dukes do exist--I just read a book where a duke's mentor was Lord Sidmouth, reactionary Home Secretary and part of the duke's arc is disengaging himself from those anti-reform politics (because he's fallen in love with a Cyprian! since it is a romance we're talking about). And the genre used to have way more non-aristocrats, whether they be landed gentry, so still having access to some level of leisure, or working people, whose jobs are integrated into the plots.
Thanks for reading and for your comment!
Out of curiosity, which book is that?
The Duke by Gaelen Foley! I'll talk about it at length next week when I look at dukes from 1985 through the 1990s.
Oh, that’s a good one!
This was an absolute delight to read!! Thank you for writing it and for your meticulous research. I really need to read Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women now. I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about Kinsale’s argument there and I’m itching to explore it more
The whole book is so interesting! It is very 1992 in a lot of the arguments (you can see that in even in the Kinsale quote that I pulled), but it is fascinating that it exists and is so wide in the topics and authors they got in the book. Such a time capsule of how romance talked about itself.
I read it recently and +1 to how Emma describes it! It's a great read, and it's so fun to see a bunch of names I know on the list of authors, but it is verrrrrry 90s feminism and really preoccupied with defending how romances treat virginity.
(And a +1 to this being a delight to read, I'm excited for part 2!)