Popular Romance Project

Romance in Turkey

I am a published novelist and storyteller, and for more than two years I have provided editorial support to Harlequin Turkey. During this period, I have had the chance to translate many Harlequin books written in English into my language and to compare their content with popular romance novels written by Turkish writers. I found several interesting cultural differences. In [...]

Mrs. Robinson revisited

In her recent post entitled “Here’s to Mrs. Robinson,” Karen Dunak linked the “troubles” real romance went through in the turbulent 1960s with the “confession,” in The Graduate (1967) that sex and love may not be linked after all. Dunak concludes that through the Ben-Mrs. Robinson relationship and the film’s ambivalent final scene, The Graduate admits that there are “limits [...]

My first year published

Remember how much you longed to be a teenager? When I was unpublished, the published state looked just as glorious as the magic year 13 does to an 11-year-old girl. I had no problem visualizing myself signing my name with a flourish and meeting my editor at fancy New York lunches. But First Years are often not exactly as one [...]

Love and legacy

The nature of slavery broke families apart, and instilled great emotional yearnings. Darlene Clark Hine connects the importance of today’s African American romances to the cultural legacy of slavery and Reconstruction. Do the romances you read connect to your genealogy in any way? Do you prefer ancestral settings? Do you feel that romances have the ability to heal or to [...]

Why “happily ever after”?

Why does romance require a “happily ever after”? Has it always? What is the relationship between the romantic and the romance? William Gleason, professor of English at Princeton University, shares his thoughts: What, for you, makes an ending a happy ending—is the couple’s togetherness enough? Can the couple be separated geographically, yet emotionally together? Can you think of endings meant [...]

Romance in black papers

I solidified my love for books secretly reading my mother’s historical romance novels at 11 years of age. Nothing is unusual about this experience except that I was a young African American girl exploring love and romance through the eyes of Catherine Cookson, Jude Deveraux, and Johanna Lindsey. These novels would indelibly mark popular representations of love and romance as [...]

Here’s to Mrs. Robinson

As the 1960s progressed, mainstream media looked warily at a changing American sexual culture. In 1960 the Food and Drug Administration approved the marketing of Enovid, the first oral contraceptive, and by 1962, more than 1,000,000 women were “on the pill.” In 1965 the Supreme Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that all women, not merely married women, had a [...]

Victorian women writers

Quick—name a famous 19th-century British romance fiction writer. Did you say Marie Corelli, Amy Levy, Augusta Webster, or Lucas Malet? While Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë come first to the minds of 21st-century readers, Corelli, Levy, Webster, and Malet would have been popular choices of their contemporaries. These Victorian authors wrote best-selling novels, short stories, and poetry about romance and [...]

When life imitates art

The theme of my two Regency novels, Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander and Pride/Prejudice, is the m/m/f ménage told as a romance, a love story with two happy endings. At the end of the novels, the hero—a conventionally masculine man—is in loving relationships with his wife and a male partner, and each partner is aware of and accepts the [...]

Regency resources

One of the topics that comes up a lot among historical writers is what research books are essential. If you ask your top 10 favorite authors, you’d probably end up with a pretty impressive research library (and I’d love to see other authors tell us about their Must Have Books in the comments). Here are mine. I think these books [...]