Popular Romance Project

When “nothing happens”

I began writing when I was in third grade, and since we didn’t have kindergarten back in the Paleolithic era, that was only two years after I had literally learned how to write. Poetry became my way to escape when school was boring, when other kids picked on me, and basically all the time. In other words, I have been [...]

The National Book Festival

The Library of Congress invited Eloisa James to talk at the 2012 National Book Festival, making her the first romance author to speak at the festival. She claims that genre fiction transforms individual lives by resonating with reader emotions. We hope you enjoy the following selections! What lessons have you learned from reading romances or other genre novels? If you [...]

Christmas past

Plenty of authors and historians have talked about the fact that, contrary to what the average person assumes, Christmas in the Regency was vastly different from Christmas in the Victorian period. No one hung stockings by the fire, few people put up trees, and Santa was nonexistent. This is problematic for authors writing Christmas romances. We can’t even substitute “Father [...]

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 [...]

Think globally, love locally

At an international conference on popular romance fiction, a member of the logistical team that was hosting us took me aside to ask about the topic of the gathering. “Love?” he smiled, a little bemused. “You know, I came here from Iran—and no one knows more about love than the Persians.” As we chatted, he told me more, breaking periodically [...]

Worst writing advice ever?

“Write what you know.” This has to be the most commonly heard writing advice in the universe. It’s also the worst writing advice ever. Who actually came up with the idea that writers should do this? My search for the origins of this idea led me to this from 1906:        The Secret        ”Tell me, O Sire,” entreated the youth        Of [...]

A romance novel as art?

Can a romance novel be a work of art? Baldly put, the question seems a little out of date. After all, it’s been almost a hundred years since Marcel Duchamp bought a snow shovel and inscribed it In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915), the first of his famous “Readymades.” (His next big number is even more famous: in 1917, [...]

He loves me. He is a Yank.

Augusta Jane Evans’ 1864 Confederate war novel Macaria instructed Southern women how to show their patriotism, beat the North, and keep their slaves. Its lesson? Forget marriage, and send your man to war. Our protagonist Irene Huntington sends off her boy in grey, admonishing him that “I want neither your usefulness nor mine to be impaired by continual weak repining.” [...]

What’s it all about, Arnold?

My father, who loved to sing, had little taste for rock ‘n roll. It was the end of the 1960s, and modern show-tunes were his favorites—songs from The Fantasticks, Camelot, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris—along with the occasional foray into lush, top-40 pop. I can probably still sing you every word of that big brown [...]

On the threshold

I am fascinated by that period in a romance novel when it looks like the wished-for union cannot possibly happen. The publishing industry calls this the “dark moment.” Literary critic Northrop Frye, who read everything and understood it better than everybody else, dubbed it the “point of ritual death.” Romance novels old and new incorporate this moment. Beneath it, according [...]