The romance novel

True love returns
Jul 25th 2002 | DENVER
From The Economist print edition


America rediscovers its heartland

FOR a few days in mid-July, there really was a place where women who �smelled of wildflowers and smoke� and had �a long tumble of flaming curls around a face of rose and cream� could glance hopefully at men with �eyes of clear and calm blue that could harden to steel�. It was Denver, Colorado, where life recaptured something of its old innocence at the annual conference of the Romance Writers of America. This is a body founded in 1980 by three dozen authors who, oppressed by the gritty greyness of the realist school of novel-writing, set out determinedly to recreate the world of P.G. Wodehouse's �Honeysuckle Cottage�.

How well they have succeeded�up to a point. The Romance Writers today have more than 8,000 members. More than 1,500 people turned up at this year's assembly. Sales of romantic books�now a third of all the fiction sold in America�topped $1.5 billion last year, and the figure is rising.

There is, of course, a price. These days the bestseller lists are studded with titles such as �One Night of Passion�, �Fast Women� and �Sins of Summer�. The definition of romance has evolved along with the expectations of the (almost entirely female) readership of these books. So have their covers. A picture of a muscled hunk embracing a knee-buckling waif is embarrassing to hold up to other people's gaze in an airliner or your firm's office. Covers nowadays are more likely to be a swirl of pastel colours around a burst of flowers. The lust advertised by those titles is for the reader's eye only.

Characters have changed too. The typical hero is no longer a brooding English aristocrat with a large estate who, on a chance visit to a sick aunt, meets a lovely, lonely, virginal 17-year-old, says Charis Calhoon of the Romance Writers. �Cops, firemen and blue-collar workers are incredibly hot.� Women have aged a decade or two, even three; not a few of them are curvaceous moguls. There may even be a divorcee with a child.

Some traditions endure. There has to be a relationship. Generally, the heroine and the hero remain monogamous after they meet, regardless of whether it is in Chapter Three or Chapter Ten, however chequered their past, and no matter whether they hate each other at first sight. And there has to be a happy ending. �The conflict,� says Ms Calhoon, �is the struggle to make your love work,� which means, she adds, the struggle to maintain �commitment, monogamy and��well, there has to be some concession��a sense of fashion.�

The reigning queen of this world is Nora Roberts, author of such classics as �Tears of the Moon�, �Jewels of the Sun�, �Born in Fire�, �Born in Ice� and �Born in Shame�. She has written 145 books under her own name, almost all of them following the same pattern: a flawed couple meet, have explicit sex (�hot blood and violent lust he knew he could only chain down for so long�), painfully break up (�Love, she thought, could be such a lie�), and then reunite.

Recently, in her spare time, Ms Roberts has begun writing books under the name of J.D. Robb (�Reunion in Death�, �Betrayal in Death�, �Purity in Death�) in which the chief theme is a mystery, not love (though love is not left out). This year she has published two mysteries, three romances and four reprints. As fast as she produces them, readers inhale them. Every minute another 34 are sold. At the Denver conference the queue waiting for her autograph extended the length of a vast ballroom. When she put her pen down, there was not a copy left to sign. Unsated admirers were left panting for more. And more.