Who reads it?

If you're an enthusiast, or even a general reader with a fair mind, you probably know the ball park, even if you haven't got a handle on the statistics. So here they are, well some of them.

Romance in the USA, where the statistics are the most readily available, was in 1999

18% of all adult books sold (hardback and paperback)
39% of all popular fiction sold (mystery/detective/suspense is 26%)
58% of popular paperback fiction sold

Statistics from the Romance Writers of America. http://www.rwanational.org/StatiticsBrochure2003.pdf

All right, I hear you say, so it's BIG. That doesn't mean it's good. The reverse, in fact. Anyone want to mention lowest common denominators?

OK OK OK The idea that anything popular has to be meretricious has been set into our appreciation of culture for a long time.

I even sympathise with the principle a bit. Most sensible people are scared of mobs. (Though some can take it a bit far : 'you blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things . . .') But actually that is not what is going on here. A readership cannot be a mob. A mob is a public thing, swung this way and that instantly without taking time to reflect. A readership, by contrast, is the sum of a lot of individuals. They buy (or borrow) their books, take them home, read them in their own time at their own pace. And then those individuals think, criticise, recommend, buy the next one by that author - or not. This is not a knee jerk reaction.

And nobody talks about the highest common denominator. You could make as good a case for that.

Ah but, say the detractors, the sales figures are skewed because individual romance readers buy so much. They are addicts. (A Romantic Times article once said that some of them buy forty books a month.)

Well back to RWA again. Every third woman has read a romance in the past year. One in three. That's not a tiny group. That's not a secret society of addicts. That's people you know.

They're incompetents, reading romance to make up for their personal and professional inadequacies, aren't they?

No actually. According to RWA's research of those admitted readers:
57% are married, 23% are single, 13% widowed, 8% divorced or separated
40% have children living with them
69% are high school or college graduates; 9% have post graduate degrees
59% are in the labour force, 23% make $50,000-75,000 a year

Doesn't sound incompetent or neurotic or out of touch, does it? Just normal.

Romance as Tosh

So what we have is a perfectly normal genre - it has been around for centuries - read by perfectly normal people - about as wide a cross section of our society as you can get which is constantly derided, even reviled.

It's a cheap joke for journalists, the journalists I've come across anyway. As for academics, with a few honourable exceptions, the academic references I come across seem to imply a romance genre that I simply don't recognise. A recent university module I saw included a study of 'the politics of trashy fiction'. Another wanted the students to discuss 'formulaic writing'. Students? Brainwashed operatives who know what the answers are before they start because their tutors are telling them- modern romantic fiction supports savage and outdated gender roles reinforced by bad grammar and worse emotional insight. And it simply isn't true. (Sorry, getting carried away there!)

A Different Perspective on Romance

We can have a toot about it. I had mine in the UK Romantic Novelists Association News Letter. Click Here to see.

Canadian author Robertson Davies (a class act by anybody's standards: The Deptford Trilogy has to be one of the great literary achievements of the last century ) made several profound points, quoted in the recently published For Your Eyes Alone; the Letters of Robertson Davies, edited by Judith Skelton Grant, Viking Press.

' I do not think that it makes the least difference that the Harlequin books are undistinguished from a literary point of view. People who like narrative need not have an exacting literary taste any more than people who like music need have a highly trained or sophisticated musical one. It is half-baked intellectualism which insists that nothing is satisfying in the theatre or in narrative or in music which is not of the currently fashionable top class. … It is dangerous to condemn stories as junk which satisfy the deep hunger of millions of people. These books are not literary art, but a great deal of what is acclaimed as literary art in our time offers no comfort or fulfillment to anybody.'

I'm not sure how many of Davies' ideas I go along with to the end of the road. But I whole heartedly sign up to two at least: that what is perceived as 'top class' is not only highly subjective but highly subject to fashion; and that romantic fiction satisfies the deep hunger of millions. (See those RNA statistics!)

Whether all, some or any category romances can be said to pretend to literary art is more debatable, I think. (First define literary, I suppose; then art.) I'm still pondering.

I suspect that 'literary fiction' is in practice simply another genre, with its own recognisable conventions, conceits and shibboleths. What is interesting is that it is romantic fiction which has been demonised as its evil and worthless swan sister. Science fiction, crime, mystery and horror are all allowed a toe hold in the same universe. But romance is literary fiction's anti matter.

Really the only way to turn this on its head is to look seriously at romantic novels we have enjoyed and try to see what it is that they deliver, how we receive it and why we went looking for it in the first place.

There are some very serious people who are romantic authors who already do this. I commend to you the following sites. I shall try to bear my part in the ongoing debate too. Always trying not to forget that romance is supposed to be fun, of course.

http://www.krentz-quick.com/ giant of the genre. Writes contemporary and historical with equal success. Has also co-authored the seminal Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women University of Pennsyvlania Press 1993. Site content includes reflections on the romance genre.

http://www.sff.net/people/JenniferCrusie/ an ex Harlequin author who has made it into the mainstream, with comedy romance in small town America. Her critical writings are as stimulating (if not quite as funny) as her novels.

http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/sep00/lowell.htm some interesting content from a mainstream cross over writer with a couple of author personae

http://www.janeporter.com/index.htm new website by a new Harlequin Mills & Boon author - if you want to see how it feels to be a newly published author, visit Jane!

http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/4.1/Felski.html thoughts of an academic rather than a romance author, this paper was published in the Australian Journal of Media and Culture Volume 4 No 1. Stimulating stuff about kitsch and sentimentality. Touches on characters from literature who have trouble unpacking fantasy from reality, including Emma Bovary and Stephen King's terrifying Annie Wilkes from 'Misery'.

And - for the truly silly - want to play Spot the Hero? We did this at a party in my house recently. No one got all the answers, including me. [Click here] But if you think you've got them all and want to know earlier, email me.

You can make any comments on what I've written here, by sending me a message Click Here. If there is enough interest (and interesting material), I will put them up in a Comments Page.