Why Can’t Romance Novels Get Any Love?

mett, Agatha Christie and Arthur C. Clarke have a few things in common: they are all canonized writers of popular genres that, for decades, have been critically devoured by popular media and literary scholars alike. English professors from Yale to the University of Alaska have long mined hard-boiled detective novels, science fiction and fantasy, identifying the tropes and memes as revelatory and significant markers of their respective eras — the femme fatale, the sordid luxury of the Orient Express, or a singing computer in 2001:A Space Odyssey.

Missing from the popular genre discussion is romance fiction, both its evolution and contemporary state, a glaring omission that Sarah Frantz Lyons is so determined to fix that she has it tattooed to her right arm. Mixed in with quotes from the likes of Jane Austen and Roland Barthes is this line, selected ironically, from Germaine Greer’s 1970 feminist call to arms, The Female Eunuch:

Greer was skewering the authors of romance novels, and the readers who made them bestsellers, suggesting they were submitting to nothing short of serfdom to their heaving, rippling fictional heroes: alpha males with giant pectorals, important lives, patriarchal views and very little interest in love…until just the right petite, witty heroine comes along.

But two years later, readers responded by making Kathleen Woodiwiss’s bodice ripper The Flame and the Flower a ravishing success.

“We’ve been talking about this for 30 years: since the 1980s at least, it’s been about empowerment versus oppression. […]