Genre History | Romance Fiction Has a History

Three volumes of The Romantic Spirit arranged next to. each other.

The Romantic Spirit: Pre-internet Goldmine

I want you for a moment to imagine yourself in 1983 (easier for some of us than others, I know!). You’ve just finished Jayne Castle’s Candlelight Ecstasy title from the previous year, Spellbound. You need more of Castle’s distinct writing style, but you haven’t seen her name on the new release shelf at the book store in a while. At the checkout counter, you ask about your favorite author, hoping the clerk has heard something.

Today, it would take a few clicks to find the information you need. Not so in 1983! But you’re in luck! The clerk tells you to hold on for a moment, and they turn around to grab a thick trade paperback off the shelf behind them. This may help, they tell you. It’s a brilliant new resource that lists all of the authors you can think of along with their books. The Romantic Spirit, it’s called. In a few seconds you learn that Jayne Castle (real name Jayne Ann Castle Krentz) has also written for Silhouette as Stephanie James, and McFadden as Jayne Bentley. A whole new world of books opens up in front of you as you can now follow your favorite authors as they change name from publisher to publisher.

First published in January 1983, The Romantic Spirit was the self-published debut for an author named Mary June Kay. Appropriately for a book about pseudonyms, Mary June Kay was the pseudonym for three San Antonio women- Mary Hotchkiss (1921-2004), June Manning (1923-2008), and Kay Garteiser. Hotchkiss and Manning were sisters who had retired from federal service and operated a romance-focused used bookstore called The Second Edition in San Antonio. They knew their stock, but didn’t have any printed reference resource for themselves or readers to use in finding, or more particularly, cross-referencing more romances. Garteiser worked with word processors at an accounting firm, presumably bringing the technical know-how to the project.

Lovers of genre fiction have long relied on bibliographies- collectors of science fiction and mystery novels used them to not only show off their own collections of pulp magazine and novels, but also to be able to cross-reference authors, publishers and titles. As romance exploded in the 1970s and 1980s, no one had yet made an effort to gather information about the genre in one place. Mary, June, and Kay were the first to take on this mammoth task.

The book itself is utilitarian and no-frills. After a brief three page introduction by Romantic Times publisher Kathryn Falk, the books sets straight to business. Authors are listed in alphabetical order, along with their known pen names [in brackets] and real name if known (in parens). Their books are then listed, with the publisher identified and book number if applicable. In some cases, sub-genre information is provided- for example, <RS> for romantic suspense. In the back, numbered lines are listed together, with titles and authors. The information appears to largely be drawn from the published books themselves, though in some cases authors are listed without books; presumably those names were taken from resources such as Romantic Times, which was still in its infancy at the time.

The book was enough of a success that Mary, June, and Kay kept at it for several years. They published updates for 1983-1984, 1985-1986, and 1987-1988 focused only on the books from those individual years, alongside corrected errors or omissions from earlier editions. The original volume earned an award from Romantic Times, presented by Barbara Cartland herself at the 1983 Booklovers’ Convention.

In 1990, Kay Garteiser announced in the pages of Romantic Times that she was retiring from working on The Romantic Spirit due to her health. She passed the torch on to occasional RT reviewer Lisa Miller, also a San Antonio resident, who put out a revised full edition of the book in 1990. The revised volume used the same format as the original, adding books and new entries where appropriate, though it lacks the line indexes of the original.

*The Roman*ce *Reader’s Handbook* (1989)

At the same time as Mary, June and Kay were working on The Romantic Spirit, reviewer Melinda Helfer was writing a column for Romantic Times identifying authors and their pseudonyms, calling herself “The Pseudonym Sleuth”. Helfer began writing the column in 1981, taking an alphabetical approach. By 1989, she had only reached the letter “P”, which tells you the scope of the task. In 1989, Helfer’s work was combined with that of Kathryn Falk and Kathe Robin in The Romance Reader’s Handbook, published by Romantic Times. This spiral-bound volume took a less comprehensive approach than The Romantic Spirit, listing only the pen names and known real name of authors but not their books. Also included was a guide to RT’s “Bookstores that Care” network, a nationwide group of independent bookstores that welcomed romance readers (and generally sold RT as well). The Second Edition in San Antonio isn’t listed- near as I can figure it was gone by then. There’s also contact information for authors and publishers, and a delightful collection of author ads in the back.

Ad from *The Romance Reader’s Handbook* (1989) from Dorothy Garlock, where she wishes her readers “health, happiness, and good eyesight”.

The five editions of The Romantic Spirit, alongside The Romance Reader’s Handbook, are not essential resources for collectors in this day and age. The vast majority of the information about authors found here can be found elsewhere. But- not everything can be found on the internet! There are author listings here that can connect you to authors you may never have thought of as romance authors, such as mystery author Jane Haddam, who wrote romance as Nicola Andrews and Ann Paris. And the bookstore section of The Romance Reader’s Handbook is an exploration waiting to happen all on its own! Or maybe you’re just like me, and a random name pops into your head at 9:30 at night and you don’t feel like looking at a screen. It can be tricky to find all of these volumes, but to me, the joy of a nicely done bibliography is well worth it!

*The Romantic Spirit* (1983, 1984, and 1990), and *The Romance Reader’s Handbook* (1989)

Some updates!

Posted on June 1 by Steve Ammidown

It’s been quiet here, but I promise I’ve been busy. I created a new Instagram account called the Romance Historian, where I’ve been sharing shorter content about some of the random romances and reference books in my collection. Some of it will mirror content you’ve read here, but I’ll try to make sure there’s lots of new bits and bobs to enjoy.

The Summer 2022 edition of Fine Books & Collections, featuring my article on romance collecting!

I also recently wrote an article for Fine Books & Collections Magazine, which is in their Summer 2022 issue! I was able to speak with some of my favorite people in the romance collecting community- Funmi Brown, Jennifer Wielt, Rebecca Romney, and Rebecca Baumann- about their approaches to collecting, and how they’d like to see collecting in the genre grow. It was great fun talking with these awesome people, and I’m really pleased with how the article came out. You can order print editions of the magazine directly from their website, or you can find it at select bookstores.

I hope you’re having a great start to your summer, and look for more content soon!

Eva Rutland (1917-2012)

Posted on April 5 by Steve Ammidown

The vast majority of category romance writers in the 1980s and 1990s did not create beloved characters or become household names. From their relative anonymity, they turned out book after book, year after year, of happy endings that brought readers happiness. When they pass away or stop writing for some other reason, they often end up forgotten by the reading public. In many cases, those authors were fascinating people in their own right, whose personal stories deserve to be remembered.

There is no more shining example of that than Eva Rutland.

Head shot of Eva Rutland — Eva Rutland (credit: IWP Book Publishers)

Eva Rutland was born in 1917 in Atlanta, the daughter of a pharmacist and a school teacher. Her grandfather, Isaac Westmoreland, was a former slave who worked as a shoemaker to ensure that each of his children attended college. Eva attended Atlanta’s segregated public schools, and graduated from Booker T. Washington High School, where she appeared on stage with classmate Lean Horne, and went on to Spelman College, where she graduated in 1937. After marrying Bill Rutland, a civilian Air Force employee, the couple moved to Tuskegee, Alabama and Columbus, Ohio before settling in Sacramento, California. While stationed in Tuskegee, Eva underwent an operation that ended up severing her vocal cords, which led to her needing a tracheotomy tube in order to speak.

Rutland was a lifelong writer, with her first story appearing in an Atlanta newspaper when she was 12. While raising her children in Columbus, Ohio in 1952 she wrote the first of a number of pieces for women’s magazines about the experience of raising Black children under segregation. Those magazine pieces formed the basis for her first book, The Trouble With Being a Mama: A Negro Mother on the Anxieties and Joys of Bringing Up a Family, published in 1964.

After her first book, Rutland turned to fiction and began writing stories. She had begun to lose her sight due to retinitis pigmentosa, but did not let that stop her. In a 2011 interview with AARP, Rutland described her early process- she would dictate a story into a tape recorder and then slowly transcribing using a regular typewriter.

Cover of the book Matched Pair — *Matched Pair* (1988) by Eva Rutland

In 1988, after years of trying, Rutland’s first book was published by Harlequin. To Love Them All debuted in the Harlequin Romance line in March of 1988, just two months after Eva turned 71. It was followed in November 1988 by another contemporary, At First Sight.

A year later, the author whose favorite book was Pride and Prejudice would become the lead author for Harlequin’s new line of Regency category romances. Matched Pair (1989) is a classic “sweet” fake relationship Regency with, not to give it away, a surprising deus ex machine twist at the end. For several years, Rutland would go back and forth between contemporaries for Harlequin Romance and Regencies for Harlequin Regency Romance, until the latter line’s demise in 1993- after that she only wrote contemporary stories. Among her Regency romances is 1991’s The Willful Lady, which I mention mostly because it has one of the most delightful covers in romance history, featuring a man falling down while trying to hold on to a Macaw.

Cover of the book The Willful Lady — *The Willful Lady* (1991) by Eva Rutland

Of the 18 titles Eva Rutland wrote for Harlequin only the last, 2005’s Heart and Soul, published when she was 88, features a Black main character. In a 2000 profile for the Orlando Sentinel, she says that she had once considered writing an earlier book with a Black character, but had been dissuaded by a friend. During the time Eva was writing for Harlequin, the publisher put out only a handful of stories with Black main characters, so one can imagine a writer who wanted to keep working with the publisher not wanting to mess with success. Even authors like Sandra Kitt and Chassie West, who had in the early 1980s written groundbreaking books with Black characters for the publisher, were mainly writing white protagonists for Harlequin.

It is worth taking a moment here to point out that while we know that Eva Rutland was one of the few Black authors writing for Harlequin in the 1980s and 1990s, we cannot definitely say how many others there might have been. Many authors published under pseudonyms, and would’ve been either implicitly or explicitly told to stick to writing white characters for their books, which may have led them to write very little or later disavow what they did write. We just can’t be certain. Rutland’s status as the first Black author to write a Regency romance for Harlequin is undeniable, however.

Eventually, Eva would team up with Sandra Kitt and Anita Richmond Bunkley to write novellas with Black characters, this time for Signet- 1996’s Sisters and 1999’s Girlfriends. Rutland’s stories in these books- Guess What’s Cooking in Sisters and Choices in Girlfriends– would end up being her only romances to feature Black couples.

In her later career, Eva published the semi-autobiographical women’s fiction story No Crystal Stair for Harlequin’s Mira imprint in 2000, and updated her 1964 book, giving it the new title When We Were Colored: A Mother’s Story in 2007. Eva’s daughter Ginger has adapted When We Were Colored for the stage as well. Eva and Ginger appeared on NPR in 2007 to discuss the book and Eva’s career. Eva also recorded an oral history interview with the Center for Sacramento History in 2009, the transcript of which is available through the Internet Archive.

Eva Rutland passed away on March 12, 2012, at the age of 95. She lived a remarkable life despite the challenges she faced, and is well worth celebrating as part of the history of the romance genre.

Covers of four books written or edited by Carolyn Nichols.

Carolyn Nichols (1939-2017)

Posted on March 17, 2022 by Steve Ammidown

As American romance publishing boomed in the early 1980s, editors frequently played an outsized role in shaping the direction of the genre. Avon’s Nancy Coffey famously retrieved Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower off of a slush pile in the early 1970s for a weekend read, liked what she read, and changed the historical romance game forever. Vivian Stephens took over Dell’s moribund Candlelight Romance line in 1979 and injected it with relatable characters and locales, upped the heat level, and made it the first line to seriously challenge Harlequin’s dominance of the category romance market. Today I want to add a new name to that list- one that we don’t often mention, but who had just as important an impact.

Around the same time Vivian Stephens was joining Dell, a new face appeared in the offices of Berkley-Jove in New York. Carolyn Nichols came to publishing from journalism, having been one of the earliest writers for WETA television in her hometown of Washington, D.C.. Like Stephens, she felt something was missing from Harlequin’s tried and true romance formula that could be exploited. According to John Markert’s Publishing Romance, Nichols submitted a memo to Berkley-Jove management in 1978 outlining an idea for a contemporary romance line with increased sensuality that could compete with Harlequin Presents. Management didn’t like the idea, but after the arrival of Stephens’ Candlelight Ecstasy line in 1980, Nichols was finally given the green light and went about creating the line that would become Second Chance at Love (Markert, 94).

Carolyn Nichols may have been new to publishing, but she wasn’t new to romance. Born Carolyn Iona McKnight in Lafayette, Louisiana in 1939, she grew up in Washington, D.C., attending Wilson High School and then George Washington University before working at WETA, one of the first public television stations in the country. In the mid 1970s, she partnered with WETA colleague Stanlee Miller Coy for a series of gothic romances- definitely five, possibly six- under the pseudonym Iona Charles. In 1978 and 1979, not long after she had joined Berkley-Jove, Carolyn published two books under the pen name Carolyn McKnight, including Gravetide for Vivian Stephen’s Candlelight Romance! Nichols understood the romance market as both a consumer and author, a viewpoint she’d use to her advantage over the next few years.

The Reluctant Lady (1976) by Iona Charles (Carolyn Nichols and Stanlee Miller Coy), and Gravetide (1978) by Carolyn McKnight (Carolyn Nichols).

More than a copy of Harlequin Presents, the identifying feature of Second Chance at Love- as the name suggests- was that both main characters had experience with love. They may have been married- to each other or someone else- and divorced, or widowed, or otherwise driven apart. This naturally meant that characters were older and typically were no longer virgins, a marked departure from the older formulas, and more in line with the direction Candlelight Ecstasy was taking. The line launched in June of 1981 with Susanna Collins’ Flamenco Nights, and found success in a contemporary romance market that was not yet oversaturated- although it was getting there.

Nichols’ success did not go unnoticed. A year after the premiere of Second Chance at Love, she was hired by Bantam in 1982, ostensibly to save their newly launched line, Circle of Love. A Harlequin Romance clone, Circle of Love turned down the heat at a time when its competitors were turning up the heat, and it was struggling to stay afloat. Luckily for Bantam, Carolyn Nichols had a better idea.

The many lines launched between 1980 and 1982 were starting to create a glut in the romance market. Highly specific tip sheets, like the one Nichols herself created for Second Chance at Love, had created too formulaic of a product. Worse still, publishers with little experience in romance and no interest in hiring talent who did were throwing sub-par books onto the market, hoping readers would snap them up anyways. The quality of a new line had to be something special.

At the same time, a nascent fan culture was emerging in romance. The reader-oriented Romantic Times had launched in 1981, and held its first Booklover’s Convention in 1982. As they had done with historical romance, readers were starting to identify authors they liked and not just the lines they wrote for, and wanted to know more about the people behind their favorite books. Nichols saw all of this and developed a plan that would make her new line stand out in what was now a very crowded field.

With Loveswept, Carolyn Nichols threw away several parts of the old category romance formula. Gone were the tip sheets and guidelines for authors. Also gone were the pseudonyms and relative anonymity of the author. Each book would be under the author’s real name, and the inside of the front and back cover would include a picture of the author and a note from them about their lives. By giving authors the chance to write the stories they really wanted to write, and readers the chance to get to know their favorite authors better, Nichols was betting Loveswept would work.

Loveswept’s free sampler (undated, but late 1982 or early 1983).

The other new thing about Loveswept was how it launched- with a free sampler. About the size of a category novel, somewhere around 200,000 of these were printed featuring a chapter from each of the first six books in the series, along with a biography of each author. Importantly, Nichols’ editor note at the front of the book identified each author as well as the pseudonyms they’d already published under as well as their prior publishing houses. The six authors in the book- Sandra Brown, Helen Mittermeyer, Noelle Berry McCue, Fayrene Preston, Carla Neggers, and Dorothy Garlock- had to that point used some combination of sixteen pen names, but here they were standing on their own.

Sandra Brown from the inside cover of *Heaven’s Price*, Loveswept #1.

The line was a hit. Nichols’ instincts payed off, and both authors and readers came to love Loveswept over its sixteen year existence before it was shuttered in 1999 (it was resurrected as an ebook-only line in 2011). As she had predicted, authors preferred writing without limits, and readers loved seeing their favorite authors at their best. Nichols continued to innovate- 1986 saw the launch of The Delaneys, one of the earliest attempts at a category romance cross-author series, featuring superstars Kay Hooper, Fayrene Preston and Iris Johansen all writing in the same world. Within each of the books was an ad for Clairol hair dye, including colors that matched that of each of the female main characters.

Nichols would go on to a long career as an editor and publishing executive at Ballantine and New American Library before retiring from NAL as Vice President and Executive Director, Editorial in 2001.

Carolyn Nichols died on October 21, 2017 at her home in Portland, Oregon. Former employee and writer Elizabeth Barrett wrote a lovely remembrance of Nichols after her passing. While we don’t talk about her much now, there can be no doubt that Nichols played a crucial role in the development of American romance. Her innovations as an editor centered readers and authors in ways that shaped the genre to this day and she belongs in any conversation about the most important romance publishing figures of the 20th century.

Collecting Romance- Harlequin and manga

Posted on October 7, 2021 by Steve Ammidown

Back in January, I was starting to think about collecting some romance novels (everyone needs a hobby, right?) and what I’d want my collection to look like. Anyone who knows me won’t be surprised to learn that what I really wanted was to collect oddballs. Books that might not mean much to most readers, but mark an important point in the history of the genre. This both keeps me from driving myself up a wall trying to find sequential Harlequin Historicals (though that’s an idea!) and it makes me feel better knowing that someone, somewhere is holding onto these books with the knowledge of what they mean.

So where to start? There are so many ways to go that your head would spin for weeks. But I knew where to begin. With Harlequin’s Dark Horse manga.

What? Harlequin manga? You heard me. Let me explain.

As described in this excellent article from Duke’s Unsuitable blog, Harlequin entered the Japanese market in the early 1980s and found success within a decade, becoming a dominant provider of fiction translated from English in the country. As they did in other countries, Harlequin became a hit by hiring local translators who not only adapted the text, but adjusted plots and dialogue to fit different cultural norms. But they saw the potential for more by getting into the Japanese ladies comics market. In 1998, they began partnering with Ozora Publishing House to translate their books into comic form.

As the new century dawned, manga began to become more popular in America and Harlequin saw yet another opportunity for growth. In 2005 the company licensed Dark Horse Comics to translate and distribute their manga titles back to English.

Only six titles were published by Dark Horse before Harlequin took over distribution in 2006, and continues to do so to this day. Inevitably, the manga shifted to the digital space, and they’re available in the US through Harlequin Comics.

The six Harlequin manga titles published by Dark Horse- *A Girl in a Million* (2005), *Response* (2005), *Holding on to Alex* (2006), *Idol Dreams* (2006), *Blind Date* (2006), and *The Bachelor Prince* (2006).

As I said though, my interest is really in those Dark Horse titles. They represent a fascinating translation project from start to finish. A book like Debbie Macomber’s The Bachelor Prince (published as a Silhouette Romance in 1994) first had its text translated from English to Japanese, including cultural changes, for a regular text edition. Then the text was translated into graphic form by Misao Hoshiai and published in Japan. Then the text from that graphic form was translated back into English Ikoi Hiroe for the American market. It’s a little bit like a romance version of Telephone Down the Lane, right?

Another interesting element of these six editions is that while the original texts all had different authors, and the manga translation was done by five different artists, they were all translated back to English by the same person. It raises fascinating questions of whose voice is really represented in the books.

Another unique aspect of these books is the way there were presented. Two separate lines were created. The first, Harlequin Pink, was intended for all ages. Typically, these were from the Harlequin or Silhouette Romance lines, so they tended to be pretty chaste. The books in the Harlequin Violet line were Harlequin Presents books, which tended to have a higher heat level, but were still closed-door. The Violet books were marketed as being for readers age 16 and over.

The color of the line the books as assigned to also indicated what color ink would be used in the printing. This was a gimmick that definitely had mixed results.

Interior pages from *The Bachelor Prince* (2006).

The pink volumes are, quite frankly, headache-inducing after a while. While it’s really more of a dark pink ink, it still ends up being very difficult to read.

Interior pages from *Holding on to Alex* (2006).

The violet/purple ink for the other volumes is really only marginally better. Not so many headaches, but I have found it hard to concentrate on it for any length of time.

Ultimately, Harlequin eliminated the Violet line for US audiences, and stuck with Pink. Thankfully, the Harlequin Comics volumes you read today are in good old black and white.

These six volumes won’t ever make me rich, and they have no lasting significance to romance history beyond the fact that they were Harlequin’s first experiment into graphic storytelling. But they were easy to acquire, with all six costing me around $35 including shipping despite the fact that I bought them from multiple sellers, and they’re interesting conversation starters that I’m happy to have.

Spines of all six Harlequin Dark Horse manga

What was your starting point for romance collecting? Or are there books you secretly lust after?

Advertisement for the 2021 Ramona Pageant in Hemet, California

A Brief History of “Indian Romance”

Posted on August 3, 2021 by Steve Ammidown

Like so many things that eventually go wrong in American history, the story of the so-called “Indian Romance” can, I think, be traced back to a white person who thought they had good intentions. In 1881, an east coast social crusader named Helen Hunt Jackson wrote a non-fiction book called A Century of Dishonor, detailing the previous 100 years of federal mistreatment of Indigenous Peoples. Jackson sent a copy to every member of Congress in an attempt to persuade them to treat Indigenous Peoples more fairly. Despite Jackson’s best efforts, the book failed to move public policy. Instead, she felt it was time to turn to fiction in an attempt to win over hearts and minds.

Cover of an a first edition of Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson (1884). Image from Wikipedia.

In 1884, Jackson published Ramona, a story about a woman of mixed Scottish-Native American ancestry and the mistreatment she faced at the hands of missionaries and settlers in California. Underpinning the story is a criticism of federal laws that made it easy for settlers to seize lands from indigenous people, but it was the Spanish missions and the doomed love of Ramona and sheepherder Alessandro that drew most of the attention. The book was massively popular upon its publication, and while less well-known now, has never been out of print.

Helen Hunt Jackson died in 1885, just a year after the book was published. As such, she never got to see the two major unintended consequences of Ramona. The first was the passage of the Dawes Act in 1887, which some credit to Jackson’s work, and broke up the communal lands of Native Americans and forced them to accept American citizenship. While ostensibly designed to avoid the land seizures highlighted by Jackson’s book, it was immensely destructive to Native culture and societies. At the same time, Jackson’s romantic portrayals of Spanish missions and California life became a promotional tool for tourism and real estate development in the state. An open-air play based on the book, called the Ramona Pageant, began in 1923 and continues annually to this day. The name Ramona appeared everywhere in California as a tribute to Jackson’s heroine, from schools to highways.

Advertisement for the pageant version of Ramona, billed as “California’s Official Outdoor Play”.

Ramona’s portrayal of settlers and “noble savages” would became a major pillar of the Western genre in American popular culture. Versions of the love story between Ramona and Alessandro, typically between a white settler and a Native American appeared in books and films for decades. Ramona itself has been made into a film five times, including a 1910 D.W. Griffith adaptation that featured Mary Pickford in the title role.

With the growth of historical romance in the 1970s and early 1980s, it seemed inevitable that Western stories would become part of the genre. Nakoa’s Woman by Gayle Rogers, published around the same time as Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower in 1972, features the cover blurb “A fierce Indian warrior, a beautiful white captive- an enthralling love story”. Variations on this setup would become the norm for the so-called “Indian Romance”, which really exploded in 1981 with the publication of Janelle Taylor’s Savage Ecstasy. Taylor and her fellow Zebra/Kensington author Cassie Edwards would go on to be responsible for more than 100 “Indian Romances”, most of which feature “Savage” or some variation in the title. And they were not alone. The subgenre was massively popular, so much so that from 1984-1993, Romantic Times gave awards for the “Best Indian Romance”.

Covers of *Nakoa’s Woman* by Gayle Rogers (1972), *Savage Ecstasy* by Janelle Taylor (1982), and *Savage Obsession* by Cassie Edwards (1983).
Images from Goodreads

Written almost entirely by white women who pride themselves on the “accuracy” of their research, the books rely on the same noble savage tropes used by Helen Hunt Jackson, with Native Americans portrayed as either fierce warriors or submissive (but strong) women. Their love stories are never between Native Americans, but always involve a white person (or “half breed”) as the hero or heroine. The authors pride themselves on research into ceremonies and dress, but at the same time portray love stories that rarely if ever happened in the time period they are writing about.

The stereotypes portrayed in the so-called “Indian Romance”, however well-intentioned they may have been in Helen Hunt Jackson’s day, are flat-out racist. They reinforce notions of Native Americans as savages who only existed in the past, when they are right here with us, right now. Native men are frequently portrayed as supposedly noble, but also as violent rapists who need the love of a white woman to tame them. The continual use of “Savage” in the titles piles on another layer of insult disguised as a compliment.

It’s really important to know that these books have not disappeared. They are not just some relic of the past. Kensington Publishing still sells the books of Janelle Taylor and Cassie Edwards, which is shocking considering that the company was on the vanguard of publishing the stories of Black and Latinx love. A review of Goodreads will show that people are still reading these old books, and giving them 5 stars. And inspirational publishers like Bethany House have clearly gotten in on this as well, with Kate Witemeyer’s At Love’s Command landing an RWA award this past weekend. Witemeyer’s book doesn’t strictly match the relationships of the books of Edwards and Taylor, with both protagonists being white, but the fact that the plot revolves around a revisionist (and white supremacist) history of the Wounded Knee Massacre and the hero’s involvement in killing Lakota peoples, I see no issues with lumping them together.

I’ve found little organized resistance to the racist tropes and narratives of “Indian Romance” outside of the most recent outrage, and there’s a lot to unpack in why that is that I’m not going to get into today. Let’s suffice it to say that I think the reason we see these books survive today is because few readers, authors, and publishers were interested in standing up against them when they were published, so they continued to stay on shelves for new readers to find. I hope that the renewed awareness brought about by this year’s RWA awards can start to change that.

In all of this, Native American voices have rarely been heard in romance. That is slowly changing. Pamela Sanderson’s Crooked Rock series and Robin Covington’s Redhawk Reunion series are just two examples of Native authors writing contemporary stories of indigenous people finding love without the harmful stereotypes of romance’s past. Let’s hope that more are on the horizon.

Covers of *Heartbeat Braves* by Pamela Sanderson (2016) and *Taking on the Billionaire* by Robin Covington (2020)

Note: I’ve chosen not to link to the offensive titles that I mention above. While I’m happy to link to other works that I discuss on my blog, most of the works I mention here deserve no such consideration. They are readily available, I assure you.

Men who Write Romance- David Wind

Posted on July 26, 2021 by Steve Ammidown

David Wind’s author photo as it appears in *Love Lines* (1983)

It was not all that uncommon for romance authors of the 1980s to collect pseudonyms like they were baseball cards. The legendary Jayne Ann Krentz has used at least 7 pen names (that I know of) over the course of her 40 year career. Sandra Brown and Nora Roberts have each used at least four different names.

The reasons vary- until relatively recently, some publishers required authors to adopt a pseudonym that then was owned by the publisher, giving them free reign to continue putting out books under that name long after the original author left. In other cases, authors like Krentz and Roberts have adopted new pen names to signal to readers the type of content the story will contain- for example, readers of Amanda Quick (Krentz) know they’ll be getting a historical, and J.D. Robb fans (Roberts) know they’re in for a futuristic suspenseful ride.

Now best known for writing mysteries and science fiction under his own name, author David Wind used at least four additional names during the early days of his career. His first book, By Invitation Only (1982), was a contemporary romance published under the name Monica Barrie. From there he published a historical, Whispers of Destiny (1982) as Jenifer Dalton, and A Love So Fresh (1984) as Marilyn Davids.

Covers of *By Invitation Only* (1982), *Whispers of Destiny* (1982), and *A Love So Fresh* (1984)
Images via Goodreads

According to an interview Wind gave to Rosemary Guiley for her book Love Lines (1983), he set up his contracts so that he could actually take the pseudonyms Monica Barrie and Jennifer Dalton to any publisher, so long as the books did not compete with each other. In the end, Wind relied more on the Monica Barrie name than anything, publishing at least 20 books compared to just two Jennifer Dalton titles. Wind also mentions a fifth pen name, Marilyn Davidson, as being exclusive to New American Library, but I can’t find any record of a book published under that name.

Like his fellow author Tom Huff, David Wind seems to have enjoyed the novelty of being a male writer in a female-dominated genre. In addition to his interview with Guiley, Wind wrote regularly for Romantic Times and made conference appearances. In Love Lines he is quoted as saying,

“It’s usually writers who are ashamed of what they’re doing who don’t want their pseudonyms revealed. I’m not, because I like to entertain people. Writing romances hasn’t stopped me from selling mainstream. Even so, I plan on staying with romances- I enjoy them.”
David Wind in Love Lines (1983), page 240

The last Monica Barrie book with a major publisher was 1987’s The Executives, a Silhouette Special Edition. David Wind turned to independent publishing in the 2000s, and has self-published 30 books on his own. In 2013, Monica Barrie’s 1983 title Cry Mercy, Cry Love was republished independently as well. And that’s where I thought the story got interesting. Let me explain.

Cry Mercy, Cry Love in their 1983 and 2013 editions.
Images via Goodreads.

These days when authors get the rights to their books back (in the case of most category romances, it happens a set amount of time after the last time the major publisher put out a version of the book), it’s not unusual for them to republish the books on their own. In the case of the Monica Barrie books, they are not mentioned on his website, but on a separate one specifically for Barrie. This itself isn’t that unusual- you’ll find separate sites for Nora Roberts and J.D. Robb, for example. It goes back to the idea I mentioned earlier of separating genres to make it easier for readers.

Where I became intrigued in this case was in the author biography, where Monica Barrie introduces herself with a brief description including the mention that she is the wife of David Wind.

Screenshot with headline "About Historical and Contemporary Romance Author Monica Barrie" — Description from Monica Barrie’s author biography

David Wind’s biography mentions that he is married to his wife Bonnie. Both Bonnie and Monica are identified as geriatric social workers. It seems pretty clear that these two are linked in more ways than one.

Image of biography from David Wind’s website

So what does this mean? Is Bonnie responsible for the Monica Barrie books, either as author or co-author, and David is now giving her more credit for the work? Or is this just a bit of fun on David Wind’s part to give Monica a back story? My guess is that it’s the latter, although it wasn’t unusual to have husband/wife teams in the 1980s, and there have been examples of republished novels in other genres suddenly appearing with two named authors where it had originally been one. In academia, we’ve seen the #ThanksForTyping phenomenon for decades, where academics will thank “my wife” for doing typing, editing, translating, and even research on published works. So it could be a bit of the former as well.

In the end, it makes no nevermind what the real story is when it comes to David Wind and Monica Barrie. Authors have license to do whatever they like with their pen names and works. But as an archivist and researcher, I’m always digging for the untold or even just slightly obfuscated tales of how things come to be. I can’t help myself! Do you have a favorite example of authors being revealed to be someone, or someones, other than who they wrote as?

Romance Scholarship & Collections- Where We’ve Been, Where We Can Go

Posted on June 10, 2021 by Steve Ammidown

On June 10, 2021 I was part of a panel at the RBMS 2021 conference titled “Happily Rarer After: The Radical Act of Taking Popular Romance Fiction Seriously” with my fantastic friends Rebecca Baumann of the Lily Library at Indiana University and Rebecca Romney, co-founder of the rare book firm Type Punch Matrix. We conceived of this panel as a way to get our colleagues in the rare book and special collections spaces to think differently about the romance genre. Rebecca Romney’s remarks situated the genre within publishing history, while Rebecca Baumann gave some great examples of ways romance novels can be used in book history instruction. I focused on a brief look at the history of scholarship and collecting related to romance within the academy. Below is an annotated version of my scripted remarks.

The academy and its libraries have long had a fraught relationship with romance fiction. It has been seen as an oddity to be studied, not literature to be enjoyed and appreciated, let alone collected in the library’s stacks. Over the past 50 years there’s been a change in these attitudes, but there remains much work to do. Today I want to talk a little bit about the history of studying and collecting romance from an academic point of view and how those of us in libraries and rare books can be a part of the genre going forward.

Several developments of the late 1960s and early 1970s would have long-lasting effects on the academic reception of romance fiction. The first was the development of Harlequin from a Winnipeg-based reprinter of fiction for the Canadian market to a Toronto-based romance juggernaut that sold millions of books across North America. Secondly, libraries began experimenting with special collections, which led to the inclusion of popular texts, including romance, in academic libraries. The rise of second-wave feminist theory gave scholars language, however derisive, that they would use for two decades to critique romance fiction. And finally the publication of Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower in 1972 turned romance fiction from a curiosity to a publishing and cultural force.

Harlequin’s growth as a publisher was fueled by marketing and savvy distribution methods, which saw the company’s books become synonymous with romance novels in the same way we think of Band-Aids as synonymous with bandages. Ubiquity made it an easy target for critics. Germaine Greer included Harlequin Romances, with their compulsory heterosexuality and dominant men, in her 1970 book The Female Eunuch as a key tool of enforcing patriarchal norms around love. Greer’s attitude became the standard when academics considered romance fiction, at least on the rare occasion it was considered, through the early 1980s.

In 1969, just a year before Greer’s book, Dr. Ray Browne opened the Center for the Study of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University, which included a special collection library devoted to all things popular culture. It included everything from Mickey Spillane to Sears catalogs. Dr. Browne saw a library filled with popular texts as key to the development of popular culture studies and it was through this bold idea that the first romance texts began to make their way into an academic library, albeit almost accidentally and not as part of an intentional collecting policy.

As romance fiction exploded in the 1970s, there was little change in how the academy handled it. You won’t find many, if any, articles or chapters devoted to the millions of books sold by authors like Woodiwiss, Janet Dailey, or Rosemary Rogers. Instead, critics continued to focus almost exclusively on Harlequin’s books, and mostly in the abstract. In 1979, Ann Snitow published an article titled “Mass Market Romance: Pornography is Different For Women”. Snitow essentially builds on Greer’s arguments about romance, but takes them a step further, arguing Harlequin’s books are pornographic and actively harmful to women.

At the time of Snitow’s article, historical romances were frequently appearing on paperback bestseller lists, and category romance editors like Vivian Stephens at Dell/Candlelight and Carolyn Nichols at Jove/Second Chance at Love were expanding the form beyond the Harlequin stereotypes of meek heroines and brutish heroes. In these new style books female main characters had fantastic jobs and back stories that included past relationships, and male main characters began to be less domineering and more supportive. Yet until the mid-80s scholars stayed focused on the low-hanging fruit of Harlequin while the genre continued to evolve.

For the most part, libraries continued to share that dismissive attitude towards the romance genre. Public libraries rarely stocked romance novels, and academic libraries ignored the genre almost entirely. Meanwhile, academic libraries saw the publicity generated by Dr. Browne at Bowling Green, and slowly began to acquire popular culture collections of their own, though these were frequently more focused on single topics, almost never including romance, while BGSU continued to cast a wide net.

Around 1984 a shift in romance research towards social science approaches began. Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984) and then Carol Thurston’s The Romance Revolution (1987) are some of the earliest academic studies of actual romance readers and the texts they love. Radway embedded herself with a group of Midwestern readers and discovered that the women she spoke with used romance as a way to separate themselves from patriarchal pressures. Thurston used content analysis as well as interviews with readers and authors to show that the romance genre was constantly evolving to match the changing place of women in modern society.

Radway’s work would in a few years inspire a unique project that further changed the conversation about romance. In 1992, romance author (and former librarian) Jayne Ann Krentz gathered a group of fellow authors, many of whom were also academics, to publish Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women through the University of Pennsylvania Press. The authors responded point by point to the various accusations lobbed at the genre by critics over the decades. This put romance authors into conversation with their critics and underlined the determination of the genre’s defenders to have their voices heard.

That DIY attitude would intersect with libraries in the early 1990s. Romance author (and former librarian- see a theme developing?) Cathie Linz became the Romance Writers of America’s first library liaison in the early 90s and immediately made inroads with public libraries, including bringing romance authors to the ALA and Public Libraries Conferences. At one of those conferences she met a BGSU alum who encouraged her to reach out to the Popular Culture Library, and in 1996 a partnership began. Linz worked with other authors to accumulate materials, and soon the library became home to the Romance Writers of America’s historical records, complete runs of the few genre periodicals, as well as dozens of manuscript collections, and thousands more romance novels. The university would also host academic conferences in 1997, 1999, and 2018 that brought authors like Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Jayne Ann Krentz, and Beverly Jenkins to campus as speakers.

Genre scholarship continued to evolve during this period. More academics who read romance themselves began to integrate the genre into their work, particularly in English departments. Pamela Regis’ A Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003) gave scholars a vocabulary to analyze romance as literature, and in 2005 the Romance Writers of America created its research grant program. The genre’s first dedicated journal, the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, was created in 2010 under the auspices of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, which also began to hold biennial conferences.

During this time, academic libraries finally began to notice the popularity of romance novels, and several small collections cropped up. In 2011, author Nora Roberts endowed the Nora Roberts American Romance Collection at McDaniel College, which includes her own works as well as award-winning and notable texts by other authors. In 2012, Harvard acquired several collections of nurse romances as part of their Women in Medicine collections. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has a similar nurse romance collection, which they used for an excellent online exhibit last year. Brown University includes romance novels as well as a handful of manuscript collections in its popular culture area, and Duke’s Rubenstein Library sometimes host talks as part of the University’s ongoing series of romance author talks. The collections at BGSU remain unparalleled in this area for both their depth and volume. Despite all this, and considering romance is the best-selling genre in America, these collections are few and far between.

And therein lies a tremendous opportunity for libraries, I think. There are thousands of romance collectors and authors out there who would be happy to see their collections find an institutional home. It’s not uncommon to find romance readers with storage rooms filled with romances from the 1980s- these folks want those collections to live on. And in many cases, they have accompanying ephemera collections that are just as fascinating.

Academic libraries can also find value in connecting with the broader romance community. As Radway discovered nearly 40 years ago, there is far more to romance than just the authors and publishers. There are plenty of folks outside of academic structures who are doing remarkable research. For example, last week at the Popular Culture Association conference the romance track included Andrea Martucci, host of the podcast Shelf Love, presenting her demographic research on the attitudes towards romance expressed by readers brought to the genre by Netflix’s Bridgerton series. The Fated Mates podcast, hosted by critic Jen Prokop and author Sarah MacLean, frequently explores the symbols and tropes of romance novels in ways that outsiders to the genre simply could not. DePaul University’s Dr. Julie Moody-Freeman hosts the Black Romance Podcast, an oral history project featuring some of the romance’s legendary Black voices. Those interviews will be published as part of a special issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies this year.

During my time at BGSU I worked with Maura Seale from the University of Michigan to include these kinds of works and dozens more like them in web archives so that they can remain available to researchers for years to come. By actively reaching out to these bloggers and podcasters, we were also able to get them thinking about the long-term preservation of their work, something few had considered. So there’s a lot we can offer that can help build good relationships with these non-traditional researchers and potential donors.

I’ll close by saying that romance fiction has tremendous research potential- as literature, as a physical object, and as a social object- and now is a great time to work on growing your own collections. Thanks.

Men Writing Romance- Tom Huff (1938-1990)

Posted on May 27, 2021 by Steve Ammidown

A short time back, friend of the blog Katrina Jackson raised a question that comes up every once in a while- what’s the history of cishet men writing cishet romance?

It’s a good question, with no simple answer. Most of the cis men whose names I’ve come across use(d) female pseudonyms for their romance books, and historically, only a few have owned up to doing that work. Some have obfuscated this past work by crediting books to their female partners, and some have denied any attribution to them. And in many cases, we’ll never know because the records were sparse to begin with. The rise of self-pub and indie publishing has made this a less common practice today- you pretty easily find men writing historical and inspirational romance using either their own names or male pseudonyms. That definitely wasn’t always the case.

One of the reasons is that the world of paperback originals during the mid-20th century was a mercenary game. Big names aside, working authors- male or female- would write anything for anyone if they thought it would make them a buck, and acquired and shed pseudonyms the way some of us change socks. Sometimes this name-hopping was due to publisher contracts, and sometimes it was a way for the author to keep their distance from work that they may not have wanted to be linked to them. In the case of a publisher-enforced pseudonym, that pseudonym may have then been used by multiple authors over decades (Nancy Drew author “Carolyn Keene” being the most well-known example). All of this means that it can sometimes be nearly impossible to identify or verify who wrote what, so be sure to take everything in these posts with a grain of salt.

Quick side-note: In the world of romance, Harlequin was particularly notorious for its enforcement of pseudonyms. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that Harlequin authors were allowed to take their pseudonyms with them to work with other publishers.

To start this exploration (which I now realize is going to take multiple posts!), I want to start in the 70s, with one of the best-known male writers of romance, Tom Huff (1938-1990). Huff began his writing career in the late 1960s, adopting the pen names Edwina Marlow, Beatrice Parker, and Katherine St. Clair to write gothics for multiple publishers. He even put out two under the androgynous moniker T.E. Huff. But in 1976, as the historical romance boom begun by Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers was well underway, Huff jumped from gothics to historicals hoping for success. And he found it. Adopting the name Jennifer Wilde, Huff published Love’s Tender Fury in 1976 for Warner Books and it sold like gangbusters. Reports were that it went through more than 40 printings in its first five years, and if the cover of this edition is to be believed, more than 2 1/2 million copies.

Cover of Love’s Tender Fury by Jennifer Wilde (Tom E. Huff). (Image taken from Goodreads)

A second Jennifer Wilde book, Dare to Love, arrived in 1978, and spent 11 weeks on the NYT paperback bestsellers list. Jennifer Wilde was on a roll, but few knew her true identity.

And then in 1981, something rather rare happened. Huff had become friends with Romantic Times publisher Kathryn Falk, and in the second issue of her brand new periodical, he revealed himself to be Jennifer Wilde. While he told Rosemary Guiley in Love Lines that this had always been something of an open secret, this revelation could have been career suicide- what if women decided to stop reading his books because he could be seen as “inauthentic”? What if he were to now get pigeonholed as a romance writer, unable to get work writing anything else?

Instead of running from his association with romance fiction, Huff leaned into it. He made public appearances, and even took part in a 1981 article in Life Magazine about romance authors, with photographs by Mary Ellen Mark that truly have to be seen to be believed. He’d go on to publish six more books as Jennifer Wilde before his death in 1990, all of which sold well. For a time, he even wrote the “men’s column” for Romantic Times, and earned a Lifetime Achievement Award from the magazine in 1988.

Tom Huff had just turned 52 when he died of a heart attack on January 16, 1990. His works have been republished numerous times since his death, including a series of very confusingly attributed Open Road Media editions. This one for Marabelle, the only book he wrote under his full name, is listed as “Jennifer Wilde writing as Tom E. Huff”.

Huff’s revelation as a male author inspired several other to do the same. Next time, we’ll turn again to Rosemary Guiley’s 1983 book Love Lines to learn more. Stay tuned!

This post by Forth Worth history blogger Mike Nichols is a goldmine of biographical information about Tom, including pictures from his high school yearbook! Definitely take a look.

Towards an Accurate History

Posted on April 22, 2021 by Steve Ammidown

Or, Why I’m Always Carrying on about Janet Dailey.

If you follow me on twitter,

I’m sorry.
You’ve likely heard me banging on about inaccuracy and Janet Dailey’s first book, No Quarter Asked.

So what’s that all about, anyways? Well, it’s a story about misinformation, half-truths, and what’s missing from the study of the genre. Intrigued? You are? Strange birds.

Alright, sit down, this may take a second. According to lore, Janet Dailey began her writing career somewhere around 1974 when her boss and husband, Bill dared her to write a book like the Harlequins she enjoyed reading. Dailey took the challenge, banged out No Quarter Asked, sent it off to Mills & Boon in London for reasons I’ve never heard adequately explained, and had her manuscript accepted with, according to her, no changes. A publishing miracle if I’ve ever heard one.

But this is where the story gets hazy in some tellings. According to Paul Grescoe’s book The Merchants of Venus: Inside Harlequin and the Empire of Romance (1997), it was 1976 when the Boon brothers, who were based in London and held a stranglehold on the content of Harlequin and Mills & Boon despite being fully part of Harlequin Enterprises by this point, decided to break with tradition and publish an American author, putting out No Quarter Asked as Harlequin Presents 124. Dailey’s official publisher bio uses this date, as did the New York Times obituary published upon her death in 2013. Coincidentally, Kensington is still publishing new books by Dailey, and her family runs a Facebook page in her name that’s written as though she hasn’t been dead for almost a decade. It’s a trip. But I digress.

You see, the problem is that Paul Grescoe is wrong. And so was Janet Dailey when she repeatedly told reporters that her first book came out in 1976.

Huh? How’s that possible?

Good question! You see, the agreed part of the story is that Dailey did in fact send her first manuscript to Mills & Boon in 1974. We don’t know if they did request any changes (Mills & Boon’s editorial practices were notoriously lax), but Mills & Boon turned around and published No Quarter Asked in 1974.

In fact, Dailey would go on to publish 7 more books for Mills & Boon before her work was shipped to Harlequin as part of the Presents line in 1976. Dailey was in fact the first American woman (who we know of at least) to write for Mills & Boon since the company’s founding in 1908. A not insignificant moment for American romance authors!

Cover of Harlequin Presents edition of No Quarter Asked (1976) by Janet Dailey (image via Goodreads)

What Janet Dailey was not, despite her claims to the contrary, was Harlequin’s first American author. Prior to 1964, when Harlequin began exclusively reprinting Mills & Boon books, the company regularly published American authors of romance and other genres. The very first Harlequin title in 1949 was in fact a reprint of The Manatee, by American author Nancy Bruff. And earlier on this blog, we talked about Auburn, New York’s Lucy Agnes Hancock who in 1955 was responsible for fully 1/3 of the titles Harlequin published that year.

This raises two questions- how did all this become so twisted, and why does it matter? Let’s take each in turn.

From the very start, Janet and Bill Dailey styled Janet as the All-American Girl. They framed her early books as an attempt to write a book about every state in the US, and often posed with the Airstream trailer that they used to travel the country to soak in the atmosphere of the place Janet was writing about. Bill put Janet in front of reporters at every opportunity, making her American romance’s first superstar author. If most Americans had never even heard of Mills & Boon, where was the benefit in mentioning the weirdly named British company? In the mid-70s, every romance reader in the US and Canada knew what a Harlequin was to the point of near-ubiquity. I can see them making the calculus that it was easier to go with what people knew when talking about her origin story. And given that it’d been a decade since the Canadian publisher had put out work by an American, where was the harm in claiming the mantle of the first American. It’s all-around good marketing.

If it was the Daileys driving this misinformation, why does any of it matter? In 1976, it didn’t matter. Romance was an ephemeral genre unworthy of more than the occasional mention in the media or academia. But academic study of the romance genre has grown exponentially since then, which brings us back to Grescoe.

Paul Grescoe’s book is a corporate history written by a journalist. It isn’t an academic text, nor does it claim to be authoritative. However, it still stands as the most recent monograph-length writing about the company. Romance researchers, most of whom are performing textual analysis of romance texts on shoestring budgets during time borrowed from other academic tasks, don’t have much time to do original historical research and so will turn to the most authoritative text they can find.

When it comes to the history of Harlequin, Grescoe is that source. Quotes about the company from his book are found in Pamela Regis’ A Natural History of the Romance Novel, John Markert’s Publishing Romance, Maya Rodale’s Dangerous Books for Girls, and many more. The Regis book is particularly influential in the academic space, with its long view of the history of the genre and groundbreaking identification of elements that compose the structure of a romance novel. Unfortunately, Regis directly quotes Grescoe’s incorrect 1976 date when discussing Dailey. Given the reach of this book into the classroom, that means this erroneous information can make it into papers and dissertations without being questioned. A game of academic telephone down the lane begins until the error becomes, however unintentionally, canon.

A Natural History of the Romance Novel, by Pamela Regis (image via Goodreads)

The story of No Quarter Asked is not, in the big picture of romance fiction, that important. But it should serve as a cautionary tale for researchers of the genre, and for those reading that research. Misinformation always starts small and innocuous, until it is repeated frequently enough that it is either accepted as fact or causes significant confusion for those seeking the truth.

The academic community around romance fiction has long been almost exclusively focused on the text and the work the text is performing, so much so that it has left historiography to journalists and random archivists on twitter (ahem). This is, I think, a grave error. As a commercially focused genre, romance fiction is never just the text on the page. It is the author, the editor, the cover designer, the publicity staff, and above all the publisher. Romance fiction must be placed also in its historical context. For example, can we really discuss the phenomenon of The Flame and the Flower in 1972 without also discussing the changing laws and mores around censorship at that moment? (that’s a blog post for another moment)

I urge the romance scholarship community to engage with and support projects that relate to the history of the genre. We’ve got to be able to relay an accurate history before we get into debates about historical accuracy.

(note: this post was edited on May 3, 2021 to remove images taken from the Browne Popular Culture Library twitter account, at their request.)