The Last Secret Vice (part 1)

(A  Reader’s Guide to Romantic Fiction)

A Note from Lady M: Here is the first of many unpublished and out of print short works of Paula Schwartz (Elizabeth Mansfield). While I am not sure exactly when this article was written, I believe it was in the early-mid 1980′s.  I have chosen to present this in 3 parts, as the entire article is about 3,000 words. Before Mrs. Schwartz became a novelist, she was a Professor of English and Theatre at Dunbarton College in Washington, D.C. It shows in this article.  Some of the ideas espoused here are elaborated in another article “Why I Am Not Jane Austen,” which will be re-published here in this blog at a later date.

Buried inconspicuously on the obituary page of the New York Times of July 6th, 1974 was a brief paragraph reporting the death of Georgette Heyer. The obit editor was probably unaware that for hundreds of thousands of readers, Miss Heyer’s passing was a blow worthy of front-page headlines. Why was the obit editor unaware of this? Because Georgette Heyer wrote romances, and even though any bookseller will tell you that her books are still best-sellers (all fifty of them), nobody admits to reading them.

In fact, nobody with the slightest claim to literary sophistication will admit to reading any sort of romance. If one divided readers into two classes — those who read romances and those who don’t–it would be immediately apparent that the latter group regards the former with complete contempt. And even though our moral climate is wildly permissive, and any vice from heroin addiction to masturbation can be admitted in the public press under the writer’s real name without causing that writer to lose the respect of his family and friends, persons caught reading a romance are immediately subject to ill-disguised sneers, utter scorn, the diminution of the world’s regard for their intellectual prowess and an abrupt decline in their social status. It’s therefore the only vice left that people are ashamed to admit.

At a time when perfectly respectable people buy books with subject matter, covers and titles  which are the most lurid in history and read them openly, it may seem unbelievable that the reading of any sort of book can cause shame in the reader. But the romance has that dubious distinction. How it achieved this distinction is a matter of some complexity and may be of interest to readers, even those who haven’t tasted the pleasures of a good romance.

It is not so easy to define just what a romance is. Yes, it’s a novel, but it differs  from other novels in several ways. Its authors know they are not writing “art” for one thing. The book is meant to entertain, as are all “genre” novels like westerns, science fiction, espionage tales and mysteries. In the romance, however, a love story figures most prominently in its plot. It’s usually defined in literary dictionaries (which what I feel is an unmistakable air of superciliousness) as a “type of novel marked by a strong interest in action, often based on love, adventure and combat, read more as a means of escape from existence than of familiarities with the actualities of life. A happy ending is often arrived at by highly artificial means.” One thing that did not figure prominently in romances until recently was explicit sex, but that has dramatically changed in the last two years. But more of that anon.

The aspect of escapism in romances is one reason the readers may feel shame in reading them, but this scarcely seems to be a sufficient cause for the light-school principal in my sons’ school to hide his copy of The Reluctant Widow in the jacket of Crisis in the Classroom. (I discovered this ploy while waiting for him to come in from “hall duty” during the change of class periods. When he saw that I had found him out, the poor fellow nearly died of embarrassment, and it wasn’t until I’d told him that not only had I read and enjoyed that book but that I wrote books of the same type that the red flush began to recede from his ears.)

the sense of shame that makes romance readers go into hiding is even more puzzling when one realizes that romances have a long and respectable history, going back to Sir Walter Scott and beyond. Only a few decades ago, under the name of historical novels, they were being read quite openly and selling in fantastic numbers. Writers like Daphne DuMarier, Elizabeth Goudge, Thomas Costain, Anya Seton, Samuel Shellabarger and Frank Yerby were found regularly on the best-seller lists with their stories of love and derring-do. What made their books respectable was the fact that the writers had set their tales in periods of history somewhat removed from our own. They had,  presumably, done lots of research in their “periods,” and we could read their books so openly because we would be learning something. This innocent, Puritanical justification is now a little laughable. How many of the two million readers of The Black Rose, the three million readers of The Winthrop Woman and the more than seven million readers of Gone With the Wind were interested in historical research?

Not surprisingly, the historical novel–one part love to five parts swash, and all of it heavily overlaid with historical detail– declined in popularity and turned into the present-day romance. The historical novelist, in order to be “respectable” and to be considered a writer of “literature” had made his story heavy with solid, factual detail. The poor reader, interested only in the consummation (with a kiss and a blackout) of the love affair between the dashing Captain of the Guard and the Duke’s imperious daughter, had to skim through hundreds of pages of battle mayhem and political intrigue. The books became graceless, and ponderous, and, literary dinosaurs that they were, their days were numbered. But some of the writers–women for the most part–began to realize that they could keep their readers if they gave them more love than swash or history, and they changed accordingly.

continued in part 2