Why I Am Not Jane Austen

Some people find the subject of romance to be trivial pursuit, but since romance is not only my occupation but a lifetime preoccupation, I hope I can imbue the subject with interesting details if not with depth. And though some of what I say may be familiar to those of you who read romantic fiction, my particular way of looking at it may give you new insights.

Let’s start in a scholarly fashion by defining terms. Romance is so difficult to define that the Handbook of Literary Terms starts its definition by saying:

“Romanticism arose so gradually and exhibited so many phases that a satisfactory definition is hardly possible.”

The two meanings that concern us here are Romance as a literary style and Romance as prose fiction.

ROMANTIC LITERARY STYLE: i.e. ROMANTICISM:

a movement of the 18th and 19th cent. wh. marked a reaction to the formal neo-classicism denoting a highly imaginative narrative in which emotion, sentiment or imagination seems to triumph over form, as compared to Classicism (or neo-classic) characterized by use of set forms and Greco-roman subject matter, but with a dispassionate, cold control.

These dichotomies may also be illustrated in the distinction between Apollo and Dionysus: the Apollonian associated with light, intelligence and control (classical), and the Dionysian with the wildly disordered and also wildly creative, hence romantic.

THE PROSE ROMANCE —

(Prof. L.T. Lemon: A GLOSSARY FOR THE STUDY OF ENGLISH.)

“a narrative of indeteinate length, but usually about as long as the novelette. Unlike a novel, it makes little attempt at verisimilitude, concentrating rather upon interesting the reader in super-natural, exotic or erotic adventure, often through a highly imaginative and poetic style. (I’m still quoting)

Since the early days of the novel, critics have tried with slight success to establish a distinction between the novel and the romance. By the criteria listed above, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter are romances; Jane Austen’s Pride and Prjudice, and Dickens’ David Copperfield are novels.”

(A momentary digression: These are not my evaluations. I consider Wuthering Heights a perfect example of the Romantic Movement in lit. Pride and Prejudice, I believe, is classical. We need only think of the behavior of Heathcliff, who, when his beloved dies, beats his head against a tree. I can not think of a single Austen hero who would do such a wildly impetuous thing. Darcy, when he has romantic difficulties, writes a letter! If he did beat his head against a tree, both Jane and I would be appalled.

I once assigned both books to a freshman English class at Dunbarton college, a girls’ school. I hoped they would see the superiority of Austen’s restraint over Bronte’s excess. I regret to report they all preferred Bronte.)

Now, in the days of PAPERBACK ROMANCES, the managements of Borders and Barnes and Noble have no problem distinguishing between novels and romances. They recognize the romances instantly and banish them from the fiction shelves to a section of their own…in the back where most people with literary pretensions are ashamed to be caught browsing.

I don’t mean to be unkind to the bookstore owners. Actually what they’re doing is organizing the thousands of titles they have to deal with into GENRES.

There are several fictional genres — or categories — that the book stores recognize: mysteries, westerns, science fiction, and romance. Each of these divisions probably have a few sub-genres, but we’ll only deal with the sub-genres of Romance. I’ve come up with my own way of classifying them, which I hope will help you if you should ever decide to pick your way through the morass of trash to find the good stuff. And there is good stuff there, or else I wouldn’t be wasting your time asking you to read this.

One more definition before we proceed: SUBTEXT. It’s a lovely word for writers. It refers to an unspoken emotion under the words that somehow makes itself felt. John Gardner, in a book for writers called THE ART OF FICTION, suggests this writing exercise: Describe a lake as seen by a young man who has just committed murder. Do not mention the word murder. The feeling that will inform, shape, underlie the description is subtext.

Now we’re ready for my thesis sentence:

I’ve figured out that there are three major romance types that descended from three giants of fiction of the last century: Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austen. But we must admit that there has been considerable degeneration through the generations.

Let’s start with the Historical Novel. Scott’s IVANHOE can be considered the archetypal historical, in which the historical struggle of the Saxons and the Normans (several hundred years before Scott’s lifetime) is recreated in the story of a knight, who for the honor of his people and to win his lady love, has to do a great deal of fighting. It’s a very respectable work..in fact, a classic of literature. We all had to read it in eighth grade.

All through the middle of our century the historical novel remained quite respectable, though not considered literature. But one didn’t have to feel ashamed when caught reading one. They were selling in fantastic numbers. Writers like Elisabeth 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. But this innocent, Puritannical justification was really a little hypocritical. Two million hard-cover copies of THE BLACK ROSE, three million copies of THE WINTHROP WOMAN sold. And as for GONE WITH THE WIND –7 million copies and counting! How many of all those readers were truly interested in learning history?

This puritanism still persists. Many people are ashamed to admit that they like a book for its love story. I can’t count the number of readers who tell me that they read Regencies for the authenticity of the background and the writer’s admirable research. Oh, really?

The truth is that the historical novel — five parts swash to one part love, and all of it heavily overlaid with historical detail — became a dinosaur. The audience (mostly women, who make up the majority of readers of novels anyway) which cared only for 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 publishers began to perceive that they got more readers if they gave them more love than swash or history. And, with the tremendous success of a book called Forever Amber, they realized that sex, not history, would sell historicals.

Nevertheless, publishers waited for another Gone With the Wind for two decades. It didn’t happen. But something did in the early 70s, and her name is Rosemary Rogers. Rumor has it that her book, WICKED LOVING LIES would never have been read, except that an editor was going away for what she thought would be a boring weekend and took the fattest manuscript from the slush-pile to keep her company. “It’s junk,” she reported the following Monday, “but I couldn’t put it down.” The publisher bought it and the result was amazing. “It was like printing money,” the overjoyed editor said.

That was the beginning of what in the trade are called bodice-rippers, and they account for the condition of the historical romance today. They are so successful that they crowd most of the other romances off the shelves. A bodice ripper is five parts sex to one part history…and terrible history at that. One of them was shown to me by an editor because it was set in the Regency period. The author did not know the difference between England in 1810 and England in 1210. In the opening scene, two warring clans were facing each other across a stone dining hall, the men — so help me!– carrying bows and arrows.

The ingredients of a bodice ripper are instantly recognizable. The cover illustration shows a bosomy female whose bodice is being ripped. It has to be fat (what is called in the trade a good read), and I think some editors require that the heroine be ravished every ten pages. The emphasis is on plot rather than character, the action is movement without motivation. The books infuriate feminists, who understandably object to females being repeatedly ravished and often enjoying the ravishment, yet the market for them is amazing and insatiable. The women who read them are avid readers who devour several a week. These are the most successful romances (with the possible exception of the contemporaries, which I’ll describe anon.)

The second category is the Gothic romance, whose Archetype is, of course, Jane Eyre. (I am not speaking of the eighteenth century gothics like the Castle of Otranto or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Those novels spawned a completely different genre — the Horror novel and its current master, Stephen King. I have an aversion to horror, so you won’t hear another word about it from me.) But Charlotte Bronte inspired a talented imitator in our century who found an enormous audience — Daphne DuMaurier. Her novel Rebecca is probably the best gothic romance of our time. After DuMaurier, the gothic became mummified; it developed rigid rules that allowed for only slight variations of one basic story: a girl finds herself in a dangerous situation in a lonely place. There is a man around to whom she has to turn for help, but whether he’s a hero or a villain will not be disclosed til the end. The covers always showed a girl running wildly through the moors, hair streaming. Behind her is a dark castle and the shadowy figure of a man chasing her. How many versions of that story can one read?

What can be said for the gothics is that they were generally well written: Two of the writers I’m sure you’ve heard of: Victoria Holt (who also wrote under several other names) and Mary Stewart, who later won acclaim with the Crystal Cave, an Arthurian legend.

Too much repetition eventually killed the Gothic genre. I suspect that readers who once loved the Gothic Romance now read mysteries.

The third category, for which Jane Austen is the inspiration, is naturally the most fascinating to me. In order to explain it, I’m going to be a little autobiographical, because in my reading history you’ll find a history of the Regency as a genre of romance.

I always believed that I became a writer of Regencies by accident, but maybe it was — to use a yiddish word — bashert: fore-ordained. I’d been moving in this direction since childhood. You see, since childhood I had a hunger for love stories. I believe that we all are born with something I call story hunger, but for me it was love-story hunger. From the time I could read fairy tales, I would pore through hundreds of pages to reach even the tiniest nugget of a love story. But there were obstacles to the satisfaction of this desire.

I didn’t want to read about sex, I wanted pure love.

my tastes even from early days, was for classic rather than romantic lit.; I had an aversion to sentimentality…what in my youth was called corn.

I had an instinctive sensitivity to language and writing style.

Let me make a brief digression here about style. I’ve learned a lot about it over the years. Pascal once wrote “when we encounter a natural style we are always surprised an delighted, for we thought to see an author and found a man. (This is 1999, so let’s substitute “person” for “man.”) The natural style to which he refers is the feeling that the writer is speaking to you. In the subtext of good writing, something of the writer’s personality reaches you, and you feel a rapport, a miraculous kind of — well, if I can steal a term from sci-fi — a vulcan mind-meld.

But back then, I didn’t know what style was, I couldn’t define it or describe it, but there was certain writing I didn’t like and couldn’t read. For convenience, let’s call it trash. When I was about twelve, I found a thick book in the library. It had green library binding. The Complete Novels of Jane Austen…all six in one volume. It wasn’t too heavy to hold, as it would be for me now. There were love stories that were a wonder. I swallowed all six in one week and took it out again every few months to reread. So, like many others of my generation, I grew up with Austen as my ideal. Elizabeth Bennet became my ideal of womanhood, Captain Wentworth my ideal man. The language of nineteenth century England was my ideal of language, her ironic undertone my ideal subtext.

The trouble was that Jane Austen only wrote six books. I couldn’t satisfy my shameful craving with so limited a supply. I call it a shameful craving because as I grew older I began to learn that there was something shameful about reading love stories, (This is not true of reading Jane Austen. Reading Jane Austen always seems to bestow honor on the reader. We’ll get to the reason for that in a little while.) But having become a gourmet of love stories, I kept on searching for the love story that was suited to my particular taste. And over the years, I did discover a couple of writers whose stories I enjoyed — they suited the special demands of my particular appetite, that is they seemed to connect loosely to the world that Jane Austen had given me a taste for — but who were writing escapist entertainment, not literature. They became my secret vice.

The first one was Jeffrey Farnol. I could do a whole lecture on him. He captured me in my teens, two books in particular that I loved: the Amateur Gentleman, and the Broad Highway. The books were set in the Regency, and usually his stories dealt with a high-born young man, just finished with school, who puts a pack on his back, goes on a walking tour, mingles with the hoi-polloi and finds adventure and love. (I made a kind of obeisance to him in a recent Regency of mine, which starts out the same way. I called the book The Walking Tour, but the publisher changed the title to A Brilliant Mismatch.) Years after my discovery of Farnol, on my first trip to England, I found several other books of his on the London bookstalls and bought them all. …they were terribly flowery and a great disappointment to me.

The second was Georgette Heyer. The lightest of light reading, but to me a delight. But by this time I was an English major and then an English teacher, and I couldn’t admit to reading her. No one with intellectual pretensions did in those days. We’re a little less phony these days. Let me give you a bit of an evaluation of Heyer. Her period is Austen’s — the English Regency, roughly defined as the years between 1790 and 1820. Heyer’s familiarity with those times was phenomenal. Many serious reviewers admitted that she “conveyed the spirit of those times more ably than many a serious historian.” What was most useful to her as a novelist was her knowledge of the ordinary speech patterns of the various social classes of the time: their slang, their cliches, their verbal mannerisms. This language she combined with her own native, understated British wit to give us some very charming dialogue. Moreover her heroines are never merely the conventional beauties one thinks of as typical of romantic novels: they are physically varied, some too tall, one plump, one who stutters; they are clever and original, independent, humorous, well read, ingenious and able to cope with life on their own. And what is best for me, she never got sticky or sentimental. Whenever a scene or situation threatened to get a bit mawkish, she punctured it with a stab of wit.

But there’s another side to her. I found her to be a dreadful snob and a closet anti-semite, both of which qualities I hated. I had to grit my teeth every time she portrayed a villainous, evil Jewish moneylender, which she did very often. But then I grit my teeth at Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest Tale and at Shylock too. Jewish English majors have to get used to offensive characterizations of our people — there are lots of them. As for Heyer, I ignored her weaknesses. She told good love stories, just the sort I like: believable motivation, witty dialog that sparkled the romance, lovely Regency expressions ( a love of words) and a good British style with a touch of sarcasm just under the surface.

Georgette Heyer’s little historicals sold steadily through the midcentury, both in hard and soft covers, and they continue to do so. But next in the history of this sort of book came an English imitator by the name of Barbara Cartland. Cartland became enormously popular (and very rich) by writing short, simple stories for teen-aged girls and unsophisticated women with limited vocabularies and short attention spans. Miss Cartland ground out her stories with alarming speed…I’m told she used to stretch out on her sofa in a filmy negligee and– thus appropriately accoutred — would dictate an opus every two weeks. Anyway, with Heyer on the high end and Barbara Cartland on the low, a new genre, the Regency, was born.

And when Georgette Heyer died, and I could find no one else I enjoy (not even Claire Darcy, who was erudite but lacked charm), Elizabeth Mansfield came along. Not very important for the world, but in my literary biography, a particularly significant event. If I couldn’t find the perfect romance for my taste, I would write it myself.

There are now literally hundreds of writers who write Regencies. As they become more and more numerous, as far as I can see, they are less and less worthy. But I’m no judge. The price I paid for writing them was that I no longer find pleasure reading them.

The birth of the Regency was not a particularly significant occurance in the field of genre fiction. It’s a small genre, last in readership after all the others. The biggest sellers of all in the romance genre are the CONTEMPORARIES. This explosion also began in the sixties and seventies, with the onslaught of the Harlequin Romances. Their success led every publisher to put out a “line” — a series of contemporary romances. Love stories of today, for those who want their daydreams to fit into their current lifestyles. In these stories, the language and plot are simple to follow, and they satisfy their audience by offering them a high degree of wish fulfillment. They satisfy them so much that they’ve made millionaires of many of their practitioners. (Janet Dailey. Danielle Steele)

Today’s trash has a way of becoming valuable tomorrow…dishes they gave away at movie houses in the thirties are now valuable collectors’ items, as are old baseball cards and comic books. In future years some of today’s romances will be taught in English classes. There are already classes being given on soap operas. I’ve heard that one of my own books (A Grand Deception) is being used in a history class at George Mason University to teach the students about English charity schools. Anything is possible.

Genre fiction is a strange amalgam. The books are written as pure entertainment, but there’s a tremendous versatility in the offerings, and a wide variety of writing talent. In the mystery, which somehow has become intellectually acceptable, we hear wonderful things about certain practitioners, like P. D. James. The same is true of some writers of science fiction, several of whom have won a degree of stature. The same is probably true of the romance.

Genre writers write for various levels of reading ability…Barbara Cartland, for example, writes for people who can’t read words of more than one syllable or paragraphs longer than a sentence. But if you read widely in a genre you enjoy, you soon discover who the better writers in that genre are. There is talent to be found even in the genre of historical romance, if you care to look.

But let’s be honest. None of them, no matter how good, can ever give us Jane Austen. Talent is a flame, someone said, but genius is a fire. Today’s romance, no matter how well written, can never be serious literature. Those of us who write Regencies today are daydreaming. We use our imaginations, some well and some poorly, to tell a frothy story. There is no subtext.

Even fairly good writers, like Heyer, don’t deal with reality. Heyer never took note of the real world of the time she wrote about — an ugly and sordid world that was not much different from that described by Swift and Defoe earlier and Dickens later. She never mentioned the lower classes whose suffering made possible the beautiful and elegant world in which the upper classes cavorted. Heyer’s publishers liked to call her a modern-day Jane Austen. She wasn’t even close.

But, it can be said, you can make the same criticism of Austen. Both authors wrote about the English privileged classes and ignored the others. And there are other superficial similarities: Both were primarily concerned with women and their reactions to the vicissitudes of love. Both created magnetic characters. Both had an eye for the comedic and the ridiculous, and both could turn a witty phrase. Why then is Heyer merely a talented craftsman of entertainments and Austen a universally esteemed author of six literary masterpieces?

We know that there are many answers to that question, but one of them is particularly relevant here. One of the differences between light escapism and serious literature lies in the authenticity of experience that goes into the writing. Georgette Heyer knew, as all the rest of us who write romances, that she was writing frothy escapist fare…a literary bubble bath. When you read her books, you enter a world that, for all its supposed authentic detail, never really was. The same is true even for Walter Scott and the Brontes. But Austen, on the other hand, wrote from the depths of her being about the only life she knew. And even though she laughed at her characters and pricked their pretensions with the sword of her satire, we who read her can sense underneath the words — the all-pervasive subtext — the stinging pain of a life really lived.

That doesn’t mean there’s no place in our reading lives for escapist fiction. Sometimes its pleasant to get away from reality, to live for a time in a never-never land of elegance and charm, of wit without bite, of love without sex, of complications that uncoil for a happy ending. Some romances can do that, even today. It’s not a crime to read a romance. It doesn’t even raise your cholesterol level. But if you value your intellectual reputation, maybe you shouldn’t tell a soul.

— — E. Mansfield

(this article was written by Ms Mansfield in 1999 or thereabouts, for an earlier incarnation of her website, derived from notes from a speech given to the Jane Austen Society)