Romance in the Classroom: Studying the Romance Novel
Scholars stopped apologising for romance decades ago, and a student who picks one for a literature paper has a real body of criticism to stand on.
Can you write a serious literature paper about a book with a clinch cover?
A student asked me a version of that question in an email last spring. She’d found the restored archive while looking for reviews of a Mary Balogh novel and wanted to know whether her professor would laugh her out of the room. I told her what I’ll tell you: by the time she was born, scholars had been writing about the romance novel for twenty years, and some of that work is among the most cited in popular-culture studies. Her professor would care far more about what she planned to say about the book than about the cover.
I’m not an academic. I reviewed books for the old All Romance Writers community, I edit the archive now, and I have read more of the criticism than most romance readers because I wanted to know what the professors were saying about us. What follows is the reading list I’d hand a student, with the history it sits on and the questions that make a paper work.
A short history of a long genre
Literary historians argue about where the romance novel starts, and the argument itself is useful material for a paper.
The usual starting point in English is Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), the story of a servant girl who resists her employer’s advances until he reforms and marries her. It was a sensation, and it was mocked almost at once (Henry Fielding’s Shamela appeared the following year). Pamela already has many of the features later critics would argue over: a heroine with little power, a hero whose behaviour is hard to excuse, and an ending that rewards her with marriage and status. Whether that ending is a triumph or a trap is a question students are still writing about.
Jane Austen’s novels, from Sense and Sensibility (1811) to Persuasion (1817), refined the courtship plot into something critics have never stopped admiring. Pride and Prejudice (1813) in particular serves as a template many later romance writers acknowledge. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) added Gothic menace and a heroine who walks away from the man she loves until she can return on her own terms.
In the twentieth century, Georgette Heyer invented, more or less single-handed, the Regency romance as a genre, beginning with books like Regency Buck (1935). Harlequin, a Canadian company founded in Winnipeg in 1949, began distributing Mills & Boon titles from Britain in North America in 1957 and went on to become the dominant publisher of category romance. The 1970s brought the “bodice-ripper” historicals, often dated to Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower (1972), and the decades after that saw the genre split into the subgenres readers here sorted books into: contemporary, historical, paranormal, suspense and the rest. Our subgenre field guide traces those branches.
So when a student asks whether Pamela and a 1998 Harlequin Presents belong to the same tradition, the honest answer is that critics disagree, and that disagreement is a paper.
The books that made the field
Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (1984)
Radway’s book is the one most people have heard of, and it is still assigned. She spent time with a group of regular romance readers in a Midwestern town she called “Smithton,” most of them customers of a bookseller who recommended titles and wrote a newsletter rating new releases. Radway interviewed them, gave them questionnaires, and asked what they read, why, and what made a romance good or bad.
Her findings were more sympathetic than many expected. The women described reading as time claimed for themselves, a break from caring for others. They had clear opinions about quality and could explain why one book failed and another worked. They disliked heroines who were stupid and heroes who were brutal without reason. Radway’s interpretation stayed critical, though: she argued that the romance offered an imaginary solution to real dissatisfactions in women’s lives, which might ease the pressure for actual change.
Students should know the book has been criticised as well as praised. Later scholars questioned how far a small group in one town could stand in for romance readers generally, and Radway herself revisited parts of her argument in a new introduction written for a later edition. Using the book well means using both its insights and its limits.
As someone who spent years on a site full of readers arguing over ratings out of ten, I’ll admit the “Smithton” chapters felt familiar. Those women would have fitted right into our reader reviews.
Tania Modleski and the earlier critics
Before Radway, Tania Modleski’s Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (1982) read Harlequins alongside Gothic novels and soap operas, arguing that the books expressed women’s anxieties and anger as well as their wishes. Ann Barr Snitow’s essay “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women Is Different” (1979) is another early piece that students still meet. These works treated romance as a symptom to be diagnosed. You don’t have to agree with them, but you should know they set the terms the next generation pushed against.
Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel (2003)
Regis took a different approach. She wasn’t interested in what romance did to readers. She wanted to define the romance novel as a form and trace that form through literary history. Her definition is short: a romance novel is a work of prose fiction that tells the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines.
She then identified eight narrative elements that she argued every romance contains, though not always in the same order or at the same length:
- The definition of society. The book shows the world the heroine lives in, usually a world that is flawed and that the courtship will challenge.
- The meeting. Heroine and hero meet, often with a hint of the conflict to come.
- The barrier. Something keeps them apart. It can be external (law, family, money) or internal (pride, fear, a past wound).
- The attraction. A reason they keep being drawn together despite the barrier.
- The declaration. One or both say they love the other.
- The point of ritual death. The moment when the union looks impossible, often marked with images of death or ending.
- The recognition. Information or self-knowledge that removes the barrier.
- The betrothal. The hero asks, the heroine accepts, or they otherwise commit.
Regis also named three common but non-essential elements: a wedding, a scapegoat figure who gets expelled from the story, and a bad character who is converted. She tested her definition against Pamela, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, and gave later chapters to twentieth-century writers including Janet Dailey, Jayne Ann Krentz and Nora Roberts.
The point of ritual death is the element students find most useful, because it gives a name to what romance writers call the “black moment.” If you’ve read our piece on plotting a romance novel, you’ll see the same structure seen from the writer’s side.
Regis is arguing a position, and critics have pushed back. Some think her definition centres the heroine’s freedom too optimistically. Others point out that it fits same-sex romance or romances with two heroes awkwardly, since it was built around a heroine. A paper that tests her elements against a book they don’t quite fit is often more interesting than one that ticks them off.
A journal of its own
For decades, romance criticism appeared scattered through journals on women’s studies, popular culture and literature. That changed with the Journal of Popular Romance Studies (JPRS), launched in 2010 by the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance. It is peer-reviewed, open access, and covers romance in fiction, film, music and other media, not only novels.
For a student, JPRS solves two problems at once: it is free to read online, and it shows what current scholarship on romance looks like. Browse a few issues on the journal’s own site before you settle on a topic. You’ll see articles on everything from Harlequin’s international editions to consent in historical romance, and you’ll get a sense of which questions have been asked and which haven’t.
Other names worth searching include Eric Murphy Selinger and Sarah S. G. Frantz, who have edited collections of romance criticism, and Jayne Ann Krentz’s edited volume Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women (1992), in which romance authors themselves defended the genre. That last one is valuable precisely because it is partisan. It shows you how the writers saw their own work in the years when the academy was mostly dismissive.
Choosing a romance for a paper
Students often pick the book they love most. That can work, but think about a few things first.
| If you pick… | You get | You’ll need |
|---|---|---|
| A canonical classic (Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre) | Abundant criticism, instant acceptance | A fresh angle; most obvious readings are taken |
| A mid-century bestseller (Heyer, Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt) | A bridge between “literature” and “genre” | Context on the publishing world of the time |
| A category romance (Harlequin, Silhouette) | Formula visible on the surface, strong genre-studies angle | Careful framing so the paper doesn’t mock the book |
| A recent single-title bestseller | Room for originality, current debates | Genre scholarship to anchor claims |
| A romance outside the white, straight, Anglo default | Underexplored territory, active scholarly interest | Awareness of the specific critical conversations around it |
Pick a book you can read at least three times. You’ll need to.
Pick a book with something to argue about. A romance where everything works smoothly is a pleasure to read and hard to write about. You want a book with a tension in it: a heroine who seems strong but keeps being rescued, a hero whose behaviour the narrative excuses and you can’t, an ending that resolves the love story while leaving a social problem untouched.
The genre “communities” on the old site and the 199 themes in our subject index are a decent place to browse. If you want a book about class, headings such as MAIL-ORDER BRIDES/MARRIAGES OF CONVENIENCE or MARMS - TEACHERS AND GOVERNESSES will give you a list. If you want consent and power, KIDNAPPING/MISSING PERSON and GUARDIAN/WARD will give you plenty of material, some of it very uncomfortable.
The questions that make a paper
These are the angles I’ve seen produce the strongest student work. Pick one or two. A paper that tries to address all of them will say nothing about any.
Narrative structure
Map the book against Regis’s eight elements. Where do they fall? Which is longest? Is one missing or displaced? A Nora Roberts trilogy might spread the definition of society across three books, while a short category novel compresses the meeting and attraction into one chapter. What does the arrangement tell you about what the book values?
The heroine’s agency
Who makes the decisions that move the plot? Track every major choice and who makes it. Some heroines who are described as spirited turn out, when you count, to be reacting to the hero for most of the book. Others who look passive are making quiet choices that drive everything. Agency is one of the most common subjects in romance criticism, and the heroes and heroines essay on this site gives you a reader’s view of how the archetypes changed between the 1970s and the 2010s.
Class and money
Romance is often about money, and the genre is not always candid about it. Who has it, who marries into it, and what does the book think about that? Austen is explicit about incomes. Many Regency romances are full of dukes in a society that had very few of them. A contemporary romance with a billionaire hero raises its own questions. Ask whether the ending changes the social order or confirms it.
Consent and power
This is the area where older and newer romances differ most, and where student papers can do sharp work. Compare a 1970s historical with a 2010s one on how each handles the first sexual encounter. Pay attention to what the narrative presents as romantic and what it presents as threatening, and to whether the book treats the difference as obvious or examines it. Be fair to the older books: understand the publishing climate and the readers’ expectations in their own time before you judge.
Genre conventions
Which conventions does the book follow, and which does it bend? A romance that breaks a convention knows it is doing so, and the reasons can tell you a lot. A paranormal romance might use the vampire’s immortality to complicate the happy ending. A time-travel romance might set the betrothal in a century the heroine wasn’t born in. Ask what the bending accomplishes.
From observations to an argument
Notes on structure, agency and class are raw material. A paper needs a claim. Something like: “In Bet Me, Crusie uses the fairy-tale references the characters mock to make a case that the romance plot can survive self-awareness.” That’s arguable, it’s specific, and it gives you a reason to look at every fairy-tale reference in the book. If you’re unsure how to get from a page of observations to that kind of sentence and then build the paper around it, a guide on writing a literary analysis essay covers the mechanics of the thesis, the topic sentences and the use of quoted evidence. The principles are the same for a romance as for Hamlet. The difference is that fewer people have already made your argument.
A few practical points from someone who has read a lot of student emails:
- Quote the book closely. Romance critics have sometimes been accused of generalising about the genre without looking at actual sentences. Don’t give anyone that opening.
- Cite the criticism even when you disagree with it. Arguing against Radway is a perfectly good move, as long as you show you’ve read her.
- Avoid the defensive opening paragraph. You don’t need to justify writing about romance. Write the paper as if your reader already accepts the subject, and most will.
- Don’t summarise the plot for more than a paragraph. Your professor can read.
Why this matters to a reader’s archive
The old All Romance Writers site was a place where readers did criticism without calling it that. Members rated books on three scales, wrote three to seven paragraphs explaining why, and joined book clubs in 2003 and 2004 where a moderator set one title a month, sometimes with the author joining in, and the group worked through it with a reading guide and discussion questions. Reader talk of that kind isn’t written for professors, and it doesn’t cite anyone, but it asks the same questions: why did she forgive him, why does this ending feel cheap, why do I keep reading these books when I know how they end?
Radway, in her own way, was trying to hear conversations like those. Regis was trying to describe the books those readers loved in terms that the literary world would have to respect. The student who picks a romance for her paper this term is joining both conversations, and I hope she writes something that makes a reader in a 2004 Yahoo group nod along.
Sources and further reading
- Pamela (1740) as the first popular courtship novel told from the heroine’s side, Harlequin’s 1957 start with Mills & Boon titles, and The Flame and the Flower (1972): Wikipedia, Romance novel.
- Reading the Romance first published in 1984 by the University of North Carolina Press, with its “Smithton” readers and the bookseller Dot: Wikipedia, Reading the Romance.
- Regis’s definition of the romance novel as the story of “courtship and betrothal of one or more heroines”: An Goris in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies, 2013.
- JPRS founded in 2010 by the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance, peer-reviewed and open access: Wikipedia, Journal of Popular Romance Studies.
- The monthly book club format, one title a month, adults only, run through Yahoo groups: the Historical Romance Writers book club page, archived August 2003.