A Field Guide to Romance Subgenres, Shelf by Shelf
Eleven shelves, 199 themes, and fifteen years of arguing about where a ghost story with a duke in it belongs.
The subject index on the old site carried 199 themes by the time the last volunteer stopped updating it, and the founders filed every one of them under a capital-letter heading, as if romance were a library with a card catalogue and a stern woman guarding the drawer. AMNESIA. BODYGUARDS. BYZANTIUM. FEY / FAERIE / FAIRY. You could lose an evening in there.
I lost many. I came to the site as a reader who wrote reviews that ran too long, stayed on as a volunteer, and now spend my evenings going through the restored pages, repairing booklists and debating with myself whether a particular novel belongs under CAPER or under CORPORATE. This guide covers what I wish someone had handed me around 2002: the communities the site used to divide the genre, the themes that lived inside each one, and the places where the walls were made of tissue paper.
Why the site split romance in the first place
A reader who adored Nora Roberts’s Chesapeake Bay books in 1998 did not necessarily want a vampire with a tortured past, and a reader who wanted the vampire had no patience for a crab-boat brother learning to parent a ten-year-old. Lumping every review into one page served neither of them. So the site ran separate communities, each with its own review list, its own new releases and, by 2003 and 2004, its own Yahoo group book club where members argued about the month’s pick.
The site’s own menu in early 2003 listed Contemporary, Fantasy, Historical, Paranormal, Series, Suspense, Time Travel and Young Adult, with an eRomance community added later that year. By 2006 the list had grown to take in Chick Lit, Electronic, Erotica, Inspirational, Multicultural and Regency as well, which tells you how fast the shelf was splitting. The subject index kept its own headings across all of them.
Those divisions came from readers more than from publishers. A publisher sorts by imprint and price point. A reader sorts by mood, and the communities were mood rooms.
Contemporary: the biggest room and the noisiest
Contemporary romance carried the largest share of reviews for most of the site’s life, and its slice of the subject index reads like a list of plot engines. ACROSS THE TRACKS covers the rich-meets-poor setup. BLUE COLLAR MEETS WHITE COLLAR is its cousin, usually with a contractor and a lawyer who keeps calling him about the invoice. AMNESIA gave you the heroine who wakes up married to a man she does not recognise. BODYGUARDS gave you proximity and an excuse for him to sleep on her couch. CHEFS arrived later than you might guess and multiplied fast once food television caught on. FRIENDSHIPS TURNED ROMANTIC held the slow burns, the books where the best friend has been standing in the kitchen for eleven chapters.
The contemporary community took in everything from category novels of 55,000 words to fat single titles by Susan Elizabeth Phillips. It Had to Be You (Avon, 1994) and Jennifer Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation (St. Martin’s, 2000) sat in the same list as Harlequin Presents titles with sheikhs on the cover, which made for some lively comment threads. If you want to know how those category books differed from each other, the guide to category romance lines goes line by line.
One quirk worth knowing: contemporary books date faster than any other kind. A 1996 contemporary with a pager and a fax machine reads as a period piece now, and most readers who pick one up today will notice it before they notice the hero.
Historical, and the Regency annex
Historical romance had the richest set of themes because history offers so many places to put a couple. The index ran from CAMELOT & ARTHURIAN through the CRUSADES and on to WORLD WAR II, with stops at the AMERICAN WEST, the AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, ANCIENT EGYPT and BYZANTIUM.
Regency got pulled out into a separate community, and the reason says a lot about the readers. Regency fans in 2001 split into two camps. One camp read the traditional Regency: short, witty, mostly chaste, published in small monthly batches by Signet and Zebra, written in the shadow of Georgette Heyer. The other camp read the Regency historical: longer, sexier, often darker, published as single titles by Avon, Bantam and Berkley. Julia Quinn’s The Duke and I (Avon, 2000) belongs to the second camp. Both camps shared the single REGENCY heading in the Historical index, which caused confusion, because a reader hunting for a slim Signet trad could land on a five-hundred-page Regency historical with a duel in chapter three.
For background on the older tradition, the Wikipedia article on Regency romance covers the Heyer lineage well. For the history itself, the archive has a separate guide to historical settings that I would recommend over any single novel.
The settings publishers would not buy
Some historical themes stayed thin for years. BYZANTIUM held a handful of titles. ANCIENT EGYPT held a few more, most of them closer to historical fiction than romance. The CRUSADES theme drew books with a knight coming home changed, which is a fine premise, though editors of the era clearly thought medieval sold best when it stayed in England or Scotland.
Readers did not lack appetite. Ask any group of historical readers which settings they want and cannot find, and the list tends to come back the same: Byzantine court intrigue, Moorish Spain, Russia before 1917. Publishers bought dukes. Dukes sold. You can see the result in the Leading Men index, where roughly one entry in four carries a title such as Lord, Earl, Duke or Sir.
Paranormal, Fantasy and Time Travel: three doors into one house
These three communities overlapped so much that I sometimes think they existed to keep the peace. Paranormal took the creatures: vampires, shapeshifters, ghosts, the ANGELS and DEVILS themes from the index, and, by the index’s own filing, FEY / FAERIE / FAIRY. Fantasy took invented worlds, plus anything with spaceships. Time Travel took the books where a modern woman falls through a stone circle, or a knight lands in a Manhattan apartment and mistakes the microwave for sorcery.
The landmarks of the period sit across all three. Jude Deveraux’s A Knight in Shining Armor (1989) and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander (1991) shaped time travel for a decade. Christine Feehan’s Dark Prince came out from Love Spell in 1999 and changed what readers expected from a vampire hero. Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Fantasy Lover (2002) put a cursed Greek general in a book and readers asked for a series on the spot.
ALTERNATE HISTORY was the strangest heading in this group. Some books under it were fantasy with a historical skin, Regency England with working magic. Others were straight historicals that changed one battle. I never settled on how to file them, and the index itself hedged: it lists the ALTERNATE HISTORY heading under both Paranormal and Fantasy.
Romantic Suspense: the plot has a body count
Suspense readers wanted danger that mattered to the relationship, and the subject themes show how many shapes that danger could take. ARSON and BLACKMAIL handled the small-town secret. ESPIONAGE handled the spy who cannot tell the heroine his real name. FORENSIC grew fast after television made lab work glamorous. CAPER covered the jewel-thief romp, and CORPORATE covered the boardroom thriller where somebody is cooking the books and the heroine is the only accountant who noticed.
Linda Howard’s Mr. Perfect (2000), Suzanne Brockmann’s Troubleshooters books starting with The Unsung Hero (2000), and J.D. Robb’s In Death series, which began with Naked in Death in 1995, gave the community its regular arguments. The In Death books caused a particular one. Are they romance or mystery with a married couple? They sit as comfortably under Suspense as under the index’s FUTURISTICS heading, and I see no reason to choose.
The balance between romance and plot is the usual complaint in this subgenre. The rating system let a reviewer say so in numbers: a high Suspense rating, a middling overall score, and a comment explaining that the hero and heroine spent more time with the coroner than with each other.
Young Adult: a separate site with its own rules
The Young Adult community ran almost as a sister site, with its own reviewers and a simpler 1 to 5 rating in place of the 1 to 10 scale used everywhere else. Its subject themes were mostly line names, which tells you how teenage readers shopped at the time: AVON: TRUE ROMANCE, BANTAM: LOVE STORIES, FLARE: MAKING OUT SERIES, and a PRINCESS DIARIES SERIES heading for Meg Cabot’s books.
Avon True Romance published historical romances for teen readers in the early 2000s, with Meg Cabot writing Nicola and the Viscount and Victoria and the Rogue, and Beverly Jenkins contributing Belle and the Beau. Bantam’s Love Stories were contemporary high-school romances, short and earnest. The Making Out books, which Avon relaunched under that name in 1998 (Katherine Applegate wrote the first eight; later volumes were ghostwritten), followed a group of friends on a fictional island off the coast of Maine and read like a soap opera in paperback form. All of them assumed a teenager wanted a romance with a happy ending and no explicit sex, a market that shifted hard once paranormal YA arrived in the middle of the decade.
Inspirational, Multicultural, and the shelf with the plain covers
Inspirational romance rarely got the attention it earned on the site. Francine Rivers’s Redeeming Love (1991) and Janette Oke’s Love Comes Softly (1979) brought in readers who would never have touched a Harlequin Presents, and Steeple Hill’s Love Inspired line kept a steady supply of short Christian romances on supermarket racks. Dee Henderson’s O’Malley books mixed faith with suspense and found readers in two communities at once.
Multicultural had its own community by the mid-2000s, and the books it covered deserved the attention. Arabesque, BET Books and Genesis Press published romances with Black heroes and heroines when the major lines published almost none. Beverly Jenkins wrote historicals about the Underground Railroad and Reconstruction that sat comfortably under the AMERICAN WEST and AMERICAN CIVIL WAR themes. Brenda Jackson, Francis Ray and Sandra Kitt held the contemporary side. I have heard more than one reader say a Jenkins novel taught her more nineteenth-century American history than a semester of high school did, and I believe it.
Erotic romance and chick lit each got a community of their own in the site’s later menus, and they make an odd pair to discuss together. Ellora’s Cave launched in 2000 as an e-book-only publisher of erotic fiction, and Kensington’s Brava line brought hotter books into print. Chick lit arrived with Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) and Harlequin’s Red Dress Ink imprint, whose first title came out in November 2001. Chick lit readers often insisted their books were not romance at all, which made the shelf arrangement funnier.
Where the borders leak
Most books fit one community comfortably. A good number did not, and the cross-listings in the archive show the patterns.
| Book shape | Communities that claimed it | Themes that did the sorting |
|---|---|---|
| Ghost haunting a Regency country house | Regency, Paranormal | REGENCY, GHOSTS AND SPIRITS |
| Modern heroine falls back to medieval Scotland | Time Travel, Historical | TIME TRAVEL - PRESENT TO PAST, plus CAMELOT & ARTHURIAN for the legend-heavy ones |
| Ex-soldier guards a witness in a small town | Suspense, Contemporary | BODYGUARDS, WITNESS OR WITNESS PROTECTION PROGRAM |
| Victorian spy with a coded diary | Historical, Suspense | ENGLAND - VICTORIAN, ESPIONAGE, BLACKMAIL |
| Civil War romance by Beverly Jenkins | Multicultural, Historical | AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, AFRICAN AMERICAN |
| Regency with working magic | Fantasy, Regency | ALTERNATE HISTORY, FEY / FAERIE / FAIRY |
The overlaps teach you what each readership cares about. Regency readers forgave a ghost if the manners were right. Paranormal readers forgave thin history if the ghost had rules. Suspense readers forgave almost anything except a villain the reader could spot on page twelve.
Teachers found this useful too. Every few months someone writes to the restored archive about a student who has been told to put two romances side by side for a class, usually a Regency like The Duke and I against a small-town contemporary such as one of Jill Shalvis’s Lucky Harbor books, and wants to know where to begin; the honest answer is that a compare-and-contrast essay works best when the student picks one shared element, such as what keeps the couple apart, and tracks how each subgenre handles it, because a ballroom scandal and a gossiping diner do the same job with different props.
That exercise works because the subgenres share a skeleton. Two people meet, something keeps them apart, the obstacle falls, they end together. The communities differed in the props and the pace, and the subject index catalogued the props. If you are teaching romance and want more on that, the archive has a piece on romance in the classroom.
How readers used the subject index
Readers came to the index two ways, and only one of them matched the founders’ plan.
The intended use was browsing by appetite. You finished a bodyguard book, you wanted another, you opened BODYGUARDS and found a list of titles with links to reviews. That worked well for contemporary and suspense, where the themes describe the plot.
The second use is the one I recommend now. Work through the index the way you might work through a museum, picking one theme a month and reading across communities. Try it with memory loss: a contemporary from the AMNESIA list, then a Regency, a time-travel book and a suspense novel built on the same device. My guess is that the Regency will do it best, because the heroine has no way to look anything up.
A few habits made the index more useful, and they still work on the restored version:
- Check two communities for any book that mixes genres. Reviews differ by readership, and a Paranormal reviewer will judge a ghost Regency on different grounds from a Regency reviewer.
- Read the theme lists for thin settings as a wish list. A thin heading such as BYZANTIUM means you have probably not read them all.
- Pair a theme with the character indexes. The Leading Ladies index cross-referenced against BLUE COLLAR MEETS WHITE COLLAR turns up the working-class heroines, who are rarer than the working-class heroes.
- Look at publication years. A theme heavy with 1980s titles and silent after 2000 tells you the market moved on.
Some filings will be plain errors, the kind that puts a book under CHEFS because the heroine cooks once. Where I find them I am leaving most of them alone. They are part of the record, and the volunteers who filed them were reading at night after work, the way most of us were.
A note on the themes that never made it
The index stopped growing before some of the biggest trends of the late 2000s arrived. No theme for steampunk, none for the billionaire boom, nothing for New Adult. Some readers ask whether we will add them. I lean against it. The index shows what romance readers were reading between 2001 and 2016, and grafting newer headings onto it would make it a different document.
If you want to see the themes in action, pick a community, open its reviews, and look at what the reviewers said about the third or fourth book in a theme. The first bodyguard book thrilled them. By the twentieth they were grading the bodyguard on his coffee.
Sources and further reading
- The community list, from Chick Lit to Young Adult, as it stood in 2006: the site’s own reviewer guidelines page, archived June 2006.
- Ellora’s Cave launching in 2000 as an e-book-only publisher of erotic fiction: Wikipedia, Ellora’s Cave.
- Avon’s 1998 relaunch of the Making Out series, its Maine island setting, and Katherine Applegate writing the first eight books: Wikipedia, Making Out (book series).
- Christine Feehan’s Dark Prince appearing in 1999 as the first of her Dark books: Wikipedia, Christine Feehan.