Reformed Rakes

Warrior’s Woman by Johanna Lindsey is a futuristic romance set in the year 2139 and follows Tedra de Arr, a highly skilled Security Agent who is too bodacious to lose her virginity to the puny men on her home planet of Kystran. When a failed presidential candidate launches a coup, Tedra, along with her annoying sex pest personal computer, Martha and sensual sentient robot, Corth, flee to outer space. To Tedra’s surprise, she ends up on Sha-Ka’ar, a planet chock full of big beefy blond warriors. Published in 1990, reviews, at the time, were mixed, calling it a successful romance, but a woefully underdeveloped science fiction novel. Cynthia Eisenmenger for Florida Today writes, “Although it is a bold exploration, Lindsey often appears lost in space with this new genre.”
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Published in 1991, the The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez starts in 1850 where we open on an unnamed enslaved girl as she kills a bounty hunter trying to capture her. We meet the first Gilda, who takes the girl in and raises her along with her partner Bird. Both Gilda and Bird are vampires with certain rules they’ve constructed to live by, including to not kill humans and aim for some sort of exchange when drawing blood from them. Gilda wearies of the world’s cyclical violence and chooses to take the true death, but not before turning the girl into a vampire. The girl, now grown up, takes on the name Gilda. What follows is a series of vignettes from Gilda’s life as she travels and lives across the United States, with the last chapter set in 2050. Gomez said of Gilda in the foreword of the 2016 edition: “Each new decade brings up reminders that the culture has not yet healed the wounds left from slavery and bigotry. Gilda must learn to leave those she loves behind without bending under the further weight of loneliness. Throughout her journey she tries to hold on to her humanity and help others to find theirs.”
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Beth’s Substack
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What makes something a romance novel? Most readers probably have an intuition of where their definitional lines are, and what are the make or break points, pushing something out of “romance” and into a neighboring genre. Critics and professional organizations of authors and publishers might provide a definition, for analysis or award purposes, to create parameters around what is the in and out group. Today’s episode is less about answering the question “what is a romance novel” and more a historiography of that question. When do we start asking it? How have the answers changed in the long arc of romance history? Who gets to decide what the final, be-all, end-all definition is? Are we ever open to change?
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Today we’re discussing Barbara Pym’s second novel, Excellent Women, published in 1952. Pym wrote mid-century comedies of manners and experienced some success in the first decade of her career and then struggled to publish new novels. Excellent Women certainly has a Miss Bates style heroine, but uniquely has a romance-style happy ending, if you agree that the match Mildred Lathbury makes has the potential for happiness. Barbara Pym was not a romance novelist and most of her works focus on a generation of gentlewomen just young enough to feel the loss of a vast number of potential marriage partners from World War II, but old enough (and backwards looking enough) that they aren’t able to parlay new social and gender class mobility into rewarding professions. They, like Miss Bates, exist in, if not a genteel poverty, a genteel bourgeois existence. They may be the daughters of vicars, but have little hope of getting the vicar to marry them. Pym is writing at the same time as authors like Barbara Cartland and Victoria Holt, cited as precedents for a lot of genre romance fiction we read today. And if Jane Austen is another grand precedent of romance fiction, Pym is at least a cousin.
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Beth’s Substack
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One Burning Heart is the latest book in Elizabeth Kingston’s 13th century medieval series, Welsh Blades, and it is a Reformed Rakes favorite. The book opens on a perfunctory sex scene that could be the stuff of nightmares. Margaret has been married to William for six years, and he's decided to tamper down his ill-concealed loathing for his wife in order to beget an heir. While William married Margaret for strategy, what he doesn’t know is that Margaret also married him for strategy. One Burning Heart is an achingly romantic tale that tackles ancestry, loyalty, and doubt, and Margaret is one of the most compelling historical romance heroines we’ve ever come across.
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Beth’s Substack
Chels’ Substack
Emma’s Substack
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