Reading Romance Literature

As an author, Georgette Heyer does not so much fit the genre of Romance Literature, as define it. If Austen holds the ultimate adulatory status, then Heyer comes a distinguished second. Perhaps, as I'm sure many self-proclaimed intellectuals would argue, that is not particularly notable in a field of literature which at its best is patronized by the public and its worse, relentlessly mocked. And, of course, there are some examples of execrable prose and plot among romance novels, the way there are many among any genre. However, romance novels are women's literature and thus inferior to any other form of textual production. In the literary climate of Modern America (as well as every other place/time), women can either write to be read by men or eschew all claims to "literary merit."

Heyer and Austen write for women (though Austen at least has now found a wide-spread, if unwilling, male readership in progressive high school classes). They write about the female experience in society, embracing female characters who seek to preserve their own identityand human integrity by actively pursuing (relatively) safe marriages based on affection and financial security. They write narratives whose trajectories end in happiness and are thus dismissed as "light" and unrealistic. However, in many ways, Heyer and Austen are the most "realistic" of novelists. In an age when Keith Gesson can publish a critically acclaimed book dealing with the ephemeral travails of being a young man in our society and be considered an intellectual writer, there should be no stigma assigned with Heyer or Austen or any other woman writing narratives of young women trying to find themselves. Yes, they associate finding their identities with finding men. However, few young men coming of age do so in a fictional world devoid of women. Perhaps, for male readers of such books (both the involuntary and the potentially nonexistent willing ones), the true unreality comes from these female authors' assertion that it is love for which their characters seek. Sex on the other hand, seems a much more realistic and laudatory goal.

Heyer and Austen write of women trapped in penury, legally owned by their fathers, forced to live lives constrained by the minutiae of social detail. And yet, they are transcendent characters, recasting the inevitable trajectory of their lives into a context of choice and will. Romance novels give both their characters and readers a vision of female intentionality and decision. Still, they never forget to also tender the reassurance that such "unfeminine" agency does not need inevitably to result in a context of loneliness and alienation. Heyer and Austen assert that there are lucky women who find exceptional men who allow them to maintain the integrity of their characters and their agency without sacrificing the love and companionship for which all people, both men and women, yearn. Is that unrealistic? Too idealistic to qualify as the focus of a serious genre of literature? Well maybe...but judging from the amount of readership which romance literature achieves, the intellectual community might eventually want to get around to examining, instead of merely denigrating, such "female" concerns in its literature and scholarship.