ABSTRACT
This chapter explores whether romance has merely become the woman of the world of genres, the dutiful, if occasionally flighty, helpmate of serious historical inquiry. It argues that romance should not be understood as built upon the foundation of an assumed gendering. And conventional tropes of romance are precisely the narrative elements that allow Scott to dismiss women from his conclusion. Romance doesn't simply reflect or deflect women's experience; instead, the historical romances of Walter Scott, and the more diffuse "romance practices" of George Eliot (from which biography is inseparable as text), seek to engage the question of what female gender might be. The community of feminism and postmodernism is not a step on the way to demystifying or revealing the truth of woman's gender so much as an engagement with the way in which gender has always been a women's issue, a recognition that the question "What do women want?" is a patriarchal one.
