ABSTRACT
In recent years feminists have had far more to say about romantic fiction than about romantic love as such. A satisfactory account of women’s interest in romance, however, itself requires that we pay attention to the emotional resonances such fiction has for women, that we give greater consideration to romantic love as an emotion. I am not suggesting that there is something called ‘love’ that exists outside society and culture. Emotions are cultural constructs, not pre-social essences: they are socially ordered, linguistically mediated and culturally specific (Jaggar, 1989; Hochschild, 1983; Rosaldo, 1984).
