ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, the rise of feminism has been paralleled almost exactly by a mushroom growth in the popularity of romance fiction. Last year alone 250 million women bought a Mills and Boon book, in countries ranging from France to Japan, from America to Australia, (quoted in Coward, 1984: 191)
The essay that follows is a sequel to recent feminist studies of these women, the regular consumers of romance and of the pleasures they find in reading the novels that Mills & Boon and a dozen other publishing houses put on sale every month (Hay, 1983; Radway, 1983; Light, 1984; Coward, 1984). I first became interested in romance through discussing analyses of Mills & Boon novels with students in a twentieth-century literature course at the University of Sussex, but I must admit that my curiosity about popular writing aimed at women is more than academic. My first job, after I got what looked as though it was going to be a perfectly useless MA in English, was as an editorial assistant at a New York City publishing company called Dauntless Books. In 1969, Dauntless Books put out six monthly confession
magazines. Their format was the story told by a heroine who tries some sexual adventuring, discovers how dangerous it is and how misled she has been, and returns to her parents or her husband a wiser and better woman.
