ABSTRACT
Mills and Boon has become a generic term for a mass popular fiction for women, and with that metonym has defined an area of study of popular cultural forms. Over the past few years, that area has rightly moved from a marginalized position in cultural theory to become a focus for discussions around language, female desire and popular narratives. Early studies of the contemporary romance form tended to offer somewhat disbelieving accounts of the readership figures for a fiction in which marriage was invariably offered as the solution for female anxiety; as in David Margolies’ attempts to do this in his application of the tools of literary criticism to the most consistently successful publishing concern in the world.1 Recent feminist analysis has been more sophisticated, concentrating on the nature of the texts themselves, and on readership surveys; most notably in Rosalind Coward’s2 psychoanalytic account of the pleasure of the text and in Tania Modleski’s3 sophisticated reading of the Harlequin Romance, the Canadian branch of Mills and Boon.
