ABSTRACT
With a massive world-wide rise in sales of Mills & Boon books in the 1970s coinciding with the beginnings of the Womens’ Liberation Movement, feminists among other critics began to ask, “why do people read these books?”. Why was it still true that these books gave “many hours of pleasant reading” to women throughout the world (as claimed on their jacket blurbs). These were the questions Janice Radway set out to answer in her book Reading the Romance, published in 1984.
