My previous romance rant was fun, but now I'm feeling mildly guilty about running down a beloved old genre. There are several good authors still working, and I've started paying attention to people's opinions in order to find new authors. The basis of my rant was mostly that the 95% of the genre that's crap is no longer crap I enjoy ironically. I'll never truly lose the wacked reversible masochism of a lousy romance novel as long the Harlequin Presents stays in print. From Sheik Surgeon to The Billionaire's Revenge Baby (One of these titles is real, and one is only real in spirit. Can you guess which is which?), this series caters to a really wonderful 1972-era British, middle-aged, middle-class lady sensibility with an endless stream of exotic, superwealthy men in search of revenge against chaste young women and their close relations. 

Here are some authors who are actually worth reading if you like girl's comics on the level:

Laura Kinsale, whose name CB swiped for Indiana Jones and the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald without realizing was swiping, has written some of my favorite titles. She's particularly good at making modern attitudes and beliefs in her characters work smoothly for the reader through the use of backstory, positioning her character on society's margins, and good characterization in general. A particular strength of her books is that her heroines are not just stand-ins for the reader, but characters in their own rights. She's had some problems with writer's block, so her output has slowed down quite a bit. A number of her older titles have recently been reprinted and are showing up in bookstores.

Sharon and Tom Curtis wrote under the pseudonyms Laura London and Robin James.  They are my favorite romance authors of all time. I would not let CB read my favorite their books, The Windflower, for the first three or four years we were dating because I didn't want to hear him say mean things about it. Then I left my copy at his place without realizing it. He read it and enjoyed for what it is: a sweet fantasy about Hollywood style pirates. The thing I particularly like about their novels is that they focus on young women becoming adults as they encounter the world. Their heroines are naive and innocent, but these qualities seem like the result of sheltered lives, not some sort innate Virtue that will never be extinguished. As they encounter the world, they gain wisdom through curiosity and compassion. The result is a warm gentle reading experience that never cloys due to the authors' lively sense of the ridiculous. The nearest comparison I could make to manga would be Fruits Basket, though the Curtises' humor is a little less paint-by-numbers. Another important point about Sharon and Tom Curtis is that they never wrote sequels, even though they had many requests for stories about various side characters. That shows admirable fortitude. All of their books are out of print, but used copies were readily available on the internet, at prices of varying reasonability.

Loretta Chase is another author whose work I love. She's one of the few current authors that gets rakes right. Firstly, not all of her heroes are rakes. This helps enormously with the sense you sometimes get that the author (Stephanie Laurens) is simply switching hair colors and renaming her old heroes to create her new heroes. Secondly, their rakish behavior causes genuine harm, mostly to themselves. Thirdly, some of her rakes are brooding and Byronic, but some are simply spoiled men who've never had to act like adults. Her willingness to make her rakes irresponsible and self-indulgent gives emotional punch to stories about changing their ways. Chase centers her rake stories on the desire to become a better person and the struggle to trust after a life of hurt. Her non-rake stories are also excellent.

Julia Quinn is another author who balances character with modern ideas and attributes with her historical settings well. Her series about the Bridgerton family does a reasonably good job with the characters from earlier books showing up in later books. The characters are siblings in a close family, so appearances don't feel shoehorned. Additionally, their father died young, and Quinn does a good job of portraying the different effects of this loss on the siblings. Another strength of her work is that Quinn respects the limitations set by history. One of her heroes is a botanist who is observing the qualities in peas that Gregor Mendel would later report. Quinn never gives him any stunning moment of insight, thus saving herself the explanation of why genetic didn't get developed a century early. Instead, she keeps to the entirely reasonable proposition that an intelligent botanist could make the same observations, but not see the larger significance of them. All of Julia Quinn's books are in print.

There are a number of other authors I enjoy, but not as consistently: Jo Beverley, Lisa Kleypas, Susan Wiggs, Judith Ivory, and Christina Dodd have all written some great books and some stinkers. Jane Feather features innovative choices of heroes and heroines, but her prose can be clunky and hard to take. Connie Mason is frequently hilariously bad, but sometimes just dully bad. Anytime you see a Violet Winspear book for less than a dollar, buy it for me! I'll pay you back.

I've been reading romance novels since I was 12. pezzgrrrl was there to witness the carnage; she can back me up on this. I've very gradually moved away from romance as a genre. During the time I worked at the GSU library, I had free rein in a respectable academic library, so I checked started reading more non-fiction. Getting books for free weaned me off my used bookstore habit for the most part. The other thing that slowed me down was the realization that most romance novels just aren't that good. I know you're all shocked. For the record, I came to similar realization about my other pet genres: fantasy and mystery. Robert Jordan just kept going and going, and I started to wonder how a plucky caterer could encounter so many corpses without feeling some sort of trauma or at least attracting non-romantic attention from local law enforcement. 

Anyway, several forces contributed to falling out of love with romance; first of all, romance, which originally helped spur my interest in history, ended up getting bitten in the ass by that very same interest. It's not so much that authors made straightforward factual errors, but they wrote about modern people in funny clothes. Sometimes they tried to use period speech to give that extra touch of authenticity. (If a character uses the words "cosh" or "stoat", you're reading a Catherine Coulter book. If you're reading a Catherine Coulter book, roll a D20. If you rolled a 7 or less, you are not actively in pain. If you rolled a 3 or less, you're having a pretty good time.)  The raging modernity of characters first became evident in Medieval romance novels. Spunky, independent-minded, unmarried twenty year olds were outraged that the king wanted to arrange their marriages. Uh-huh.  In later eras, our well-born hero and heroine scorn high society for its frivolity, but nevertheless wow the clueless ton with their iconoclastic sense of style. Of course. A white girl lives blissfully ever after with her half Cheyenne boyfriend in 1870. Hey, yeah, sure. I started to want Medieval romances with sixteen year old spinsters, Georgian romances where the hero, the heroine, and his mistress live happily ever after, and maybe when a couple from a previous novel appear in a later book to display their many attractive, healthy children that we hear about a least a few dead infants. If I could get myself together enough to actually write a romance novel, it would be the most hated historical romance ever.

Another problems is the overall issue of quality. I'm not looking for Toni Morrison here, but the authors who are actually worth reading are few and far between. This problem here isn't really romance's problem, but rather art and entertainment as consumables.  Publishers have to have something new every week. There just aren't enough competent writers to support the market, and the demands for more, more, more make even skilled authors uneven producers. Still, there was a quiet revolution in romance in the 90s. When I first started reading romances, many of the books I read were dreadful, but they were awesomely dreadful. I miss the hell out of psychotic heroes. If an author can't create reasonable facsimiles of human beings, then I want wacked out spectacle. The heroes of the 70s and 80s were spectacular indeed. How many plots of revenge centered on ruining a girl in her teens because her father cheated at cards or spied for the French? How many husbands refused to listen to their wives completely reasonable explanations because once a upon a time a woman lied to them? Modern romance has rehabilitated rape as "forced seduction", but modern authors are just too in touch with reality to create worthwhile psychos. There's a possibility that the psychos have reappeared in the burgeoning "Supernatural Romance" subgenre. I wouldn't know; I get hives when I read about destined mates (except in chess!). Today's lousy romance novels are just quietly dreary with one spunky bluestocking after another bickering into the sunset with a man who never once slapped her.

Finally, though not entirely separate from the previous point, there's the problem of rakes. The word rake used to mean something, goddammit!  In our desire to shoehorn book people into modern healthy relationships, we've reduced our rakes to manly stuffed suits. In your modern historical romance, a man who is introduced as a rake has affairs with sophisticated married ladies and expensive professionals, doesn't drink more than a bottle of alcohol in an evening, and never gambles to excess. Nice young ladies are warned about how dangerous he is. Folks, this is not a rake. This is joe-blow of the gentry or aristocracy. To actually earn a bad reputation, a man has got to act shady.  It means nothing if a man who is basically stable to begin with chooses a life of stability! The real kicker is that the lukewarm offerings that get called rakes aren't even all that attractive as mates by real world standards. While you don't end the books wondering if the hero is really going to be able to stop gambling and drinking himself into a coma just like that, you do see nasty, dismissive behavior that never gets called out. Old school heroes treated heroines like shit in epic fashion such that no sane person would stick around for the equally epic grovelling at the end. Modern rakes are just dully unpleasant. Bleah.

This was meant to be an essay on why I love Georgette Heyer's books. I got off track, obviously. I will tell you that at the beginning of her book The Devil's Cub the Marquess of Vidal shoots a highwayman dead and leaves his body in the road so as not to slow down his attempt to break a speed record on his trip to London where he plans to seduce the virginal daughter of a merchant. That's a fucking rake, people!

I have discovered a love too delicate and sublime for this harsh, unloving world.

In the process of explaining to CB why he will never quite measure up because he hasn't been genetically modified, and we cannot soulbond because I am not his chosen mate because is a normal man, and normal men do not have chosen mates, we got off topic very quickly. We determined that other books in this series could be maybe Mangolin, or Mandrill, or Mandingo. After they run out of animals, they could then pursue a theme of exotic men who have are the products of genetic experimentation with humans and musical instruments, resulting in Manjo and Mandolin. So, uh, yeah. This is how I've spent the past month and a half.

While shelving in the romance section, I was pleased to see that both Harlequin and Harlequin Presents have not changed since the late sixties. This past month Harlequin Presents featured exotic, domineering men, including a Greek, an Italian, and a Sheik. The sheik has a virgin bride. Aw. yeah. The Greek bought out the heroine's father's company, so he could get revenge on dad by forcing the heroine to marry him. Dude. I think the Italian was just a playboy who discovers an ordinary English, or American, or Australian, or possibly Canadian girl who will not succomb to his Continental blandishments. And she's got like this special something that keeps him intrigued even though he could be getting rimmed out by supermodels even as we speak. There's stability in the universe.

Eventually all the teenagers writing Naruto slashfic are going to end up writing this stuff.

Actually, the thing that really strikes me about the classic romance novel, much bagged on by the extremes of feminism, is how anti-male they are. Men fall into two categories, tomcatting cads and the unattractive men. A man can be a hero only if he's an utterly domineering dick who isn't afraid to humiliate and mistreat the you in the name of a misunderstanding (I though you was a hoe!) or revenge (usually against a relative of yours, but sometimes against you if there's also a misunderstanding). Romance consists of crying yourself to sleep or maybe yelling at the guy until he suddenly realizes, usually because you've gravely injured yourself for his sake or his best friend punches him and explains that you are the best girl in the world, that you are the best girl in the world. The formerly domineering jerk then grovels before you. You are the best girl in the world, and he will never be mean to you again. Also, he'll be awfully mean to whatever conniving ex or freaky parent or possibly gay best friend who ran you down and connived against you. Ha! You've got him forever and ever. He'll be mean to the world and nice to you. All other men are either heroes of future books, in which case they're generally domineering jerks, but they're nice to you, or they belong to the unattractive class. The unattractive are those average guys who want to do things like have conversations with you. You regard them with pity and regret at the end, though at the start you might have thought one of these schmoes was all that you deserved. The unattractive might also be a crazy guy who stalks you or a mean male relation. The hero will hit them.

In summation, I'm glad romance is a much more diverse field now. Once upon a time, the above was all you got. Now that fanfiction.net exists, I don't need Harlequins. I still read romance novels, but I look around for books that feature protagonists who are psychologically realistic and heroines who are adults. Clearly, Manaconda is at the top of my list.