O Tell Me the Truth About Love

This article first appeared in Publishing News on 22nd April 2007.

The Romantic Novelists Association (RNA) will announce the Romantic Novel of the Year on 27th April. The venue for the annual lunch is the Savoy’s rococo mirrored and curlicued Lancaster Room – and the Chairman of the judges is the very uncurlicued Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, an avid reader with 16 Olympic medals and more than 30 world records under her belt. It is a nice juxtaposition: romantic fiction holds a mirror up to a multi-faceted world.

When 115 authors founded the RNA in 1960 the romantic relationship was crucial to women’s survival: marriage was the norm; divorce was horribly difficult; women’s salaries were two thirds a man’s. A few titles were ‘soft as eiderdown fluff’ but most romantic fiction had harder edges, reflecting that seriousness.

Netta Muskett, for example, was gritty, truthful – and sexy. One RNA member remembers, ‘Very racy - my mother wouldn’t allow me read them!’ The War was only 15 years in the past. Mary Burchell, an early President, who had run a refugees’ escape route in Europe, said the romantic impulse was important because it gave hope, even when the intellect despaired – and cited Winston Churchill as a exemplary romantic. Lucilla Andrews – whose memoir No Time for Romance will be republished by Transworld in August - had nursed through the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. It permeated her fiction. Her 1990 novel Frontline 1940 gives an unforgettable picture of people falling in love while they daily expect the country to fall.

In 2006 volume sales of romantic fiction in the UK were up 2.5% over 2005, at 5.5 million units, making it the second largest genre after crime and thrillers (Source: Nielson Bookscan). This year there were 200 entries for the Award, compared with 35 in 1960. Today’s long and short lists demonstrate both continuity and three distinctly twenty-first century trends.

Continuity lies in the big story of an outsider protagonist (compare Dickens and Rosamunde Pilcher) in Lesley Pearce’s splendid Crimean nurse Hope (Penguin); the allure of past artists (Joanna Trollope’s Parson’s Harding’s Daughter won in 1980) in Vanora Brown’s Portrait of an Unknown Woman (Harper Collins) which was inspired by Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas More’s family; the special house in the country (Tara to Penmarric; Miss Read to Rutshire) in Rachel Hore’s The Dream House (Simon and Schuster). All were long listed.

The biggest distinguishable trend is the increasing popularity of the family saga with our 100+ volunteer readers. From Catherine King’s gritty debut Women of Iron (Little,Brown/Sphere) set in the South Riding of the Industrial Revolution to Annie Murray’s multi-generational Birmingham-based Family of Women (Pan/Macmillan), they cover a wide spectrum that traditionally has aimed at an older readership. But a third of our reader panel is under 30. Perhaps the appeal lies in problems that are, as in the misery memoir, specific, extreme but limited, and ultimately in the past.

Two sagas are short listed. Best seller Katie Flynn’s heroine in Beyond the Blue Hills faces the hardship of a Shropshire farm in war time as well as personal betrayal. Judith Lennox’s A Step in the Dark, (Headline Review) is a big acutely observed novel of family wounds and power plays over three generations. Flynn’s is a solid working class world, where people borrow candles and look after each other; Lennox’s social structures are more fluid. In both, characters are challenged to the utmost during the War. In both, old-fashioned endurance is the key.

Perhaps the rise in interest in family history contributes, too the popularity of sagas, too. The intrusion of family is the second trend that I detect - these are no longer the love stories of the mating generation alone. Two of this year’s short listed novels are set in twin time periods, with the troubled contemporary relationship set in the context of a previous generation’s love story. Elizabeth MacGregor’s Learning By Heart (Transworld/Bantam) is a lyrical page-turner (shades of Mary Stewart in the sense of place), contrasting two generations’ attitudes to love and fidelity. In Iris and Ruby (Harper Collins), Rosie Thomas contrasts a predatory, vulnerable fifteen year old with her grandmother’s war time love affair in Cairo which was glamorous, passionate and intense, infused with the imminence of death.

The third distinguishing trend is a very twenty-first century worldly ruefulness in the short list romantic comedies. Sex is no longer the mystery it was in the 60s and friendship between the sexes can be both intimate and relaxed. But the beloved is still incalculable. In Carole Matthews’s Welcome to the Real World (Headline Review), the hero is a genre favourite, the haunted high achiever, but the heroine is ultra contemporary – practical, affectionate, pursuing her music career through a TV reality show, dealing with her memorably feckless family, a classic coper. By contrast, the hero of Matt Dunn’s The Ex-Boyfriend’s Handbook (Simon and Schuster) isn’t really coping at all. Edward’s self improvement programme to get his girl-friend back leads to true self discovery and the discovery that emotional partnership should be based on more than proximity and habit – a contemporary sentimental education, in fact. These comedies make you laugh aloud but they tell the truth about feelings.

Carole Matthews has a US following but, apart from romantic comedy, there is not much overlap with North American romantic fiction. There is only one romantic suspense on the long list, for example – American Nora Roberts’ Angels Fall (Piatkus) - though the UK virtually created the genre with the iconic Mary Stewart. There are no paranormal romances at all.

In 47 years, the rate of social change has been more rapid than ever before. Women today are better educated, better informed and better off than in the days of our RNA founders. But the fearful clash of hormones and self-respect does not change.

Is its singing at parties a riot?
Does it only like Classical stuff?
Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?
O tell me the truth about love.

Yes, to all of the above.

And these books do.