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        This article appeared in the July 2005 edition of ROMANCE WRITERS REPORT in the US and formed the basis of a workshop I gave with my agent, Kristin Nelson, at the RWA conference in Reno, Nevada. I was inspired to write it when I heard a very successful author complain about the ‘cringe factor’ she was made to feel when she first started writing love stories. My academic research into the origins of romantic fiction uncovers a truth that should not surprise us – the love story is not only a great tradition, but a powerful and subversive voice for women.

        I’d like to take you into the past in quest of two things: first, the meaning of the word ‘romance’; second, romance as a form, as a way of telling a story.

        What is the point of this quest? Because as writers of romantic novels we are part of an endeavor that is hundreds of years old, and which will continue long after you and I are gone. Humankind does not seem to be able to live without the love story. And since that is the case, we might as well know everything we can about this age-old endeavor. So from now on, if someone is condescending enough to ask you, ‘Romance! What on earth are you writing that for?’ you’ll be able to answer, ‘Because I’m a revolutionary.’

        The root word of the term ‘romance’ is ‘roman’, which is a Latin word, and some of the earliest novels were written by the Romans -- such as the fourth-century novel, Apollonius of Tyre. The old word ‘roman’ indicated something quite democratic -- for those early novels were written not in classical Latin, but in the language of the people, the vulgar Roman language of the time. From the beginning, then, the word ‘roman’ meant a form of story-telling that was accessible to people from many walks of life. These novels would have been recited or read aloud to ordinary people: soldiers around a campfire, or friends gathered to wine and dine in someone’s house.

        This root word ‘roman’ travelled through Europe and into Middle French and Middle English, when we first meet the word ‘romanz’. In those early days, and later in the Middle Ages, a ‘romanz’ was a tale in verse, often about marvelous deeds of chivalry, or the adventures of a dashing hero, or a pair of star-crossed lovers. And the word also came to mean a prose narrative on similar subjects -- again, not in Latin, the language of scholarship and the church, but in the vernacular, the language of the people. By the fifteenth century we find ‘romanz’ used also to mean an extravagant fiction, invention or story, a picturesque falsehood, a wanton exaggeration. Well, if romance is wanton exaggeration, I’m all for it! In 1530 we find the lovely variant ‘romaunt’, usually a fabulous tale about a knight and his lady. In the seventeenth century, in France and England, the term ‘romance’ was used for a fantasy, a long inventive story remote from real life. For the first time, in that century, it was also used specifically to mean a love story, written to be accessible to a wide audience, and we see this meaning carried through right to our own day.

        So much for the history of that venerable word. What of romance as a literary form? Within Western culture, its first flowering was in the days of the troubadours. Something revolutionary happened to poetry in France in the twelfth century -- there was a huge swing towards the canso d’amor, the song of love, which in its turn influenced the roman, the long narrative poem. This trend was inspired by elaborate and beautiful Arabian songs and tales of love which came to the south of France via the Moors in Spain. And it was a movement that neatly suited its time, when the kings, queens and high nobility were refining the art of living in their gracious and sophisticated courts. Most of the troubadours, men and women alike, were aristocrats. They were highly educated, with a curiosity for fresh ideas, and they also loved the antique past, the mythical, the fantastic. They were writing in a form that required great wit and technical skill, and they turned all this learning and ingenuity to the development of a new concept -- courtly love.

        So seductive was it that we are still familiar with it today. In courtly love the knight, the poet, the lover, woos his mistress gradually and gently, with respect and obedience. It is the woman who calls the tune and the man who sings it. The woman dictates each stage of the man’s approach and of all their passionate exchanges. In return for his worship, she tenderly and expertly shows him her loving mercy.

        In their form and their themes, many of these long works resemble the epic poems of chivalry or the religious poems that people were familiar with at the time. Nonetheless, the new lyrical and narrative poems of love mark a great difference in story-telling. Epics and religious stories present human life through action and description, and concentrate on putting across a strong plot, with a message or moral. The romance, on the other hand, explores character and relationships. Dialogue, the exchange of thoughts and sentiments, self-commentary and emotional debate are central to this new form. The roman may still contain tales of valor for the sake of a sovereign, or a sovereign lady, but the focus has altered -- the real battle is fought not on far-off fields, but within the woman’s ambit: the court, the castle, the mansion, the hearth and home where the woman holds sway.

        There were hundreds of troubadours to sing and convey these stories around southern France, and hundreds of trouvères to spread them across northern France and into England. These poets and musicians might be great ones themselves, like Guilhem VII, Duke of Aquitaine, or Béatrix, Countess of Die in Provence; they might be warrior poets like the noble Bertran de Born of Périgord or they might be patronized by the great. Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen first of France and then of England, was a grand patroness of troubadours, the most famous of her protégés being Bernart de Ventadour. He was not nobly born: he was brought up in the kitchens of Ventadour, and fell in love -- and into bed -- with the mistress of the castle.

        These complex, adventurous romances gained currency and found a hearing not just in the courts but in society. Ordinary people, like the citizen-poets of Arras, embroidered on the new forms. Talented women like Béatrix drew about them other women in schools of poetry that developed the new themes. Romance took a strong hold on the popular imagination, and it was actively promoted by women. We can see that, in more than one sense, romance was subversive. It freely examined the woman’s point of view. It put love above violence, and it put understanding above possession. Romance ran directly counter to the everyday brutalities of the feudal system, in which warfare and territory were the primary concerns.

        In the following two centuries, love pervaded European literature, in prose and verse. This was before the invention of printing, so these popular works were spread by performers, and in manuscript. One of the international bestsellers then was the love story Floire et Blanchefleur, which was translated into German, Dutch, Norse and English. Once printing came along, different versions spread across state borders, and they were reissued again and again, in embellished or condensed forms. Geoffrey Chaucer started his poetic career with a translation of the Romance of the Rose. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a late fourteenth-century romance, helped to inspire Thomas Malory’s Arthurian romances in the fifteenth.

        From then on there was every kind of romance you could think of. Adventurous. Fantastical. Historical (and pseudo-historical). Pastoral. And they were written in every form and at every length; some of them were voluminous.

        In the seventeenth century, romance was still supreme in England, its greatest admirer being John Milton. Meanwhile in France the next great revolution was occurring in romance. From around 1650 we find one of most extraordinary phenomena in the history of letters -- the career of Madeleine de Scudéry. She was well born, she had a highly successful salon, and her romantic novels sold across Europe in miraculous numbers. In England, Samuel Pepys’s wife reread a Scudéry novel, Le Grand Cyrus, so often that five years later she was still retelling the story to him in the carriage when they went out at night.

        The other influence of Mademoiselle de Scudéry was even more profound. She was a precieuse. In those days, as now, if you call someone ‘precious’ you are accusing them of affectation. Worse, the critics of the précieuses called them sentimental. And they were. If you’ve seen the film of Cyrano de Bergerac you’ll remember the heroine going to a poetry salon run by the précieuses, where they read sentimental poetry. Rostand, who wrote the play, makes ironical fun of them. But he felt their influence powerfully: what could be more contrived, more witty or more gloriously sentimental than the love story of Cyrano de Bergerac?

        Linguists will tell you that the précieuses did more than any other group in history to change the French language; and in so doing they changed people’s way of thinking about love. They had a whole vocabulary to explain their ideal -- a version of courtly love, where the man wooed the woman with wit and tenderness. What they proposed was a seductive new interaction between the intellect and the feelings. They turned the word tendre meaning ‘tender’, into a noun -- meaning ‘the tender feelings’. They drew a map of the feelings, la carte de tendre. A beautiful country of the emotions, where you could start at ‘new friendship’ and travel through gentle pastures to the ‘tenderness of gratitude’, the ‘tenderness of affection’, or the ‘tenderness of esteem’. They were dedicated to exploring the sentiments, and they placed a high value on wit and well-chosen language -- a language that seemed bizarre and even shocking to commentators of the time.

        The influence of the précieuses on the love story was profound. It touched all the great novelists of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century: writers like Madame de La Fayette, Prévost, Rousseau, Goethe. There is a strong link between their vision and the final literary revolution we’re going to explore -- the Romantic movement. As far as the novel is concerned, this really sprang from the initiatives of Samuel Richardson. He lived in London in the first half of the eighteenth century, and he was a printer. So he was very close to book buyers; he knew what people would pay to read. He also had a lot of young women friends, who used to employ him to write answers to their love letters. He had a ‘garden of ladies’, a coterie of bluestockings, who were the first to hear and make critiques of his work before it was published.

        Richardson was extraordinarily successful. His novels were pounced on in the bookshops and swooped on in the lending libraries. They swept through England and poured across the continent, in every language. What were his secrets? First, the intimacy of his subject-matter. He wrote for and about the heart; he followed every nuance of the emotions, the inner life of his characters. Second, he chose a form that suited the subject-matter. His novels were written entirely in letters, and his central characters in the two most successful, Pamela and Clarissa, were women. He wanted the reader to hear a woman’s voice in the first person, so that the thoughts and feelings came from her inner being. People had done this before, but Richardson went deeper and further. How? Through the third aspect, the tension in his books. The interaction of the characters is intensely dramatic. We are told everything that happens inside and outside the main person in each encounter. This emotional dynamism is what drives a Richardson novel, what makes us keep reading -- through several fat volumes. Richardson’s prose is a fantastic paradox -- he’s the only writer I know who can be both long-winded and breathless at the same time.

        Scholars think of Romanticism lasting in various phases well into the nineteenth century. I’m going to touch on just three aspects that proved vital from our point of view as novelists. The first is the way the Romantic novel came to concentrate on the inner life of human beings. It turned towards the subjective: it was obsessed by the individual consciousness, and it explored the mind and the sensibilities with faithful care. Second, it painted a different picture of how this new ‘subject’ related to the physical world. Inner feelings found their echo in the grand movements of nature. We’re all familiar with the imagery: the lone traveller upon the blasted heath, the poet gazing wildly across an Alpine gorge, the doomed lovers embracing in a tropical paradise that rustles and seethes with hidden menace. The Romantic novel derived many effects by showing this exchange between the individual consciousness and the outer world -- which, of course, meant a new understanding of how individuals related to each other. And this led to result number three: a liberation of the form in which this exchange was depicted.

        Once the Romantic novel burst upon the scene, the form itself was freed of restraint, and has remained so ever since. The idea that a story can be organically shaped to suit what it expresses proved too natural and appealing ever to go out of use. The novel exploded, in form and expression. There were as many kinds of works as there were authors. You could say there were as many types of novels as there were characters -- Jane Austen is one of the great heirs of the Romantics, and think of the wide difference between Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park.

        Novelists have always relished this freedom. Any question -- any answer -- is permissible within a novel, including a contestation of the novel itself. For as long as there are writers, this is a revolution that cannot end. And we are part of it; we are writing here, at our own point on that exciting continuum.

        Have we really finally arrived at romance as we know it? Including category romance? Yes indeed. We’ve looked at the great tradition and we can see just what we have inherited. From the troubadours, we received the love story itself -- seductive and subversive, because it dares to sing of women’s ideas and desires. From the précieuses and their followers, we learned about the lovers’ sensibility, and the witty, well-chosen language of the sentiments. From the Romantics, we inherited freedom of expression.

        Freedom -- what, even in category romance, which is so often criticised as ‘formula’? Absolutely, because in our endeavor everything is constantly changing; only people outside it can possibly see it as fixed. The publishers themselves are acutely aware that the great tradition of romance is being carried forward into the future, and they strive to second-guess where writers and readers are going next, constantly dreaming up new lists to capture the shape of things to come.

        A final point. Once we are fully aware of romance as a tradition we can see why it has always drawn a very nervous reaction from many sides, down through the centuries. To this day, romance still runs counter to the power structure within society -- because it freely explores women’s ideas and desires. It puts love above violence and understanding above possession. And it accounts for more than 50 per cent of the US market in books? That’s subversion on an awe-inspiring scale.