FOR LOVE OR MONEY

It's always a pleasure to introduce a new academic work that seeks to reveal the true nature of romantic fiction.

It's been nearly fourteen years since jay Dixon's seminal work,The Romantic Fiction of Mills and Boon, 1909-90s was published, but now Laura Vivanco - familiar to many of us through her Teach Me Tonight blog - has published her new scholarly look at the genre with  For Love and Money: the Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills and Boon Romance

Laura gave me the opportunity to read a pre-publication copy of her book and it's an engrossing read for the lover of the genre and an essential for the writer, but I'll leave her to give you a taste of her book.

Welcome, Laura...


Hi Liz! Thanks so much for welcoming me to your blog.


I was introduced to romance via Georgette Heyer so long ago that I can't remember exactly how young I was at the time. I got my PhD from the University of St Andrews where I studied death in fifteenth-century Castile but after I discovered Harlequin Mills and Boon romances and started blogging about them from an academic perspective (at Teach Me Tonight) I decided to apply my literary criticism to analysing (and defending) HMBs. The result is For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills and Boon Romance.

In Liz’s short story, "Secret Wedding"

"the heroine is “bestselling romance novelist Mollie Blake” and the text of each chapter puts into practice the advice contained in its epigraph, excerpted from “Mollie Blake’s Writing Workshop Notes.” (Vivanco 110)

Mollie writes in her notes that “The romance reader is looking for warmly observed characters and deeply felt emotion.” Rachel Anderson, author of The Purple Heart Throbs: The Sub-literature of Love, concurs with this assessment of the importance of emotion: “It is emotional intensity which makes a good romance”. The primary quality of a good romance, then, is that its readers become emotionally involved in the story.

Of course, that’s not the only criterion on which romances can be judged and as I hope I’ve demonstrated in my new book, For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills and Boon Romance, these are novels which can be considerably more complex and well-written than many of their detractors are aware. Nonetheless there are, as Mollie acknowledges, “some cliché-ridden romance[s]” and even she “couldn’t escape the clichés. Even in the darkness of the car park she could see that he was tall, with mile-wide shoulders.” That’s probably because, as the hero of Sally Heywood’s Steps to Heaven (1991) observes, “When emotion runs high, cliché comes into its own. [...] The point isn’t whether it’s cliché but whether it’s genuine” (49-50) and with HMBs it is of paramount importance to evoke genuine emotion in the reader.

Daphne Clair and Robyn Donald, who are both HMB authors, write that

"Emotional impact (also called emotional punch or emotional intensity) is the heart of romance. It can make the difference between acceptance and rejection. If there is a ‘secret’ to romance writing, this is it."

"There are writers whose technical skills may not stand up to stringent literary criticism but who are instinctively able to deliver this magical experience. This is why you will occasionally see books that ‘are not nearly as well-written as mine’ on the shelves when your carefully crafted manuscript has been sent back with a polite letter."

I, however, wanted to apply some “stringent literary criticism” to romances in order to demonstrate that it is wrong to label them all as “sub-literature.”

Writing a good romance involves learning rules, such as those contained in Mollie’s notes, because it’s important to understand the genre’s conventions and sources of inspiration before attempting to innovate and push boundaries. As Gert de Geest and An Goris have observed,

"...handbooks take care not to create the impression that romance writing is merely a mechanical process—an automatic repetition of invariable formulas and previous examples—since this impression would fundamentally conflict with readers’ and potential authors’ experience of new romance texts. On the contrary, the emphasis is placed on the way the “spontaneous” aspect of the writing process remains dominant: the suggested tips and guidelines are mainly presented as strategies that enable and even optimize the spontaneity and individuality of the writing process."

The author of a “self-reflexive” or metafictional HMB such as “Secret Wedding” runs the risk of pulling the reader out of the story each time she draws attention to the strategies she is employing. In Secret Wedding, in which the structure of the story is deliberately signposted and the tricks of the romance-writer’s trade are revealed at the beginning of every single chapter, Liz is therefore testing her skill to the limits. I think she passes the test with flying colours: I enjoy the self-aware observations about romance writing, but every time I’ve re-read the novella I’m pulled into caring about Mollie and Tom’s relationship and by the time I reach the end, I have a silly, happy grin on my face.

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Anderson, Rachel. The Purple Heart Throbs: The Sub-literature of Love. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974.

Clair, Daphne, and Robyn Donald. Writing Romantic Fiction. London: A and C Black, 1999.

de Geest, Dirk, and An Goris. “Constrained Writing, Creative Writing: The Case of Handbooks for Writing Romances.” Poetics Today 31.1 (2010): 81-106.

Fielding, Liz. “Secret Wedding.”

Heywood, Sally. Steps to Heaven. Richmond, Surrey: Mills & Boon, 1991.

Vivanco, Laura. For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills and Boon Romance. Tirril, Penrith: Humanities Ebooks, 2011.

For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills and Boon Romance is published by Humanities Ebooks in pdf format. It is also available in paperback and in Amazon’s Kindle format. More details can be found on Laura’s website.