Chapter 98: Women's Leadership in Romance Fiction Scholarship

Stephanie Moody

Women's leadership in romance fiction scholarship The widely accepted definition of romance novel is a fictional text that (a) centers on the development of a love relationship between two people and (b) ends with the two people happily together. The origins of the romance novel have generally been traced back to Samuel Richardson's (1740) Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded because of the novel's focus on an assertive woman as the protagonist as well as its narrative account of courtship, betrothal, and marriage. Since Richardson, the romance genre has been dominated by talented women novelists such as Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Georgette Heyer, E. M. Hull, Barbara Cartland, Nora Roberts, and Jennifer Crusie to name a few. Today contemporary romances feature a wide variety of subgenres, plots, settings, and relationships, but they continue to retain the basic features of a love story that ends happily. Despite their immense popularity, romance novels ...

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