Category Archives: Romance Cover Art

Review – Blue Jasmine – Violet Winspear (1969)

29 Thursday Sep 2016

Posted by in Harlequin Romance, Hero Archetypes, Romance Cover Art, Uncategorized, vintage romance review, Violet Winspear

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Originally published in hardcover in 1969 by Mills & Boon, Violet Winspear’s category line classic Blue Jasmine, had three Harlequin Romance line reprints by 1976. If there was to be a romance canon, Blue Jasmine might make the list.

But it’s impossible to review Blue Jasmine without the foundation of E. M. Hull’s The Sheik. It’s like trying to discuss Samuel Johnson without mentioning James Boswell. And really, why would you want to?

Blue Jasmine Violet WinspearE(dith) M(aude) Hull’s (1919) The Sheik is, in fact, an even surer ringer for the romance canon (again, if such a thing existed). The Sheik’s Ahmed Ben Hassan was played by Rudolph Valentino in a 1921 film adaptation to audiences who just couldn’t believe it. As a romance subgenre, it’s a long-time market win.

The two novels are similar enough in storyline and character development that I’ve had students argue Blue Jasmine is plagiarized. I say instead that Blue Jasmine is a worthy tribute that imitates to flatter.

Take as a goose-pimpling example the scene when the heroine realizes she’s trapped in a tent with the sheik, surrounded by his loyal entourage in the middle of the desert, and there’s no escape from his animal spirits…

In The Sheik by EM Hull:

Why have you brought me here?” she asked, fighting down the fear that was growing more terrible every moment.

He repeated her words with a slow smile. “Why have I brought you here?” Bon Dieu! Are you not woman enough to know?

And in Blue Jasmine by Violet Winspear:

I have no need of your money, so I fear it cannot buy your freedom. There is only one thing that can, and you are a surpassing innocent if you don’t know what it is.”

She stared at him, her eyes like bruised flowers in her pale, shocked face. “I don’t know,” she whispered.

“Really?” His eyes flicked over her. “With your unusual looks, you tell me you don’t know what a man means when he brings you to his tent. Ma belle femme, I think you do know.

the sheik EM HullBoth The Sheik and Blue Jasmine present typical Winspear heroes. If you remember, Winspear presents heroes who “frighten but fascinate…the sort of men who are capable of rape: men it’s dangerous to be alone in the room with.” Winspear, however, likely wouldn’t have loved Ben Hassan. Sadly, Diana, the heroine of The Sheik, is raped off-scene, repeatedly, and for several months (until she falls in love, as any woman would).

Although Blue Jasmine‘s sheik, Kasim ben Hussayn is a  Mr. Angrypants of the first order, heroine Lorna is yet spared rape. A Winspearean hero, a product of his time, would threaten, but never follow through (unless he was a captain of a sailing vessel).

Blue Jasmine first cover

original 1969 cover of Blue Jasmine

As for the heroines, Blue Jasmine‘s Lorna is independent, saucy, up for adventure. Diana in The Shiek is presented as all these things, but, in addition: boyish and unfeeling, an interesting corruption of womanhood that in the first quarter of the twentieth century might demand correction more so than by the late 1960s. But, of course, both heroines fall for their captors, succumbing (in similarly described pivotal scenes) on a far side of the enemies-to-lovers trope continuum.

After all is said and done, Winspear’s heroine, like Hull’s, is revealed (thank the Almighty Christian God) to have fallen for a European. Today’s popular romance market might not balk with singular voice at a bona fide Arab hero (and all of our gods please bless this guy), but in 1919 and 1969, a sheik had to look like a Princeton man.

 

 

 

 

 

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Review – The Little Nobody – Violet Winspear (1972)

15 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by in Giulia Torre, Harlequin Presents, Harlequin Romance, Hero Archetypes, Romance Cover Art, Uncategorized, vintage romance review, Violet Winspear

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A Romance Canon, one as staid and firm (and stout) as Harold Bloom‘s should include Violet Winspear, whose corpus includes over 90 titles written for Mills & Boon. I love her name almost as much as I love Foyle’s War’s Honeysuckle Weeks.

The Little Nobody was chosen for the alpha hero lurking beyond it’s title.

Violet Winspear The Little Nobody

With a little nobody, a Big Somebody must be in there somewhere.

Violet Winspear is known for (notorious for at one time) her alpha heroes: angry, incomprehensible heroes and our future bodice rippers. In 1970, she explained:

I get my heroes so that they’re lean and hard muscled and mocking and sardonic and tough and tigerish and single, of course. Oh and they’ve got to be rich and then I make it that they’re only cynical and smooth on the surface. But underneath they’re well, you know, sort of lost and lonely. In need of love but, when roused, capable of breathtaking passion and potency. Most of my heroes, well all of them really, are like that. They frighten but fascinate. They must be the sort of men who are capable of rape: men it’s dangerous to be alone in the room with.

The category line Winspear helped to launched has pervasive arm-gripping, angry kissing, and even spanking. Still, she got a little flack for that.

The Little Nobody is only #15 in the original Harlequin Presents line (of thousands). A more recent Harlequin line of the same name has the same mission as the original:

You want alpha males, decadent glamour and jet-set lifestyles. Step into the sensational, sophisticated world of Harlequin Presents, where sinfully tempting heroes ignite a fierce and wickedly irresistible passion!

The little nobody is Ynis Raiford. She is newly arrived on a dark and stormy night to a gothic castle on the Cornish Cliffs (Cornwall, England) called the Sea Witch.

Her name – Raiford – is not even hers. It’s borrowed from her stepfather, a con man serving time as a result of his designs on the hero’s fortune (a part of it at least). The hero – Gard St. Clair – is a former maestro whose arm was injured by a freak storefront accident, and then severed from his body at the shoulder by a surgeon, unaware he was operating on a famous conductor because Gard’s wallet had been stolen from him by a pickpocket while he was still unconscious and bloody beneath the shattered pane of glass. So, when Ynis’ petty thief stepfather was caught trying to steal from Gard a couple years later, our hero was still a little touchy and unforgiving. Ynis ventures to the Sea Witch to persuade maestro Gard to drop the charges, but finds the hero a tad embittered by pickpockets, his missing arm, and, presumably, the bad weather.

The bad weather is important, because after Gard declines Ynis’ request to free from prison the only family she’s ever known, she runs out into the dark, stormy night and is deservedly hit by a car. She awakes back at the Sea Witch with amnesia and a ring on her finger. Gard claims she’s his fiancé.

Readers of this line are given no insight into the thoughts and feelings of heroes beyond their actions and smoldering looks of incomprehensible rage, but we can assume the hero feels guilty, or something.

So there we have it. Add another woman – “his old love, the beautiful actress Stella Marrick” – and the set-up is a typical 1970s Mills & Boon pretzel-plot.

Of significance…Ynis has been living in a convent for the better part of her life. Though the Reverend Mother tried to convince Ynis to take orders, instead Ynis wants to see the world. She’s at her hills-are-alive moment when this book begins.

What the heroine’s convent background provides is a nice dose of virgin envy. Yes, it’s a real thing. And Winspear knows how to work it.

He didn’t care a rap she found him more fearful than fascinating. He seemed to her to enjoy the fear which she felt. ‘There are certain terrors known only to a girl,’ he said. ‘The fact is fascinating to a man, and that’s the bare truth.’

Virgin envy. I’m green with it.

Review – The Queen’s Captain – Margaret Hope (1979)

08 Friday May 2015

Posted by in Giulia Torre, Harlequin Romance, Hero Archetypes, Laura London, masquerade historical, Pirates, Romance Cover Art, ship captains, vintage romance review

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The Queen’s Captain by Margaret Hope arrived in a box from my mother’s attic. A huge box filled with Masquerade Historicals and Harlequin Romances when they were prized at 60 cents.

The Queens Captain

Consider this a reading case study. I’d call it an auto-ethnography, but, ew.

Phase I. I find the book in a box of books. They’re all vintage, which means all cock-blockers. There will be no sex, and if there’s any kissing to speak of, there will be no tongue.

Shameful.

Phase II. I find this particular book and read the inside flap.

Get to work, lad, or I’ll whip you.

Phase III. I remember a thread on Goodreads. One of those threads where a reader looks to the group for help to remember a title. The title this reader wanted to remember had a delicious scene where the heroine, disguised as a man, gets flogged by the hero. Flogged. Right there on the deck of the ship. The ship’s crew knows she’s a woman, but has been keeping the secret from the captain. They watch her flogged, unable to do anything about it, because there is no mutiny on a ship. The captain reigns supreme in only the way a captain can. (Note to self.) Then, when the captain discovers the man is a maid, the laments that follow are sweeter for the beating.

I think I’ve found that book.

I was so excited, it took me a few weeks to pick it up. When I did, I put it down again. Another week before I picked it up again. The anticipation bordered on dread. I was that titillated.

Phase IV. I forget utterly that this is a Harlequin line from 1979. It wasn’t until the heroine had escaped the ship unflogged that I’d realized my mistake.

What follows is an altogether different reading experience than I’d hoped for, but one I would recommend nonetheless. Margaret Hope may not have allowed her captain to flog the heroine, but she did so much research that I learned a few things about the Defeat of the Spanish Armada and the Battle of Gravelines.

Plus, Hope’s sentence structure is outstanding.

REVIEW – Dangerous Marriage – Mary Wibberley (1980)

22 Saturday Nov 2014

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Dangerous Marriage by Mary Wibberley (1980)

Dangerous Marriage coverHarlequin Romance #2364

I’m not all about the sex. I’m not. Don’t believe me?

I’m reading The Romance Revolution: Erotic Novels for Women and the Quest for a New Sexual Identity by Carol Thurston (1987).

Reading The Romance Revolution, it occurs to me just how smart women had to be in the academy in the 80s to be taken seriously. This book is rich with research and insight. Each chapter is a book unto itself by today’s standards.

My favorite analysis of popular romance, until now, was Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance. But I prefer Thurston’s methodology. Both Radway and Thurston explore readers’ responses to romance, but Thurston’s methods include a comprehensive analysis of plot and character, the texts themselves. Where Radway’s work is an ethnography, Thurston’s is a discourse analysis, one that takes the reader beyond the often self-referential textual analysis of New Criticism.

I suppose I should be grateful that at my age, I’m still thrilled by academic discovery. But this discovery would have been more helpful when I was a critic. Not just scanning for sex scenes…

So back to that.

Thurston in her opening chapter “The Romance Novel as Popular Culture” outlines her erotic romance data set. The Harlequin Romance line, of which I have been reviewing in my last posts, is not included. That’s what I’ve been saying about this line. No sex.

Thurston reports that, “With a few notable exceptions…the character of male-female relationships portrayed in [this] line remains…the incomprehensible/cruel hero and the insecure/masochistic heroine”.

That’s it. Utterly incomprehensible. I’m relieved to know it’s not just me.

It’s not just the frustrating absence of erotica that excludes this collection of books from Thurston’s analysis. She reports that critics of popular romance as a rule disregard these “classic” romances and cites a Romantic Times (1985) writer: “One wonders when Harlequin will realize that this is not romance at all.”

I can’t agree or disagree. Romance is too subjective a notion to disregard anything outright as not romance. Instead, I’ll argue it either scratches your itch, or it doesn’t.

Take Vargen Gilev.

Yes, ladies. Vargen Gilev. It bears repeating.

Vargen is the “handsome island entrepreneur” who is Mary Wibberley’s incomprehensible hero in Dangerous Marriage. He is a “hard-eyed, hard-faced stranger,” alpha all the way. In spite of the Marimekko shirt he’s wearing on the cover.

The heroine, Shelley, has arrived on Avala to buy a hotel. Her domineering father has demanded that she do so. Vargen also wants the hotel – has actually already purchased it – but more than that, he requires the respectability a marriage will give him. He persuades Shelley to marry him.

Hey, wait. We have a marriage plot. Chin up. There might be sex because they’re married.

Shelley could have been a vindicated heroine, the trope described in Kiss of a Tyrant. But the reader is offered no feeling of vindication. Although Vargen is incomprehensible, he is not cruel.

True, he consummates their marriage while she’s still groggy from the Russian vodka he’s made her throw up fifteen minutes before. But the author Wibberley has more cruelty than Vargen. Vargen by my account is a hottie, and I’ve been duly revved. But their consummation is oblique.

She felt the hard bed beneath her and was aware of having been lifted and placed there, and she lifted her arms to him, to pull him down to her, to hold him as she had never held anyone before…There was only darkness, and movement, and two bodies that became as one…

Only darkness? Only movement? What about his penis?

The plot’s twists are a righteous yoga pose designed to explain the hero’s actions for the previous 180 pages. It’ll just confuse us both if I try to recap.

Shelly, after a lifetime of emotional and psychological abuse by her father, is skittish. When Vargen grabs her to keep her from falling over the balcony, she rages. The typical fist flailing against his hard, broad chest. Shelley almost falls off two balconies, cuts her foot, nearly drowns, suffers alcohol poisoning, and is kidnapped.

Through it all, Vargen is impassive, hard. Incomprehensible.

Until the final scene, when he rescues her from her kidnappers and melts.

 ‘I love you Shelley, I love you very much…,’ he groaned. ‘Oh, my dearest…’

And more like that. Some darlings. Some my loves. I prefer my reserved heroes to remain reserved. His softening at the end of a book feels like a betrayal. He can love her but still look mean. That’s the point.

I’m so done with this line. Where the hell is Avala anyway?

Up next…Harlequin Temptations. I remember stealing these from my mother and hiding them under my bed. They’re included in Thurston’s analysis of erotic romance, and a box has just arrived on my front porch – an accidental pregnancy after a few tipsy minutes on Ebay.

Yeehaw.

Swan Bay

15 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by in Giulia Torre, Romance Cover Art, Swan Bay, Wolfe Island series

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SWAN BAY 
Swan Bay cover painted 11 14 14

Simon Low is a rake. His name travels across New York on whispers and titters. Owner of a luxury department store on the Ladies’ Mile, it’s his job to create desire.

He makes women want things. 

At least, that’s what Chloe Swan’s brothers tell her.

But her brothers must have the wrong man.

Simon is the most awkward man Chloe has ever met. When Simon visits his brother’s grave at the cemetery managed by Chloe’s family, he refuses to touch her. He can barely look at her, let alone seduce her.

What in the world could he make her want?

But Simon has a secret. He and his twin shared an extraordinary connection, one that was lost when the two were separated during the storm. He had always felt that connection. And then, with the single gulp of the river that had swallowed his twin, had not.

Until he meets Chloe.

Now, Simon has the devil of a time telling her the truth…that he can feel her from the inside out.

Set in New York against the Thousand Islands Region and Manhattan in 1893, Swan Bay continues the story of Wolfe Island.

Yes! Sign me up! I want to read SWAN BAY.

Kindle, Paperback Publication Date: February 14, 2016.

REVIEW – Kiss of a Tyrant – Margaret Pargeter (1980)

29 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Harlequin Romance, Hero Archetypes, Romance Cover Art

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Kiss of a Tyrant PargeterKiss of a Tyrant by Margaret Pargeter
Harlequin Romance #2375

The virgin’s vindication. One of my favorite tropes. If you don’t know of it yet, it’s a good one. It culminates with the hero – an angry man of the highest order – as his head snaps up to look in mute horror to study the face of the maiden beneath him after he’s inadvertently stolen her virginity. The inadvertent part is important.

But not as important as the hero’s grim belief that the heroine is not a virgin. And dammit, she should be.

What if I asked you to prove you’d never belonged to another man?

Such is the way with Kiss of a Tyrant.

Sloan Maddison is an Australian alpha male who finds himself in the English countryside where his widowed mother contemplates returning to live. In a country inn, he meets interior decorator Stacy Weldon. Stacy is “on leave” from her career, helping her mother and sister at the inn after being nearly raped by her boss. She is wounded and angry and not optimistic about her future.

Sloan is attracted to her. Pretty sure he wants to marry her. So uses his mother’s illness as an excuse to carry her off to Australia. But on the way out the door, he gets wind of that “affair” with her boss. And he’s hopping mad about it. She must have asked for it, and along the way, collected other affairs that now debases their own kindling desire.

The hero’s she-must-have-asked-for-it motivation is a hole in the plot that has widened over time. But it’s easy to jump across. Because Sloan is sexy in the way only an angry pants hero can be. Mean, misguided, and hard to get. Oh, but in love nonetheless.

The wrap-up is a bit holey, too, and would have been for readers even in 1980. Sloan is mean to Stacy up until the final moment, but claims he had known of her innocence for the preceding two whole days before the final page. He wanted to see if she could really adapt to his remote Australian way of life. Huh.

Sloan is mean as a billy goat. But, alas, sexier. So I can forgive the holes, even if Mr. Angrypants can’t.

REVIEW – The Angry Man by Joyce Dingwell (1979)

22 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Harlequin Romance, Hero Archetypes, Romance Cover Art

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The Angry Man Joyce DingwellThe Angry Man by Joyce Dingwell (1979) Harlequin Romance #2318 The Angry Man. How could I not?

First, a detour to cover art. I am working with an artist on the cover of book two of the RiverLust series, Simon’s Story. It’s called Swan Bay. I don’t believe you can paint a handsome man on the cover of a romance novel. Beautiful heroines? Yes. But the heroes always come off wrong.

Point in fact: The Angry Man cover hero is bleak. Crocodile Dundee with a longer face and shadowed, sunken cheeks. His hair is some kind of a poofy gray 70s mullet. Go ahead. Take a look at the cover of The Angry Man. Does he look angry to you? See that slight lift of his upper lip, over there on the right? The way his brows are furrowed together as he regards the heroine? Yes. The lovely doe-eyed one.

He is not angry; he’s sardonic, bemused. The man on this cover looks more perturbed than angry. Which is the perfect summation of Joyce Dingwell’s hero in this book.

English Polly loved her neighbor, who loved her sister, so her uncle sent her away. To Australia. Where after working on a statistics team as the resident non-statisician, she is told she has to stay another six months, because her former lover’s courtship of her sister is going more slowly than anticipated. So she takes the position of paid companion to Mrs. Clemance, young and beautiful wife of Thorn Clemance. Thorn is an ag specialist for a pharmaceutical company. A medical herbalist. But the beautiful Mrs. Clemance is not his wife. It’s his cousin’s widow. The hero is, in fact, not married. We learn this as the heroine does, and it’s a breathless beat.

Look at me, MissKendall, look at me, tell me what you see.’ ‘I-I don’t understand you.’ Polly tried to retreat a step, but he advanced, and at once they stood barely an inch apart. I think you do understand. I think you see a man who is a no-half-measures man. I think you see a man who would not be put off with subtleties, evasions and half-truths from any woman he made his wife. I think you see a man who would demand an entirety, a fulfillment, a conclusion, a completion.’ A pause. ‘I think you see a man who would be demanding four, not eight walls.”

Oh, dear. Here’s looking at you.

The ultimate logic of conflict? Unknown.

There is an ancestral puzzle requiring a flow chart to comprehend. And, for some reason, Thorn couldn’t tell Polly about his cousin’s widow’s recent sanitarium visit, her convalescence in his home, or the will that required that before she inherit, she must remain unmarried for two years. Which would have explained Polly’s charge to keep the young woman away from men.

The hero is in fact exactly like his picture (and the reader). Confused and frustrated. Not an awful book. Joyce Dingwell (b. 1908) wrote 80 of them. She knew how to write.

But for this one, in the end, I am left with only a single, bright nugget: Upon first introduction, her toes were dipped in the river until he found her and hauled her out. A shark had taken the hero’s dog from that very rock, only a week earlier.

There is no cure for a shark attack…When you put your gear on we’ll get back.’ ‘Gear? I’ve only removed my shoes and my pantyhose!’ He shrugged, saying almost uninterestingly: ‘Put ‘em on.’ Incensed, feeling a fool, hoping at least he would look away as she did so, Polly complied. It was not easy to wriggle discreetly into pantyhose, and she wished he would wander off. A tactful man would have. But he didn’t, he stood there right to the final hitch.

The final hitch? This whole line of books is worth reading for the settings. These girls get to go everywhere.

SWAN BAY cover sketch – Book Two

17 Friday Oct 2014

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Working again with Tracy Hetzel of Long Blue Straw on the cover for the Wolfe Island follow up, Swan Bay. Again, set in the thousand islands of upstate NY in 1893. Though historically ‘accurate,’ the setting is fictionalized representation of Thousand Island Park and the surrounding region.

This is Simon’s story.Swan Bay sketch Giulia Torre Longbluestraw

For text and image teasers, visit my Wolfe Island Pinterest Board.

My husband proposes that this be called the RIVERLUST series. Which is funny. So may just stick.

REVIEW – Secrets of Autumn – Joan Elliott Pickart

05 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by in Loveswept Reviews, Romance Cover Art

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Secrets of Autumn by Joan Elliott Pickart
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Secrets of Autumn coverThe Secrets of Autumn #162 – Joan Elliott Pickart (Oct 1986)

Meetup: Slapstick. Heroine pretends to be unfashionable and unattractive while she temps for a handsome architect to gather psychological data for her dissertation.

Conflict: Hero falls in love with plain jane heroine because he’s looking to settle down, and feels betrayed when he learns that she is actually fashion-forward.

80s standouts: Were human subjects research protocols not run through an IRB in the 80s?

His fashion: Not terrible. Very little brown, surprisingly.

Her fashion: It wouldn’t be the 80s without a teal blue shirtwaist dress.

The Penetration Station: “He came to her with strength tempered by gentleness, and she received him with love” (p. 87). Meh. Not Joan’s strong suit.

Cover Art: Nick Caruso. They’re both wet.

Survey Says: Joan Elliott Pickart does fun romps better than tragic sap. This one was a romp. Fun and funny. Actually liked secondary character (hero’s male chum) – Bish Terzoni. Bish Terzoni?

View all my reviews

Caught the Bantam Loveswept wave?

03 Wednesday Sep 2014

Posted by in Loveswept Reviews, Romance Cover Art

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I’m afraid I have. I caught it back in 1984, the year of the line’s debut. That’s when my mother first starting receiving the books monthly by the half-dozen, boxed in cardboard, and to the wrath of my father who lamented the subscription fees. (It wasn’t the only box of books she received each month.)

It’s easy to see how a 13-year-old Catholic school girl could have loved these stories, fallen in love with the very idea of being swept off her feet…and (a little too early) into the bedroom.

As a 43-year-old? I’m having fun swimming in the retro. Brown suits and yellow dresses. Phone books and travel agencies. Illustrated front covers. A lost art.

On sale on Etsy by Curiosities39t

On sale on Etsy by Curiosities39t

And the marketing campaigns. My favorite – a 1-800 number to call to assist Bantam with research on its readership. These bits of ephemera are making my re-reading of the Loveswept line more fun than even Joan Elliot Pickart’s opening-scene, open-mouthed, stranger-danger kisses.

Try one for yourself. The entire Bantam line was digitally re-released in 2011.