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GIULIA TORRE

~ reading and writing romance

GIULIA TORRE

Tag Archives: Mills and Boon

Review – The Everywhere Man – Victoria Gordon (1981)

31 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by Giulia Torre in feminism, Giulia Torre, Harlequin Romance, vintage romance review

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category romance, Harlequin, harlequin romance, Mills and Boon, romance, romance novel reviews, romance reviews, sexual harassment

In honor of all the women who in 2017 fundamentally changed the conversation around sexual harassment, in honor of all the women who for a hundred years prior tried and failed, and in honor of those of us to come who will still speak truth to power, even in the face of new ASAP legislation (I speculate here) that will make accusing a white man of anything at all a criminal offense…I give you The Everywhere Man.

the everywhere man

Because, even if she claims she doesn’t, every woman wants a stalker.

Set in Australia, Alix is an architectural draftswoman with a talent for design and training German Shorthaired Pointers. Alix lost both her parents to a bushfire two years before, a sad fact that serves to motivate our heroine, at the awfully familiar sound of an Australian bushfire, out of the bush onto a busy highway at warp speed. She swerves into a ditch to avoid the hero. In the midst of an angry man rescue, she faints (ffs).

“Obnoxious, arrogant, conceited” Quinn Tennant pulls her out of the ditch. After Alix fails to show proper gratitude, Quinn asks, “Is it part of some Women’s Lib programme to be ungrateful, stroppy, and generally disagreeable?” (p. 17). Expressly claiming payment, he kisses her with “no crude savagery. Only a vast knowing” (p. 18, italics belong to the author). She tries and fails to claw-slap him (“Naughty, naughty” he chides), which is followed by laughter: “Why not relax? You’ve only one more kiss to finish the debt” (p. 19).

The professional rapes described in the story are metaphoric in scope. Victoria Golden, author of Always the Boss (1981) and Age of Consent (1985), among other 80s category romances, is presumably familiar with the issues of sexual predation in and out of the workplace.

Alix’s former fiancee and co-worker, a threadbare stereotype, steals her designs. New hero Quinn Tennant is not only her judge in dog shows, the landlord of her rented cottage, but also her boss. I won’t go into the details of the now-dated professional set-up for the central love scene. It includes a hotel suite, a drink in the boss’ face, a naked roll across the vast bed, an “athletic” dismount from the mattress, followed by a “sprint for the doorway”  (p. 114). Alix’s virtue remains intact because heroines can be out-and-out shrews when confronted with deflowering.

Fast forward through more dog shows to the happily-ever-after: The two are engaged to be married, and Quinn reveals he’s rescued Alix’ stolen designs. She promptly rips the short stack of drawings in half and quarters, saying “these are from the past; they don’t matter now” (p. 189).

What woman would rip up her original drawings? Who would expect her to?

It may mean nothing, but author Victoria Golden is a man, and the a.k.a. was born in response to the publisher’s claim that “no man” could write Harlequin category romance: “Gordon is widely believed to be the first man to seriously meet the challenge.”

I ask myself: is it one thing when readers consume toxic romance narratives imagined by other women, but another thing entirely when they’re crafted by a man (pretending to be a woman)?

My students tell me that it seems sometimes that I love these books, and sometimes that I hate them. Rarely in life am I this conflicted. True, someone can offer me one drink or another, and, faced with a hard choice, I’ll end up with both.

So I’ll end up with both here…

I love romance.

I hate this book.

 

Review – Dear Tyrant – Margaret Malcolm (1953)

30 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by Giulia Torre in Harlequin Romance, vintage romance review

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category romance, Harlequin, harlequin romance, Mills and Boon, romance novel reviews, romance reviews, romance writing

 

dear tyant malcolm

First published as Beloved Tyrant in 1953.

Thirty-five Ithaca College undergraduates are taking my first-year seminar Reading Popular Romance. In the footsteps of Carol Thurston and Janet Radway, we leaf through hundreds of roughed-up, red-edged books and mine the texts for what they are: artifacts of popular culture. One collective expression of an unarguably female imagination. The very act of reading is everyday citizen science. We ask ourselves, whatever will these women say next?

Don’t think it matters? Ithaca College’s ivy league neighbor, Cornell University, enrolled hundreds (~) of its undergraduates in a seminar to watch pornography. Students called it “the porn course.” My “trash class” is therefore in good company.

So what have we learned from Dear Tyrant? For one thing, something about a woman’s professional life in the 1950s. Goodreads reports that Margaret Malcolm wrote over 100 romance novels at Mills & Boon from 1940 to 1981. By the time Beloved Tyrant was published in 1953, she’d already written ten.

You’d think after reading hundreds of romance novels that by now the pleasure would be, you know, expected. But it was an unexpected pleasure to see in the pages of Margaret Malcolm‘s Dear Tyrant (1975) reference to Jane Eyre. It’s not unusual for authors of these old category romances to follow Brontë’s lead. Thousands of paperback romances were written before women could be issued credit cards in their own names, while marital rape was legal (legal until 1993 in all 50 states, my friends), when access to the Pill was decades away. One of the few jobs available to Harlequin’s heroines – or for women in general for that matter – was as a caretaker for homebound invalids or children. It shouldn’t have moved me overmuch when the character sees her own reflection in governess Jane Eyre. Still, I was tickled.

Because even in her eleventh book, Margaret Malcolm was having fun. Not only does her heroine laugh at the image of herself as Jane Eyre, but she also attends a masquerade ball, has to leave by the stroke of midnight, and loses a shoe in the throes of her speedy departure. A nod to Jane Eyre, and a wink at Cinderella.

Eleven books in, with eighty-nine to go? That’s about time a career romance writer taps her nose and says I got this, too.

 

 

 

 

Review – The Little Nobody – Violet Winspear (1972)

15 Monday Jun 2015

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

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1970s harlequin, Boon Harlequin, category romance, contemporary romance, cover art, harlequin presents, harlequin romance, Mills and Boon, retro romance, romance novel reviews, vintage romance reviews, Violet Winspear

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.

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