Romance blockbusters usually feature this vulnerable young woman and tell the story from her point of view. She is set up in the narrative as particularly isolated and defenceless, but this situation enables her to demonstrate the strength and independence of character that readers identify with. From Pride and Prejudice to Twilight, nearly two centuries later, this formula is still working. The opening situations that will drive the romance plot are:
- the heroine is an orphan
- the heroine's social standing depends on her taking a husband even if she does not love him
- the heroine has suddenly been deprived of all her friends
If her identity has been destroyed, she must now (re)build it and she (usually unwittingly) finds the way to do so through romance. This is demonstrated by some of the classic romance heroines, such as:
- Charlotte Bronte's eponymous Jane Eyre, (1847) made to live first with relatives who dislike her and then sent to live in an orphanage-like boarding school;
- Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice (1813) is eldest of five sisters whose social identity in the future will depend upon their choice of husbands;
- Elizabeth Gaskell's Margaret Hale, North and South (1855), wrenched from her idyllic country parsonage to a bustling grimy industrial city.
Romance Characteristics: The Orphan Heroine Needs Love
The unnamed heroine of Daphne du Maurier's novel, Rebecca (1938), is an orphan who must work as a companion to a rich woman in order to earn a living and mix with the social class that she was brought up with. Through her work she begins dating and then marries Max De Winter. This novel is often perceived as a 20th century version of Jane Eyre. Originally published in hardback on both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously, it has never been out of print.
Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances These Old Shades (1926) and Regency Buck (1935) both feature a very young heroine made ward of an older yet desirable aristocratic male, set during the same historical period as Jane Austen's novels. Eventually she comes to love him and realises that he loves her. The wedding follows.
In The Flame and the Flower (1972) Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, London orphan Heather Simmons is obliged to marry Brandon Birmingham and move with him to the United States, travelling to exciting and exotic locations, but love comes later. This explicit and sensational historical novel was published first in paperback, then a new strategy for mass-market romance novels.
Charcateristics of Romance Fiction: The Heroine Actively Seeks a Husband
Irene marries Soames Forsyte, a man she does not love, for the security of a middle-class identity in John Galsworthy's novel The Man of Property (1906). After the end of World War One this becomes the first volume of the long-running Forsyte Saga, a dynastic series that continues to re-emerge on bestseller lists at regular intervals.
Scarlett O'Hara in Gone WithThe Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell, must marry an heir to property at least on a social par with her father, which sets up the dilemma of her life. In the course of this epic saga Scarlett O’Hara becomes by force of circumstance several different kinds of romance heroine.
Bridget Jones of Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) by Helen Fielding, keeps a diary of her aspiration to find a male companion who will fit in with her comfortable middle-class upbringing. How the hero looks dresses and behaves is perceived as bestowing a particular social identity - this man is the quarry of all chicklit heroines. There are noticeable similarities between this novel and Pride and Prejudice.
The Romance Heroine Uprooted From Familiar Surroundings
The Way of an Eagle (1912) Ethel M. Dell. The heroine, Muriel Roscoe, has already been taken from the safe life in England to live with her father, the General of a besieged fort in India, and is now about to find even that way of life, and her father, completely destroyed. By the end of the First World War, Dell was one of the wealthiest authors in Britain. She became mentor to the young Barbara Cartland, whose long career produced over 700 romance novels which famously never stepped beyond the bedroom door.
The Sheik (1919) by E.M. Hull was the first great erotic popular novel of post-World War One and its film version in 1921 became extraordinarily influential. The heroine, Diana Mayo, is kidnapped and kept prisoner in the desert by the man she eventually loves. The exotic location later becomes a staple of Mills and Boon romances.
Bella Swan, heroine of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight (2005) was obliged to move from living with her mother in Texas to living with her father in Washington, needing to make new friends and allies in school; Edward, the love of her life, becomes such an ally. This is the first worldwide bestselling romance (rather than horror) novel with a vampire as hero.
It is no coincidence that several of the bestselling romances considered above also became blockbuster movies. The Sheik, Gone With The Wind, Rebecca, Bridget Jones's Diary and several films of Pride and Prejudice now joined by the Twilight franchise. The individual and independent heroine remains at the core of that success while the print versions of many of those stories remain popular.
Sources:
Bloom, C (2002) Best Sellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900, Palgrave Macmillan
Sutherland, J (2002) Reading the Decades: Fifty Years of the Nation’s Bestselling Books, BBC Worldwide Ltd
Valerie Williamson - Dr. Val Williamson is a freelance journalist and academic specialising in historical and popular culture topics.
