Romance Novelists Lust After Respect

More than a dozen women, and one man, listened raptly as Richard Proietti, standing tall in camouflage fatigues, recalled his days at West Point.

“Our socks had to smile,” he said, explaining how cadets must roll each pair of clean socks, tucking in the long end so that the resultant ball seemed to wear a broad grin.

The occasion was the May meeting of Los Angeles Romance Authors, or LARA, in the community room behind Fashion Square Sherman Oaks.

To inflame the passions of their feisty heroines, romance novels often feature forceful, charismatic heroes. Darkly handsome enough to model for what romance writers call a clinch cover, Proietti certainly looked heroic, especially when he showed the proper way to draw a saber.

But the former Army flier had been invited to the meeting to serve a literary purpose. As LARA Vice President Elise Dee Beraru told the group: “This is information that will make your military romance feel more real without actually having to be in the Army yourself.”

The 40 members of LARA, the Los Angeles chapter of Romance Writers of America, have all published romance stories or aspire to. Orange County’s chapter, one of the largest in the country, has about 300 members. Nationwide, the organization’s 2,000 women writers and 200 or so men produce the steady stream of romances--more than 2,200 titles a year--that their fans find more addictive than “The Sopranos.”

According to Romance Writers of America, more than 41 million people, 90% of them female, read at least one romance novel in the last year. But the fact that millions of people read an estimated 220 million romance novels annually--almost 40% of all popular fiction sold--doesn’t make the genre respectable. Ask any literary critic: Romance has none of the cachet of mysteries, let alone literary novels.

“The stigma is absolutely terrible,” said Marcy Elias Rothman of Studio City, author of four Regency romances, including 1997’s “The Elusive Rake.” A former New York Post reporter, Rothman covered beats from sports to crime, when female journalists were usually sequestered in the features department. She chose to write Regencies, because, as a member of the Jane Austen Society, she was fascinated by English culture of the early 1800s. In a sense, Austen’s novels are Regency romances, Rothman said.

Battling Stereotypes

Jennifer Edelin is an editor at St. Martin’s Press in New York City who acquires women’s fiction, the term that has become preferred for romance novels. She said she thinks people tend to sneer at the books because they are largely written by women, for women. As practiced today, Edelin said, “Romance is a very feminist genre.”

Edelin makes no hard and fast distinction between romantic and other fiction. “Anything that celebrates women, relationships and women’s power is a romance,” she said. She also argues that the romance novel is one of fiction’s most durable forms: “Someone once said, ‘Every great novel is really a romance, and every great novel is really a mystery.’ ”

Linda O. Johnston of Universal City is one of romance’s up-and-coming writers. She has published seven books, several of them in the popular subgenre of time-travel romance. In these novels, the heroine and hero don’t just meet--they come together from different eras of history.

Johnston is also a practicing lawyer, as is Beraru. According to Romance Writers of America, 32% of the genre’s readers are college graduates and almost 10% hold advanced degrees. Still, Johnston said, “People have these stereotyped ideas of who readers are, and they’re not all bored little housewives.”

In fact, many may be bored housewives. Fifty-seven percent are married, and slightly more are outside the full-time work force (41%) than are in it (39%).

Like Edelin, Johnston sees similarities between romances and mysteries, both of which she reads and writes. “They’re fairy tales,” she said of romance novels, “but so are mysteries, because they have to have a happy ending.”

Many people who don’t read romances have little or no idea what the field is about, Johnston said. She was distressed when a man approached her at a recent literary event to ask if it were true that the typical heroine is taken by force by the hero.

Overpowering the heroine is a definite taboo, she told him. “Women often look for alpha males, but abuse is not typical. It’s atypical, and it’s frowned on.”

Seducing More Readers

Paranormal romances such as Johnston’s are just one of the subgenres that have emerged in recent years. Romantic suspense is another, and there is also a growing number of inspirational romances, most aimed at fundamentalist Christian readers, in which consummation never precedes marriage.

Romances are now being published online as well. And covers are changing. Today’s are less likely to feature cleavage. Fabio is out, cartoon characters are in. And since no genre is an island, romance continues to reflect the culture at large. Hip urban stories are on the rise, or as Johnston said: “A lot of publishers are now doing their own version of ‘Sex and the City.’ ”

Johnston complains that people seem to think that romance writers have a formula they write by. Not so, she says. Janet Evanovich, a best-selling mystery writer who began her career in romance, said she was never told by an agent or publisher to include certain “hooks” (a heroine with amnesia, say, or a secret baby). The only caveat she was given, said Evanovich, a Romance Writers of America Honor Role Author, was, “They didn’t want me doing any cussing. . . . I had to say, ‘Peas and carrots!’ That drove me crazy.”