Nicola here. Today I’m talking about the sort of words that people use to describe romance and romantic fiction. Back in 2019 I wrote a blog piece (more of a rant!) about attitudes to romantic fiction. I’d just finished my term as chair of the Romantic Novelists Association and had been deeply involved in the business of romance. Now, only seven years on, I’m no longer a member of any organisations that promote romantic fiction, several of which have been through seismic changes in the meantime. Now, instead, I’m a bookseller with a different perspective on all sorts of fiction. I’m still a reader of romantic fiction in all its forms, however, and I’m curious whether anything much has changed, attitude-wise to romantic fiction, in the last seven years. But first, here is a taste of the original rant:
“One of the issues of which I have become hyper-aware over the last couple of years is that of the language that is used by critics to describe romantic fiction. I’ve always been aware of romantic fiction’s literary reputation – at the very start of my writing career a friend told me how she covered my books in brown paper bags because they were a guilty pleasure. (At least she was eco-friendly about it!) This is hardly a new phenomenon. My grandmother used to hide her genre fiction at the back of her wardrobe.