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When you pick up the latest Emily Henry novel, or settle in for an evening with the newest volume of your favorite romantasy, you are taking part in a process stretching back two millennia. The ancient Greeks considered it a highlight of one's life to hear with one's own ears the words of the great romantic poets of their day. The Romans enjoyed sprawling romantic epics that only reunited their lovers after continent-spanning struggles against foreign armies, pirates, and treacherous monarchs. The Middle Ages sung hushed stories of lust far from the ears of the Church, while its great poets probed the darker boundaries of courtly love, and the writers of the seventeenth century delighted in giving young women ten-volume romances, delivered over the course of a decade, to fill their bookshelves and lonely hours.
Writing about love, its complexities, and resolutions, has been a part of the literary tradition since its inception, but it is only in the last three centuries that the format has grown into the publishing juggernaut we know today. From the intensely observed novels of Jane Austen, through the great Sensation Novels of the 1860s that fused romance and mystery, and into the great industrial and marketing machine that was Mills & Boon and Harlequin at their height, new developments in publishing have linked up with new ideas about womanhood, sex, and romance, to produce an ever-evolving approach to the romance novel, culminating in our own modern Golden Age, where more people from more backgrounds are writing more types of romance than ever before for a readership than is larger than it has ever been, and is consuming its favourite literary form in convenient new formats.
A History of Romance Novels: From Trembling Innocents to Hunky Werewolves explores the long story of our love affair with love stories, during both its eras of creative flourishing, and the long periods of industrially motivated stagnation, to give even the most dedicated romance reader a few new veins to mine, and a few more characters to fall in love with.
