If you’ve heard about any historical romance, then you’ve probably heard of Outlander. The popular series by Diana Gabaldon follows Claire Beauchamp Randall, an English nurse who falls through time when visiting standing stones in the Scottish highlands in 1946. Transported to 1743, she is picked up by a band of Scots highlanders and falls… Read more →
Tag: Romance
Unmasked by the Marquess and the Male Impersonator’s Tipping Point
In a moment in which trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people have quickly gained increased visibility, the stakes of telling a tale of a person assigned female at birth and living as a man have never been higher. Tales of “male impersonators” existed long before the “transgender tipping point,” but this historic moment calls for… Read more →
Suffering a Suffragist: An 1880s Romance
When Nursing Clio put out the call for the Romancing Clio series, I searched Goodreads for historical romance novels in my field and was surprised to find eighty-two suffrage-themed romance novels, including one set in Texas, my specialty. Bobbi Smith’s The Lady and the Texan looked like an enjoyable romp about Amanda Taylor, a young… Read more →
Love in the Ton: Georgette Heyer’s Legacy in Regency Romance World-Building
Georgette Heyer is widely considered to be the pioneer of the Regency romance. From 1921 to 1972, Heyer published thirty-seven romances set in the Georgian or Regency eras.1 But Heyer’s fiction never reflected the realities of life in Regency England. Although she was an avid researcher, particularly when a subject interested her, she nevertheless invented… Read more →
Conditions Are Favorable—For Love!
Tara Staley’s 2013 novel Conditions Are Favorable brings romance to the windswept sand bar of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, positing an emotional relationship between Orville Wright and Madeleine Tate at the start of the twentieth century. Tate is a local woman dreaming of something better than rural poverty and hard work. She seems to find… Read more →
World War II Romance Takes Flight: With Every Letter by Sarah Sundin
A confession: I am a fairly new romance reader. I only picked up my first true romance novel about a year ago. However, I grew up hearing a true story that could be straight out of a historical romance. My grandparents met and had a shipboard romance just after World War II as they served… Read more →
“Stories in Plain View”: Cat Sebastian’s Revolutionary Queer Historical Romances
It’s no secret that I love romance novels. At its best, the genre challenges traditional narratives by offering emotional and sexual agency to characters who are so frequently denied both; not only women, but gay, lesbian, nonbinary, and queer characters. In a world that continues to wrestle with equity, bodily autonomy, and consent, romances are… Read more →
The Gender Politics of the “Sexy Chef” in Romance Literature
After finishing my master’s degree in Gastronomy in July 2013, I gave myself an academic reading palate cleanser.1 I devoured dozens of romance novels that summer before I began my PhD. Some were good: saucy and satisfying. Others were less good: dull and uninspired, though still relatively enjoyable, like the breadsticks at Olive Garden. One… Read more →
A Curious New Woman: Veronica Speedwell
It is June 1887, and London is preparing to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, marking the 50th year of her reign. The once young and luminous Queen is now, however, a plump German widow, viewed increasingly by many as little more than a symbolic figurehead. In 1887, the British Empire is vast, covering nearly 25%… Read more →
A Very Lost Cause Love Affair; or, Is It Possible to Write a Good Civil War Romance?
Ask anyone who knows me, and they’ll tell you: I love romance novels. Seriously — after signing up sort of as a joke, I fell hard for Audible’s Escape Package and binged books about everything from Vermont apple farmers to Regency wallflowers. And while some people might want their escape reading to be as far… Read more →