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The Romantic Fiction Of Mills & Boon, 1909-1990 PDF

232 Pages·1999·12.013 MB·English
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The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon, 1909-1990s The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon, 1909-1990s jay Dixon 0 jay Dixon 1999 This book IS copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. First published in 1999 by UCL Press UCL Press Limited 1 Gunpowder Square London EC4A 3DE UK and 325 Chestnut Street 8th Floor Philadelphia PA 19106 USA The name of University College London (UCL) is a registered trade mark used by UCL Press with the consent of the owner. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available ISBN: l-85728-266-3 HB l-85728-267-1PB Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book. The permission for the use of extracts taken from Mills & Boon” publications has been kindly granted by Harlequin Books S.A. Switzerland with acknowledgement to Harlequin Mills & Boon Limited, UK. Mills & Boon is a registered trademark owned by Harlequin Mills & Boon Limited, UK. Temptation is a registered trademark owned by Harlequin Enterprises Limited, Canada. Silhouette is a registered trademark of Harlequin Books S.A., Switzerland. Harlequin, Harlequin Presents, Harlequin Romance, Temptation and MIRA are registered trademarks owned by Harlequin Enterprises Limited, Canada. Mills & Boon Enchanted is a registered trademark owned by Harlequin Mills & Boon Limited, UK. Typeset by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed by T.J. International, Padstow, UK This book is dedicated to: The memory of John Boone and Jacqui Bianchi - may their dedication to the genre of romance fiction live on in their successors. All the past, present and future authors and readers and editors of Mills & Boon romances - may your enthusiasm for the genre never wane. All those women who have ever defined themselves as feminist - long may we live. Mike Smith - because I promised, and because without whom this book may not have been written. My parents, Ida and Jack Dixon - with love and gratitude for all the years of support and encouragement that they have given me in all my endeavours. V Contents Foreword by Rosemary Auchmuty ix . . . Acknowledgements x111 Introduction 1 1 A Short History of Mills & Boon - A very profitable small firm 13 2 Reader, Author, Editor - Many hours of pleasant reading 27 3 1910s - Society and Exotic, City and Country 43 4 Hero - You brought me to life 63 5 Heroine - Mirror Image 81 6 War and Aftermath - You give me redemption 97 7 Work - The smothering of the creative spark. . . could be a sort of murder 113 8 Sex - We got all the damned foreplay over with months ago 133 9 Love and Marriage - Harbour of desire 155 10 Feminism - I’m not a feminist, but. . . 179 Bibliography and Further Reading 197 Index of Mills & Boon Authors 203 General Index 208 vii Foreword Rosemary Auchmuty A great deal of patronising nonsense has been written about Mills & Boon romances. As “popular culture” they are fair game for literary dismissal; as books for women they invite condescension and ridicule; as the pioneers of brand-name publishing, whose readers are attracted by a logo rather than an author’s name, they have come to stand for all that is worst in formulaic writing and cynical mass-marketing. Apart from their (millions of) readers, few people have anything good to say about Mills & Boon ro- mances; while many who have never read one are quite prepared to denigrate the genre without regard for evidence or truth. As Sheila Ray, author of The Blyton Phenomenon, wrote of another equally derided icon of popular culture, “the sternest critics do not see any need to get their facts right”.’ jay Dixon’s book is different. Dixon writes as an insider, an avid reader of Mills & Boon romances. “Personally, I never travel anywhere without one,” she tells us. She has read - and enjoyed - hundreds of Mills & Boon romances, dating from the birth of the genre in the early years of this century up to the present. So she knows what she is writing about and can set the record straight. As a former employee of the firm, personally acquainted with key personnel including many authors, she has a staggering breadth of knowledge of the genre, its creators and its critics. For those of us who are not so deeply immersed, many surprises lie ahead in this book. Dixon challenges many popular myths about Mills & Boon novels. For example, it is often said that Mills & Boon never depicted premarital or extra-marital sex until very recently. Dixon ix FOREWORD shows that, on the contrary, both have featured in novels of every decade from before the First World War. We tend to think of the typical Mills & Boon hero as aggressive and masterful and the heroine as passively awaiting her prince. But Dixon points out that the macho hero conventionally associated with Mills & Boon only made his appearance in the 197Os, his predecessors including men who were younger, poorer, and/or physically inferior to the heroine, and his successors tending towards the “New Man”. Mills & Boon heroines, too, are far from the stereotypes of feminine pas- sivity that their critics have led us’ to expect. They are usually work- ing women - women with life goals independent of their desire for a maxi’s love - women who are not prepared to take their men as they are, with all their masculine imperfections, but who seek to transform them through love, to bring them firmly into the more humane and egalitarian feminine value system. Many, indeed, are already married, and the plot turns not on winning Mr Right but on transforming a problematic marriage into a fulfilling one. Equally importantly, Dixon writes as a feminist. She demon- strates, as other feminists have tried to do before her, that even an apparently reactionary genre like Mills & Boon romances can be read positively by women. What makes her work different from that of most of her predecessors is that, as a Mills & Boon enthusiast who is herself a feminist, she is living proof that such messages can be taken from the books. In this sense her book is one big primary source, one woman’s first-hand account of her reading life. But it is more than this. Dixon understands the conventions of the genre as only an insider can. She can “read” the symbols (for instance, the home as the place of feminine power into which the hero must be brought) and explain the significance in plot terms of particular scenes, such as the violent sexual assaults on heroines by 1970s’ heroes, to which feminists have not unnaturally ob- jected. At the same time she understands the feminist objections. She recognizes above all that Mills & Boon romances are histori- cal documents and must be read in the context of the time and manner of their production. In this sense her book is a painstaking historical account of the genre’s development over the century and the ways it has responded both to historical events such as war

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