Romance in revolution Part III
The conclusion of my article and workshop, 2005 RWA conference in Reno, Nevada.
The final literary revolution we’re going to explore is the Romantic movement. As far as the novel is concerned, this really sprang from the initiatives of Samuel Richardson. He lived in London in the first half of the eighteenth century, and he was a printer. So he was very close to book buyers; he knew what people would pay to read. He also had a lot of young women friends, who used to employ him to write answers to their love letters. He had a ‘garden of ladies’, a coterie of bluestockings, who were the first to hear and make critiques of his work before it was published.
Richardson was extraordinarily successful. His novels were pounced on in the bookshops and swooped on in the lending libraries. They swept through England and poured across the continent, in every language. What were his secrets? First, the intimacy of his subject-matter. He wrote for and about the heart; he followed every nuance of the emotions, the inner life of his characters. Second, he chose a form that suited the subject-matter. His novels were written entirely in letters, and his central characters in the two most successful, Pamela and Clarissa, were women. He wanted the reader to hear a woman’s voice in the first person, so that the thoughts and feelings came from her inner being. People had done this before, but Richardson went deeper and further. How? Through the third aspect, the tension in his books. The interaction of the characters is intensely dramatic. We are told everything that happens inside and outside the main person in each encounter. This emotional dynamism is what drives a Richardson novel, what makes us keep reading -- through several fat volumes. Richardson’s prose is a fantastic paradox -- he’s the only writer I know who can be both long-winded and breathless at the same time.
Scholars think of Romanticism lasting in various phases well into the nineteenth century. I’m going to touch on just three aspects that proved vital from our point of view as novelists. The first is the way the Romantic novel came to concentrate on the inner life of human beings. It turned towards the subjective: it was obsessed by the individual consciousness, and it explored the mind and the sensibilities with faithful care. Second, it painted a different picture of how this new ‘subject’ related to the physical world. Inner feelings found their echo in the grand movements of nature. We’re all familiar with the imagery: the lone traveller upon the blasted heath, the poet gazing wildly across an Alpine gorge, the doomed lovers embracing in a tropical paradise that rustles and seethes with hidden menace. The Romantic novel derived many effects by showing this exchange between the individual consciousness and the outer world -- which, of course, meant a new understanding of how individuals related to each other. And this led to result number three: a liberation of the form in which this exchange was depicted.
Once the Romantic novel burst upon the scene, the form itself was freed of restraint, and has remained so ever since. The idea that a story can be organically shaped to suit what it expresses proved too natural and appealing ever to go out of use. The novel exploded, in form and expression. There were as many kinds of works as there were authors. You could say there were as many types of novels as there were characters -- Jane Austen is one of the great heirs of the Romantics, and think of the wide difference between Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park.
Novelists have always relished this freedom. Any question -- any answer -- is permissible within a novel, including a contestation of the novel itself. For as long as there are writers, this is a revolution that cannot end. And we are part of it; we are writing here, at our own point on that exciting continuum.
Have we really finally arrived at romance as we know it? Including category romance? Yes indeed. We’ve looked at the great tradition and we can see just what we have inherited. From the troubadours, we received the love story itself -- seductive and subversive, because it dares to sing of women’s ideas and desires. From the précieuses and their followers, we learned about the lovers’ sensibility, and the witty, well-chosen language of the sentiments. From the Romantics, we inherited freedom of expression.
Freedom -- what, even in category romance, which is so often criticized as ‘formula’? Absolutely, because in our endeavor everything is constantly changing; only people outside it can possibly see it as fixed. The publishers themselves are acutely aware that the great tradition of romance is being carried forward into the future, and they strive to second-guess where writers and readers are going next, constantly dreaming up new lists to capture the shape of things to come.
A final point. Once we are fully aware of romance as a tradition we can see why it has always drawn a very nervous reaction from many sides, down through the centuries. To this day, romance still runs counter to the power structure within society -- because it freely explores women’s ideas and desires. It puts love above violence and understanding above possession. And it accounts for more than 50 per cent of the US market in books? That’s subversion on an awe-inspiring scale.
For my historical novels of romantic adventure, see my Books page. For my current crime novels, the Victor Constant Investigations, go straight to Amazon here.
