Sample from Romance Fiction

From Romance Overview

Romance fiction as we know it is a fairly recent invention.  The term ‘romance’ originally referred to any kind of adventure story, but has now developed a more specialised meaning.  In romance fiction, the main plot is about the relationship between the central male and female characters – how their romance begins, overcomes setbacks and finally succeeds.  Romance fiction almost always has a happy ending.

Stories about lovers have been around as long as there have been stories.  In the middle ages the idea of ‘courtly love’, that is, the expression of admiration for an unattainable beloved, was the staple of the earliest ballads.  Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the archetypal tragic love story, was an old story long before he used it.  From the middle of the eighteenth century romantic novels, in the sense of adventure stories with a love interest, became increasingly fashionable.  Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: or Virtue Rewarded (1740-41) was one of the most popular; it tells the story of a young woman’s rise from being a servant to making a respectable marriage.  Most were highly melodramatic.  The novel ‘The Lost Heir’ that Georgette Heyer has her heroine write in Sylvester, about Count Ugolino’s shocking behaviour to his nephew, probably caught the tone of circulating library novels very accurately.  And Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) also satirizes the sensational novels that were current at the time.  These novels always involved a love story, but the main interest was in the highly coloured adventures of the hero and heroine, rather than in their relationship, in which undying devotion was taken for granted.