How the writing of romance novels changed througout time

Those who read my daily blogs, will have noticed I was born in the past century, to be exact in the year 1956. I was a teen during the 1960's and became of age in the 1970's.

Because I was - and still am - a voracious reader, I noticed the change in the romantic books I got into my  hands. The first romance I ever read was one The Impetuous Duchess by Barbara Cartland, followed by These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer. These were very lovely tales, where the heroine was a virgin and did not go any further than a forbidden kiss at the end of the book. She did have all sorts of adventures, though.

                                                    

Then came the 1980's. The tone in romance changed. The heroine was not necessary a virgin anymore, she could have more than one lover and nobody thought the worse of it. In many a novel, she also got raped. Authors then told us how life really was. People used chamber pots in such stories, woke up in the nighth to go and pee. One of my favorite authors from that time was Rosemary Rogers.

                                                  

In 1978 I began my studies at university, and having Literature as one of my two main subjects, I discovered romances have been written all along. I gather that even Egyptians had stories specifically meant for women. In older times, fiction for women was written by men, but around the 16th century also women took up the pen. Romance novels became quite popular in the early 17th century, and even more in the 18th and 19th century.

From that era date famous novels like Wuthering Heights by Emily Brönte (1847) and The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emma Orczy (1905).

In the 20th century we saw the birth of the Harlequin romance novel (starting in the 1950's) and ever since romance has become more and more popular.

Publishers will be willing to take on a romance author, as they are guaranteed to produce sales. But in our age some changes have been made.

We are told we can't write novels of 200,000 words and more. Much too long! The reader, used to watching TV and playing computer games, has a shorter span of memory and doesn't like to read a long novel. I can't vow to this, as I often read exactly such long novels. If they're good, it doesn't matter if the number of pages is higher.

Also rape is absolutely forbidden now - next to a girl having sex when she is not quite 18. I've had to adjust my way of thinking to that of my editor in such aspects. I've been trying to tell her that in Europe people have a different way of thinking and that sex is allowed from 16 years on. But she tells me my novels are published in the US, so I have to adjust.

So now my heroine is a bit older at the start (you can work around that problem) and she can't creep into bed with too many partners. Despite everything she goes through, I should try and keep her virginal. I must admit I often have problems with it. The hardest novel to fix was Maria Gonzalez. In the first draft, Maria marries 4 times (ok, that was kept in the final version). Her first husband gets murdered and she is forced to marry the one who killed him. But she refuses, and thus is raped by that man. I had to change that part. Now she accepts him as a partner, although unwillingly.

And I also have problems with all those explicit sex scenes. In modern romances, pages and pages are filled with descriptions of how two people make love. Call me old-fashioned, but I think this belongs to the privacy of one's own bedroom and the reader should be able to picture what happens. My characters go to bed with each other, but I'm not too explicit. That's ok for me.

How do you think about this?