Australian Romance writing - what's there to take seriously?

Last weekend saw the annual Australian Romance Readers Awards.

Once again, Australian author Anna Campbell won Favourite Australian Romance Author as well as the Favourite Historical Romance category for her book Midnight's Wild Passion.

Other authors present at the awards dinner included AWW challenge participant Helene Young, whose book, Shattered Sky, won Favourite Romantic Suspense, multiple ARRA award-winner Kandy Shepherd, Lisa Heidke, Rachael Johns, Sharon Archer, Beverley Eikli, internationally best-selling author Keri Arthur, and witty guest speaker Paula Roe.

But how many Australian readers and booksellers have heard of these talented, successful Australian authors?

Of all the women writers in Australia, romance writers are among the most under-recognised, despite their success internationally.They are victims not only of gender bias, but also of genre bias. In the lead-up to International Women's Day (March 8) and The Stella Prize discussions on the nature of women's writing (whether it differs from men's), maybe it's time to question why romance writers and their chosen genre have yet to achieve the respect they deserve.

In recent years, the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR) has been established in an effort to address this very problem. The first IASPR international conference was held in Brisbane in 2009. Since then, the association has flourished, attracting an increasing number scholars, including some notable Australians such as Juliet Flesch and author Bronwyn Parry who insist on taking romance writing seriously.

One independent scholar writing in the romance field is Laura Vivanco, contributor to the influential blog, Teach Me Tonight. Laura kindly sent AWW an overview of Australian romance fiction, gleaned from For Love and Money, her study of popular romance writing. It's published here in honour of St Valentine's Day and the official launch of the National Year of Reading.

Laura Vivanco's Guest Post:

Australian romance fiction has often touched on issues affecting Australian society. For colonial women writers, for example, “the themes of romance fiction must have resonated with their own predicaments in a new country” (Gelder and Weaver 1) and “colonial romance provided a crucial site for the struggle over the model of womanhood that seemed best to express the aspirations of an emergent nation” (2). 

In the 1940s, weekly women’s magazines

had short story features in every issue, and in the last years of the war and the early years of the post-war period the overwhelming bulk of short fiction in these magazines concerned the problems of returning soldiers. [...] In most stories the men returned embittered, angry, broken, jealous, moody and in many respects unwilling or unable to resume their former roles. The women they love are required to coax these men back to the path of love and faithfulness, and in most cases, after many travails, they succeed. (Garton 59)

When

[Joyce] Dingwell’s The Girl from Snowy River (1959) was published, a tale of an English woman emigrating to Australia, [Alan] Boon [of Mills & Boon] sent a copy to the Hon. A. R. Downer, MP (then Australian Minister of Immigration), at Australia House, with the message, ‘We feel it is good propaganda for immigration.’ (McAleer 103)

[Australian author] Melissa James has written of her first novel, Her Galahad (2002) that it is

a based-on-fact book, gleaned from my Aboriginal History course in 1999. [...] I read that [...] the Australian Government had regularly given fake death certificates to members of the Stolen Generation (Aboriginal kids taken from their families) for their parents, so they wouldn’t go home and look for their heritage, and blend into white society. Those same kids (the girls) quite often lost their children - told they were dead, and the government adopted them out to white families. And many of those boys ended up in prison, on real or fake charges.

I had to write the story then. I studied up the subject, checked facts, finished my course and wrote the story of Tessa and Jirrah. A few people have condemned the book as implausible and unrealistic, even ridiculed it. But it is fact. (Sova)

Juliet Flesch, in her history of modernAustralian popular romance novels, while she acknowledges that “not all Australian romance novelists set all their novels in Australia nor do they all attempt a distinctively Australian idiom” (250), goes as far as to argue that “They do [...] speak with a voice that is distinctively Australian [...] in general they endorse qualities of openness, inclusion, egalitarianism, community spirit and self-reliance” (296). 

Be that as it may (as a non-Australian I feel unqualified to judge the Australian-ness of all Australian romance novels, but I’m wary of generalisations), I did notice that although [Australian romance author] Marion Lennox’s Princess of Convenience is set in a fictional European principality, the patterns in the Australian heroine’s weaving recall the waves of the seas surrounding Australia, while the novel’s treatment of time and death may have been influenced by Aboriginal attitudes towards journeying (see For Art and Money pages 183-193).

Like Marion Lennox’s heroine, Australian romances have often had to travel abroad to find a home. Hsu-Ming Teo has observed that:

conditions of national and international Anglophone publishing in the twentieth century [...] shaped Australian popular fiction in such a way that women’s romance novels remained tied to the apron strings of empire, attentive to the demands of British editors and an overseas market even as a distinctive postcolonial ‘Australianness’ was asserted. (qtd. in Sarwal xi)

Joyce Dingwell, “Mills & Boon’s first native Australian author” (McAleer 102) was first published by the company in 1955 but it was not until 1974 that the by then Harlequin Mills & Boon “established an office in Sydney, Australia” (McWilliam 6) and not until 2006 that

the company hired its first Australian Commissioning Editor, signaling its tentative shift away from a branch office operation, which distributes products created elsewhere, and towards a creative branch, which distributes products it has created. While Australian authors had featured among Harlequin-Mills & Boon’s most successful authors for years, they had, until 2006, been commissioned through the publisher’s North American or British editorial offices. (McWilliam 8-9)

This would appear to have been a short-lived experiment, however, because Mills & Boon’s Australian website currently states that “the Australian office is a sales and marketing office. All of our editorial staff work through offices in the UK and North America”. It remains the case that, as the Romance Writers of Australia acknowledge:

Most of us are first published in Nth. America or the UK and our books are imported or reprinted here. Australian publishers publish very little romance [...]. [...] Our authors are published by Avon Books (Harper Collins), Bantam Books, Harlequin (Mills and Boon), Hodder & Stoughton (UK) NAL and Berkley Books (Penguin/Putnam ), Simon & Schuster, Transworld, Robert Hale (UK), Virgin Publishing, UK.

A few are published mainly within Australia/NZ: Pan MacMillan, Random House, JB publishing. Many more are published in e-book format, which is a growing international field.

Unfortunately, despite the international success of Australian romance authors, their novels have not tended to be treated with a great deal of respect. Ann Curthoys and John Docker summed up the situation:

romance fiction [...] has been high literature’s Other, a negative icon, what not, what never to be. Newspaper critics in reviews, journalists in their columns, good professional-middle-class people in their conversation, would casually snap at a book or passage by saying things like ‘it unfortunately smacks of Mills and Boon’.

Australian romance authors, though, have been known to snap back. 

In Nicola Marsh’s Contract to Marry there’s a secondary character who reads and defends romances (see For Love and Money page 115) and the dedication of my book, “To every Harlequin Mills & Boon romance author who has ever been asked ‘When are you going to write a real novel?’,” was inspired by a conversation in [Australian romance author] Valerie Parv’s The Love Artist, in which a cartoonist describes a common, prejudiced, response to his work. I’ll give the last words, though, to [best-selling Australian romance author] Anne Gracie:

In every genre, there are novels that are clichéd and poorly written, and some books that are wonderfully written with unforgettable characters and prose that sings. Romance is no different. It’s a huge genre, with an enormous range and variety. Don't judge a whole genre by a few books.

[End Guest Post by Laura Vivanco]


AWW writes:

If you want to pick up an ebook bargain for Valentine's Day from an Aussie bookshop which supports the AWW challenge, you can buy Anna Campbell's Courtesan trilogy for under $15 from The Book Shuttle, Avid Readers Bookshop, or Pages&Pages Booksellers. Australian Online Bookshop also has a tab for Australian Women Writers on their ebook website, but Anna's collection doesn't appear to be available from them. All of the bookshops have Anna's other titles, however, for well under $10. One best-selling Australian romance author, whom Laura doesn't mention in her post, is Stephanie Laurens. Her ebooks can also be found at these ebookstores. 

------ Notes for Laura's Post ------

Curthoys, Ann and John Docker. “Popular Romance in the Postmodern Age. And an Unknown Australian Author.” Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture 4.1 (1990). 

Flesch, Juliet. From Australia with Love: A History of Modern Australian Popular Romance Novels. Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2004.

Garton, Stephen.“‘Fit Only for the Scrap Heap’: Rebuilding Returned Soldier Manhood in Australia after 1945. ” Gender & History 20.1 (2008): 48–67.

Gelder, Ken and Rachael Weaver. The Anthology of Colonial Australian Romance Fiction. Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2010.

Gracie, Anne. “Romantic Myths.”

McAleer, Joseph. Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

McWilliam, Kelly. “Romance in Foreign Accents: Harlequin - Mills & Boon in Australia.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 23.2 (2009): 137-145. Rpt. at the University of Southern Queensland’s ePrintsArchive.

Mills & Boon. “Author Guidelines.” 28 Jan. 2012. 

Romance Writers of Australia. “The Romance Genre.” 28 Jan. 2012. 

Sarwal, Amit. Foreword. Sold by the Millions: Australia’s Bestsellers. Ed. Toni Johnson-Woods and Amit Sarwal. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. viii-xvi.

Sova, Cathy. “New Faces 136: Melissa James.” The Romance Reader. 16 Nov. 2002.

Vivanco, Laura. For Love and Money: The Literary Art of the Harlequin Mills & Boon Romance. Tirril, Penrith: Humanities Ebooks, 2011.

Laura Vivanco is an independent scholar, a member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance and a regular contributor to Teach Me Tonight, a blog devoted to discussing romance fiction from an academic perspective.

Marketing the Boundaries: the fiction of Margo Lanagan

Prize-winning Australian author Margo Lanagan's novel Sea Hearts will be launched at The Hobart Bookshop tomorrow.* Author Krissy Kneen says of Sea Hearts "In Margo's skillful hands we are woven a tale that resonates with so much in our real lives... a longing for something that is missing from our hearts". Her review of the novel, written for the AWW challenge, can be found here.

Last week, Claire Corbett wrote an article on Lanagan's earlier work which questions the common classification of Lanagan's audience as primarily Young Adult (YA). Corbett's post has already appeared in short form on her own blog and in full at Online Opinion. She kindly gave permission to cross-post an extract here.

Claire Corbett writes:

I’ve just read my first Margo Lanagan books, two collections of short stories titled Red Spikes and Yellowcake. The colour theme is upheld through two other collections, Black Juice and White Time. The covers are also consistent, each showing a feminine figure in a mysterious landscape with totemic creature spirit: butterfly, beetle, spider. I mention this because marketing a writer with a consistent approach is one of the themes of my review; it intrigues me in Margo Lanagan’s case because it says much about the state of literature in this country.

Lanagan is a literary writer, a writer’s writer with a beautiful turn of phrase ("drops of salt sorrow in its strands here and there like smooth-tumbled crystals in a cunning necklace" – Chapter 2, "The Golden Shroud") and a rigorous style. The quality of her writing has been recognised with several World Fantasy Awards and Printz Honor Awards. What intrigues me is why has Lanagan’s work been corralled within the definition of Young Adult (YA) fiction? I am not suggesting there is anything lesser about YA fiction, nor do I know how Lanagan herself feels about this.

To me though, classifying Lanagan’s work as YA makes about as much sense as classifying Angela Carter, Italo Calvino, Jonathan Swift or Robert Louis Stevenson as YA writers. Just because some of her protagonists are young and just because there are fantasy elements in her stories do not seem valid reasons.

Lanagan’s subject matter is dark and adult, though I think teenagers should read it. They should read Carter, Calvino, Swift and Stevenson too. In Red Spikes, for example, there is a clever, brutal story, "Monkeys Paternoster", about the overthrow of the alpha male of a monkey colony, told from the point of view of a young female. She sees baby monkeys butchered by aspiring bachelor males who then rape their mothers; her own rape is vividly described. In what sense is this story not adult?

The controversy that blew up in 2011 over Lanagan's Tender Morsels at the Bitch Media website# originates partly in this confusion over what is/is not YA. The website published a list of 100 Young Adult books for the feminist reader. After a complaint accused the novel of failing to critique characters who used rape as a tool of vengeance, Tender Morsels was removed from the list, sparking furious debate...

Read more of Corbett's discussion here. Please feel free to comment below

Claire Corbett

Claire Corbett was born in Canada and moved to Australia as a child. She has had essays and stories broadcast on Radio National and published in Cinema Papers, Picador New Writing and The Sydney Morning Herald, among others. She has completed the MA Writing (UTS), has taught at UTS and undertook a Varuna Mentorship with Amanda Lohrey in 2000.

Corbett's own novel, When We Have Wings, also arguably defies generic pigeonholing, although Claire describes it as a "speculative fiction crime novel". It was published by Allen & Unwin in July 2011.

Notes:
* According to Lanagan's blog, Sea Hearts will be published as The Brides of Rollrock Island by David Fickling Books and Jonathan Cape in the UK, and by Knopf in the US.
# Lanagan's response to the Bitch Media website controversy, dated 3 February 2010, is archived here.