‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that any essay about Jane Austen… must be in want of a poorly rendered paraphrasing of her most famous opening lines,’ writes Ella Risbridger in this sharp, gleefully obsessive field guide to romantic fiction. For her, Austen is the genre’s ‘mother’, and she crisply notes that while George Eliot disparaged ‘silly novels by lady novelists’, ‘she does appear to have read a lot of them’.
Risbridger is the author of two cook books, including the award-winning Midnight Chicken (and Other Recipes Worth Living For); a children’s novel, The Secret Detectives; and the editor of anthologies of poetry and food writing. She has read a lot of romance novels, too. At school, her class’s copy of The Other Boleyn Girl was confiscated because its spine was ‘cracked at just the right place so that the book would fall open to reveal Anne Boleyn in bed with her brother and their shared lover’. Later, she quested for ‘joyful queerness’ in the pages of gay fan fiction and, working in a community library, polished off sometimes two ‘kissing books’ a day.
She invites us to picture her as a romance heroine with ‘stripy pyjamas, glasses, messy hair up in one of those grabby claw-clip things. An orange cat… Heart all in knots because something is just beginning.’ We know the formula:
Since I’m on the sofa under a blanket, you’re probably a high-powered professional in the big city (in which case I’ll teach you to breathe out), or a wholesome outdoorsy professional in your small town (in which case you’ll teach me).
Some of what these novels reveal about desire is cheesy and embarrassing. There’s a chapter on Hot Billionaires, from Bluebeard to a ‘queer knife-play BDSM triad’ in Sadie Kincaid’s The Perfect Fit. In another gorgeous bit of high-low literary criticism, Risbridger leaps from the romance publisher Harlequin’s Montana Mavericks series of cowboy love stories to D.H. Lawrence’s novella St Mawr, in which ‘an American heiress… falls in love, or something, with a stallion’.
While she enjoys the iconic scene in the TV series Fleabag about ‘how hard it is to know what you want’, Risbridger feels that ‘Fleabag would like the cultural pulling power of romantic fiction but without any of the humiliating, cloying historical connotations of romantic fiction’. There’s no such snobbery here. Risbridger is gentle about what she calls ‘Quirky Little Job in a Charming Little Location’ romances. She generously wonders if all the problematic ravishing is
rape reimagined in such a way as to reinvent the power structures of the patriarchy. He rapes her; later he will be on his knees begging to give her everything. The worst thing that can happen to her happens, and she gets a happy ending anyway.
Risbridger has also read enough tentacle erotica to fill most of a chapter.
Romance is ‘a wish-fulfilment station’, but ‘the wishes are, perhaps, not always straightforward’. The retellings of Pride and Prejudice (Risbridger counts more than a thousand) show just how unstraight-forward they can be. Some readers wish for alternate universes where Lizzy accepts Darcy’s first proposal; some want the story told by Anne de Bourgh (of all people!) or by the servants; some want there to be dragons; some want dragons and smut; some want Lizzy to end up with Charlotte; some want a mystery or crime; some want modern-day remixes in which not everyone is white. Risbridger writes:
I want to read so many of them. The pirate crossover! The Lydia Bennet witch! The trans academics! I want to see how people shuffle the cards, and what story they can play out from the story I know inside out.
She argues that the rules allow romantic fiction to be a ‘playground for feelings’ which includes ‘the infinitely weird’. If nothing else, this romp through romance gives a sense of the dazzling range of what is being written. After finishing it, I went straight on to read one of the many books Risbridger references, Rules for Ghosting, which turned out to be the queer romance about a Jewish funeral home I didn’t know I needed. Risbridger wonders if ‘perhaps we can say that it is because of the fluidity found in romance that it is a genre that should be exalted; it is a genre of possibility’.
The book isn’t just about romance. As the title indicates, it’s about love and taking love seriously and striving for a ‘happy ever after’ while knowing that it’s really only a ‘happy for now’, because ‘there aren’t, in real life, any real endings. There is only the point where you choose to stop telling the story. And why not, then, choose a perfect moment?’
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