That Old Flame

What is the enduring quality that keeps people reading Harlequin romance novels? The Walrus, Canada's best magazine, tries to answer that.

From the story...

Well, you can see why critical theorists are having a field day with this stuff. First, there is the consistent popularity of the romance genre: 32 percent of adult mass-market paperback sales are romances, and Harlequin is the dominant publisher of bodice-rippers worldwide. In 2007, it sold 130 million books; since its inception sixty years ago, it has shipped more than 5.6 billion. And its wares are recession friendly — in the last quarter of 2008, with its parent company, Torstar, suffering heavy losses, Harlequin’s profits rose by 11.2 percent.

Especially alluring for the theorists is the natural dialectic: i.e., are these books perversely, even dangerously anachronistic, trapped within a dated, patriarchal framework? Or are they in fact empowering: fiction written by women for women, in which there is always a happy ending for the female characters? If you factor in reader demographics — Harlequin reports that 53 percent of its overwhelmingly female readership has at least some college education, and 45 percent work full time — you have the makings of a feminist studies seminar, the central question of which might be, what is the appeal of these books, and is this a bad (in the critical theory sense of “bad”) thing?

For a gallery of some of Harlequin's great book covers, go here.