historical romance
When Loui came home from a work conference in November, he brought me a romance novel.
At each Kentucky Association for Environmental Education conference, there’s a fundraising silent auction. In each silent auction, someone includes a romance novel, sourced from a secondhand shop or Little Free Library. This year, after trying ever since we got together, Loui succeeded in winning the romance novel for me. (I have no idea how much he paid for it; frankly, I don’t want to know. But for a good cause!)
The book was Puppy Love in Thunder Canyon by Christyne Butler, and I read it last month. It was an okay read; I found the romance a little simplistic, but there was a cute dog involved.
I was excited about a few of its characteristics, though. One was the publisher, Harlequin. I’d read about Harlequin in Jane Austen’s Bookshelf, one of my favorite books of 2025. Rebecca Romney writes about the women writers who influenced Jane Austen, godmother of romance, and along the way, Romney became interested in more modern publication of romances — modern like after World War II, when Harlequin was founded. She writes:
“I dug into the history of the postwar paperback industry for modern romances that functioned so differently from traditional publishing. Instead of selling hardcover books at bookstores on a seasonal basis, companies like Harlequin pioneered selling their slim paperbacks on grocery story racks. Their titles changed every few weeks, like magazines.”
Romney, a rare book collector, became more interested in romance novels and started to build a collection:
“I bought them over many years, when few collectors were paying attention to Harlequin paperbacks, then sold the collection to an institution, Indiana University’s Lilly Library, only after interest in romance at rare book libraries had increased sufficiently to make it practical. But it was a gamble. I was only able to pull that off by a conviction that romance deserved more attention in the rare book world.”
I am all for a project that brings deserved attention to something long overlooked, especially when it pertains to women. One of the soapboxes I will happily stand on is that things that are important to women are often derided solely because they’re important to women. Romney’s work — about romance novels and about women writers — is so awesome.
The other thing that caught my attention in Puppy Love in Thunder Canyon is the handwritten M scrawled on the inside cover. I wonder if the writer of that M did it for the same reason that women in my life do: to document that she had read it. Both of my grandmothers and my mother-in-law have this habit, handwriting a little note in the book they’ve just read — perhaps whether they own the book or not.
Last week, for example, I finally read Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, a wonderful book that my mother’s mother loaned to me many years ago. On the first page, beside the book’s title, Memaw wrote “NSG ‘16” in blue ink.
I’m pretty sure I have Memaw to thank for my romance reading origins. When I was a young reader — I’m not sure how old, but probably slightly too young — I was visiting Memaw for a weekend and needed something to read. She pointed me to the closet, which housed childhood classics like The Little Red Hen. It also housed two Nicholas Sparks classics, The Notebook and A Walk to Remember, both of which I read.
If you don’t have a romance lineage of your own, I invite you into mine and Rebecca Romney’s and Jane Austen’s. It’s the perfect time to pick up a romance novel.