‘That’s love for you’: Destabilizing divides and re-imaging subjectivities in the romantic fiction of Eloisa James

Traditionally the critical literature has dismissed popular romance as formulaic escapism, compensatory literature and insidious cultural programming that produces a false consciousness amongst its passive readership. These assessments have become more inflected over the last twenty years in response to research that shows that there are different ways of reading romance, and with the growth in Romance Association reader surveys, which indicate that popular romance is read by fans drawn from across all demographics. Significantly, these results reveal that up to 45 per cent of readers are tertiary educated, effectively destabilizing the dominant cliché of the romance reader as ‘uneducated, unsophisticated or neurotic’ (Struve 2011: 1289). A more nuanced understanding of the romance reader has emerged and this is evident in the type of readership imagined in the work of Harvard-educated, Fordham University Professor of Literature Mary Bly, who also publishes historical popular romance as Eloisa James. A New York Times best-selling author, James’s stories not only promise her readers romance, but her work is distinctive for its ironic and comedic narratives and an intertextuality that includes references to Socrates, John Donne’s poetry and Shakespearian sonnets. These cultural references are deployed to tell more interesting stories, yet they transgress the literary divides that have held in place the critical disparagement of romance and enable a broader imaging of the function and appeal of romance. Drawing upon James’s work, this article argues that one of the reasons that romance remains popular with a diverse readership is that the genre enables readers to rehearse how two people can learn to live together. This requires an imagined experimentation with identities, which is not only a pleasurable escape but also part of a broader cultural and social dialectic renegotiating women’s subjectivities.