Just Like Heaven was published in 2011 as the first in the Smyth-Smith quartet and follows a family set in the Bridgerton world. Quinn’s most successful series is the Bridgerton series, even before the adaptation, features a large, tight-knit family that run around Regency London acting anachronistically and telling jokes that we’re told are hilarious and finding true love. A lot of romance time and effort has been spent on the Bridgerton series, book and television show, along with Quinn’s place as an outsized representation of romance to the non-romance world and this is mostly outside what we’re going to be talking about today. All the Rakes have read at least a handful of the Bridgerton series and none of us really enjoy the television show that much, so we wanted to read another one of Quinn’s books as our standalone exploration of her writing style, to try and parse what works or what doesn’t for us, along with what might be the longstanding appeal to readers for a Julia Quinn novel.

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We spoke about Mills & Boon last week and now we're onto Harlequin. While we go through the history of Harlequin, we continue with the lens of how gatekeepers influence the romance genre. While writing this script, I was influenced by John Markert’s book Publishing Romance where he argues that gatekeepers often use their own tastes as a barometer for what readers want. Markert argues another driver for gatekeepers is what they perceive market conditions to be. This often results in gatekeepers acting conservatively as they try and find a product that is similar to yet slightly different from what’s on the market. We talk about a few editors again and how they influenced their authors, Vivian Stephens and her time at Harlequin, how heroines having jobs has been editorial policy since the 80s, and how mass market paperbacks will be dramatically scaled down in the upcoming year.

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When we look at the history of romance novels, often people pin the start of modern romance history to the 1972 publication of The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss. By doing this, people erase a key evolution and influence in romance, which is the category romance. If you’re from the UK then you already know that the category publisher there is Mills & Boon, and they’ve been a publisher for a little over a century. First starting out as a general publisher in 1908, over the decades Mills & Boon gradually specialized in romance novels. Harlequin, first seeking to re-print their medical romances, eventually bought Mills & Boon in 1971. While we look at the history of the company, we also focus on publishing gatekeepers and how they’ve influenced the romance genre.

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Pamela Morsi’s books were different than the typical historical romance of the time. Writing stories set in rural America, with poor or working class characters, Morsi was hailed as the “the Garrison Keillor of romance fiction,” by Publishers Weekly. When demand for the Americana subgenre waned after 2000, Morsi switched over to contemporary romance and women’s fiction with 2002’s Doing Good. She continued to write through 2014, publishing 29 books in her long career. She died this past December. Garters, published in 1993, is one of Morsi’s most beloved books. Following Esme Crab, a poor hill girl who wants to marry up, and Cleavis Rhy, a storeowner with aspirations of being a gentleman, Garters is an unusual tale about class, love, and ambition that is goofy, tender, and at times heartbreaking.

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Chasing Cassandra by Lisa Kleypas is the sixth book in the Ravenel series. The Ravenels are the most recent series in Kleypas’ extended universe—going back to the Gamblers of Craven. The Ravenels are a family made up of two sets of cousins: Devon, Earl of Trenear and West Ravenel, then Helen Ravenel and her twin sisters Pandora and Cassandra. Cassandra’s main goal is to have a family and she feels particularly lonely on the day of her twin’s wedding. Tom Severin, an industrialist and sometimes friend to Devon and West and Ravenel, offers to marry her after he overhears her express her anxieties about ever getting married. He’s immediately taken with her beauty and pragmatic interest in running a home, two things he is seeking in a wife. But when Tom reveals to Cassandra that he can never love her because he insists he is incapable, she puts distance between them. This book is one of Kleypas’ more recent publications, from 2020. She has a long backlist and while this book definitely reads like a romance from the 2020s, there are many tell-tale signs of a Kleypas original.

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Emma uses her lawyer powers to teach Chels and Beth about the history of obscenity law in the United States. The impetus for this episode came about because sometimes well-meaning people misapply these laws or standards to current book banning resistance. Emma shows us how "but what about the children" has been there from the very beginning. How people in the past have talked about sex in books is Very Familiar unfortunately. (Even in current bookish spaces!) And, most importantly, how often suppressing sex in books is really hiding political motivations.

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In Bed with the Devil by Lorraine Heath is the first in the Scoundrels of St. James series. The series is Oliver Twist fanfiction, as it follows Fagin’s crew of child thieves as grown ups. The first book features Lucian Langdon, referred to as the devil earl as it’s common knowledge he murdered his supposed uncle. I say supposed, because Luke was adopted by the Earl of Clayborne. This earl is the father of the man who Luke killed. Because of Luke’s silver eyes, the earl believes him to be his long lost grandson who disappeared as a child. Luke struggles to believe he’s really his grandson, but says the right things to become adopted. The romance is between him and Catherine, the daughter of a duke. She’s looking for someone to murder on her behalf. She chooses Luke for his reputation and refuses to say who it is until he agrees to it and the time is right.

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Murmur of Rain is a Gothic-tinged historical romance set in France and Haiti in the 1890s by Patricia Vaughn. Lauren Dufort is the daughter of a descendent of enslaved people in French Guiana and a white Frenchman. Her parents were deeply in love, but their marriage estranged them from society, so when Lauren is orphaned as a teen, she is raised by her paternal aunt, Claude, who runs a gentleman’s club, knowing that her mixed-race identity may keep her from ever making a love match in 19th century France. But when handsome Haitian Roget de Martier arrives at Claude’s club, Lauren is immediately smitten and he seems to reciprocate interests. There are hints of secrets about his past and family in Haiti, but when the rich gentleman proposes marriage instead of a mistress arrangement, Lauren’s head and heart both feel like this is her best chance at happiness.

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