How about romance:I need a genre!

So how am I going with the question of historical romance?  Sure myself that my definition of historical is correct but I am out of step with the world I turned my attention to the next question. Have I written a romance?  Well I wasn’t immediately sure; being an old woman my definition of romance is a little broader than seems to be the case these days – and it doesn’t start with love affairs. Thinking I may be wrong I went back to the dictionary.

 Oxford Dictionary

Romance is defined thus

1  a: Latin derived languages

   b:Medieval vernacular verse or prose narrative relating to legendary or extraordinary adventure of hero, of chivalry

  c: Extravagant fiction – wild exaggeration

  d: Historical ballad, short epic poem (in Spanish context)

  e: Fictitious narrative depicting setting and events remote from everyday life especially 16th & 17th century

   f: Literary genre with romantic love and highly imaginative events or adventures forming central theme

   g: Romantic or imaginative character – prevailing sense of wonder or mystery surrounding mutual attraction in a love affair and/or suggestion or association with adventurous or extraordinary events.

Romantic

 2 a: Narrative etc having the nature or qualities of romance in the form or content

    b: Tending towards or characterised by romance in stylistic basis

    c: Pertaining to movement or style of late 18th and early 19th century in Europe - marked by emphasis on feeling, individuality and passion

    d: Of a story, novel, film etc having romance or love affair as a subject

    e: Characterised by idealised fantastic or sentimental view of life, love or reality appealing to imagination and feelings

    f: Influenced by imagination

    g: Fantastic, quixotic, impractical project

Romantic love between unmarried man and woman does appear in the list, but it is not the first or even the second definition.  The definition of romance that I grew up with is the wide one.  It is the epic narrative, the natural, emotion and feeling driven; fantastical, wild and adventurous.  I cut my reading teeth on novels of a hundred or more years ago.  I read and thrilled to Sir Walter Scott and Herman Melville later reading James Fennimore Cooper and Washington Irving and, of course, all those wonderful epic narratives such as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Arthurian legends.  These merged effortlessly into works from Dante and Spencer.  Romance, but not I fear in today’s terms

I discovered historical romances with the likes of  The Scarlet Pimpernel and, as I grew,  discovered the newer definition of romance in William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens, with their huge sweeps of life.  Then George Elliot, the Bronte’s and Jane Austin.  If I had realised it at the time the definition of romance was growing ever narrower.

I realize that romance is now equated only with love between man and woman although it means I have to re-file all those great novels and epic narrative poems I grew up with to different areas, a little sulkily I admit because the very word romance conjures up to me wonderful vistas of excitement and adventure, larger than life heroes and heroines, amazing deeds and splendid sweeping tales straddling every known emotion.  Feasts indeed.

But reading, on the advice of many, the guide lines of Romance Writers of America I also realize that the world has not only captured and caged the bird of romance but has clipped off its wings and de-beaked it as well.

Guide Lines

            Plot must revolve around two people as they develop romantic love for each other and work to build a relationship with each other.

            Both conflict and climax should be directly related to that core theme, developing romantic relationship.

            Must have emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending. Although they have allowed, for instance, that Romeo and Juliet is a romance because the focus of the story is romantic love.

            As long as these basic guide lines are followed there are many sub genres allowed into ‘Romantic Fiction’.  They include amongst them:

            Paranormal

            Sci-Fi

            Fantasy

            Time Travel

            Futuristic

            Pirate

I’m thinking these ones should be in the main genre and the romantic love between man and woman, not married, should be a sub genre – but hey, that’s this old woman wondering where the excitement in romance has gone!! My, what a straitjacket romance and romantic writing has been tied into.

Well the first two of my series could just about be shoe-horned into this definition , just about because I hope they are more than romantic love. 

My books need something else, they I suppose belong to a sub genre - dreadful expression! So it seems I must turn my attention to Science Fiction which many of my readers say is what I have written.  This turns out to be more sub genre divided than romance.

How about historical; I need a genre!

An Historical (Romance)?

When I first designed the cover of ‘Ellen’s Tale’ I called it ‘an historical romance’.  I still consider the story historical despite it’s setting in 2161!  How so?  You may well ask.  The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, that hefty tome of a book, sums up history/historical as

History:

1) Original meaning of the word was learning or knowledge by enquiry

2) Narration of incidents

3) Continuous methodical record of important or public events

4) Branch of knowledge that deals with past events

Historical:

1) Pertaining to history

2) Concerned with events of history

3) Belonging to the past not the present

Ellen’s Tale concerns the work of two archivists in 2161 researching events fifty years in the past – 2111.  Using archival material they try and discover how these events influenced history.  They have to read and study around the basic source material so that the story can be placed in context.  The tale is the first part of a longer narrative which seeks to unearth the facts of the events.  Now tell me Ellen’s tale isn’t an historical something (I’ll come to romance in another post!).

I know, I know; life moves on, language changes.  However, it is to dictionaries we go for meanings; if we cannot do that language will mean nothing.  So moving on from the dictionary to Wikipedia – from the sublime to the ridiculous!  Amongst its pages on History we have

1) inquiry/knowledge acquired by discovery/ collection and organisation

2) presentation about past events

Alright, I know this a bit tongue in cheek but I have always liked to play around with the man-made, changing birthdays to suit myself ditto my names.  However, on this idea of straightjackets for fiction I do get so impatient.  Am I the only one who

1)    cares about the meanings of words

2)    thinks genre is just a useful ploy of distributers and book shops

3)   considers it not only a laziness of description but

4)   a bar against readers’ exploration of all fiction – readers also get into pigeon holes.

History is supposed to be real/factual – well we can dispute that.  As we are so often told, it is written and sometimes distorted by the winners, the powerful, to suit themselves (sounds like me!).  It is supposed to be a discipline which looks at past records (written by whom?); an inquiry into past truths by substantial and solid means.  So a strand of beads from a Roman ruin tells the historians a noble lady lived there? – sorry it doesn’t, it tells us someone dropped some beads there. 

Many historical novels and plays are about the author’s interpretations on their subjects or periods of time; events could differ substantially from ‘historians’ common pronouncements.  Shakespeare was a past master of this writing up historical events according to the ruling party of the day and why wouldn’t he be in the days when the Tower and the chopping block were real deterrents to doing otherwise!!  Robert Graves and Mary Renault presented their own interpretations of events in their novels and, of course, it is easier to play with ancient Rome and ancient Greece than something that happened last year.

'Historical romances', according to Wikipedia, are stories set before the Second World War.  Historical fiction, however, seems to follow the true course of the word history and allows stories from the past: such as Jonathan Coe’s ‘The Rotters’ Club’ set in the 1970’s or Courtney Thomas’ ‘Walls of Phantoms’ set in 1989.  So what makes romance different?

I accepted, reluctantly, that others had differing views to mine on the meaning of a history and went in search of romance.