The centenary year continues ...

Well, I'm back home and at work in the cupboard-which-passes-for-my-study. (I've put that in for my editor who would really like this book.) The offical launch of Mills & Boon's centenary year, held at the Wallace Collection (left), was fun but I've got to say the best part was catching up with writing friends.

I'll tell you all about it another day because I honestly do have loads of words to do this week, plus a library talk tomorrow AND it's half-term holiday week so I have my children 'not bothering me but just wanting to know ....'

I love it really, but it does slow me down.


For now I have the latest article to appear in the British press.

Ready? Got yourself a coffee??

The Great Escape

From classic romances to raunchy romps, Mills & Boon novels have been satisfying readers' fantasies for 100 years. But they aren't as easy to write as you might think, reveals Kathryn Hughes.

Saturday February 9, 2008
The Guardian

In the mid-1980s, I was working on a glossy women's magazine and not enjoying it at all. Straight out of Oxford, I had thought this was going to be a training ground for being a writer, and discovered that it was something else entirely. As I recall, most people working on weeklies and monthlies at that time were victims of a similar (dis)illusion, and consequently there were an awful lot of sour-looking faces. Over at TV Times, so the rumour went, every single sub was secretly working on a literary novel during office hours, with the result that any request to cast an eye over next week's listings for the Royal Variety Performance was met with pained looks and theatrical sighs.

At my magazine, we had more modest ambitions: we wanted to write a Mills & Boon, on the principle that if anyone could do it, surely it was us. For, above all, we knew how to produce copy so transparent that you could dive into it and not notice you were engaged in the act of reading. What's more, we understood what women's lives were like. Not in the way that was increasingly debated with worried frowns in seminar rooms up and down the country (this was the decade when "women's studies" emerged in universities), but in terms that made sense to us. We weren't fussed about the patriarchy, but we did know what it felt like to ache with desire for an outfit by Wendy Dagworthy, a boyfriend who spoke French, or the knack of getting your hair to look like Kelly McGillis's in Top Gun.

This ambition to write a Mills & Boon ran round the magazine like a craze, the kind of thing that used to happen at school when everyone suddenly decided to dab their pulse points with musk oil or carry their books in a BOAC bag. And, just as at school, we all pretended that we were hardly aware that other people might have had the same idea. I'm pretty certain that there was a briefing pack we all sent off for: Mills & Boon has always been democratically alert to the ambition of its readers to become writers. After all, producing commercial fiction has for centuries been one of the few ways that women can make a professional wage while staying at home to look after others.

The would-be author pack was welcoming but realistic. Everyone thinks they can knock off a Mills & Boon, but it's harder than it looks. The really important thing, said the bumph sternly, was not to condescend to your readers. Clearly, the company had grown weary of submissions from smarty-pants who attempted to ventriloquise a mass-market fiction voice while failing to disguise that they felt it a bit beneath them, rather like Dick Van Dyke doing cockney.

Yet, I felt, that caveat could not be directed at me. I worked, after all, for a women's magazine and had already endured quite enough condescension during my baby-sized career not to wish to inflict it on anyone else. So, feeling myself naturally advantaged with both skills and insight, I set to writing a Mills & Boon. I did what you're supposed to, and stuck to what I more or less knew. So my heroine was a journalist (tick) who is sent to interview (tick) a hotshot financier (cross) in Luxembourg (double cross). I'd never been to the place, but I liked the way that it managed to be exotic and accessible at the same time. Crafty, and surely exactly the kind of subtle calibration of reality and desire that Mills & Boon was after.

In the event, I got a letter back from the company saying that, although the manuscript wasn't right, it was worth persevering. In other words, I should start again with another story and set of characters. While this wasn't great, I knew enough about rejection letters to know that it wasn't a brush-off either. So I was feeling decidedly perky, until the assistant editor of the magazine sauntered in and announced that, as a result of her submission to Mills & Boon, she'd been called in for a meeting. Obviously, they'd liked her synopsis and three sample chapters more than mine. Since I knew that I was a better writer than her - I was, I was - I gave up in a huff, with the consoling thought that perhaps, after all, you really did have to have a touch of the shop girl in you to write such trash successfully. It's amazing how snooty you become when turned down by Mills & Boon.

My escape route from journalism came another way. I got a PhD place and a full grant - those were the days - and no longer needed to come up with ways of financing what I really wanted to do, which was to think and write about the 19th century. Once ensconced in a seminar room of plastic chairs studded with fag burns, I was obliged to confront just what I had been doing when attempting to dream up that story about a pretty young journalist with a heart-shaped face who manages to tame a wealthy financier with a hard-to-place accent and a way with the ladies. Urged on by my new, serious-minded friends, I concluded that, after two and a bit decades of internalising the patriarchy, I had unwittingly become its handmaiden. In other words, in trying to write a Mills & Boon, I had not only oppressed myself, but I had become an instrument of oppression to others. Thank heavens the publisher turned me down.

Things have changed since then. That thuggish impulse to police women's fantasy lives, not to mention their reading habits, has slipped away from feminist discourse. Taking the long historic view, you can see how Mills & Boon novels emerged from a venerable tradition of serialised fiction aimed at working-class women. In the 1920s and 30s, publications such as Peg's Paper gave weary mill girls and factory workers a repeating roundelay of love affairs between raffish milords and little Cinderellas to sweeten the odd 20 minutes of what would now be called "me time". That Mills & Boon romantic fiction really took off in the Depression likewise suggests that it provided a much-needed escape from an increasingly grim economic landscape where jobs, let alone passing marquises with cruel smiles, were distinctly scarce.

But so what? Just because something has been around a long time doesn't make it good or right. Sterner souls than mine would argue that here is post-feminism doing its usual thing of trying to elevate the sugary scraps fed to women to keep them sweet into some kind of rich and self-determining culture. In any case, Mills & Boon novels have changed, or rather they are always changing, which is why they are so successful: each year, 200 million copies are sold worldwide, and 60 new titles are produced in the UK alone. When I tried my luck in 1986, there was a lot of talk about how the novels had had to evolve to take account of women's entry into the professions (that's why my heroine was a journalist, not a nurse). Acutely sensitive to readerly desire, Mills & Boon continually polls its readers for their reactions to its current crop of novels, then tweaks future texts accordingly. It's a permanent process of cultural feedback.

That's why there are now 12 distinct strands to Mills & Boon (in literary publishing, they'd be called "imprints"), ranging from the kind of classic romance I tried to write 20 years ago to ones set entirely in hospitals, or in crinolines. And then there is the Desire series. The Desire brand comes as the biggest shock to anyone who lazily thinks they already know what goes on in Mills & Boon land. In these books, the hero has an erection by chapter three and isn't afraid to use it. In fact, he "thrusts" and "explodes" so often in the course of exactly 55,000 words that it's amazing he finds time to run a finance company/a ranch/a whole desert kingdom.

The heroine in a Desire book, meanwhile, won't be a virgin because that would be weird (if no one else fancies her, then how can the thrusting, exploding hero?), but she will be a born-again celibate. Some trauma - the death of an earlier love, even a divorce - will have left her in sexual limbo for months, if not years. It's the hero's job to guide her back into a full erotic life, which ends, if not with marriage, at least with something that feels very like it. And if this still doesn't strike you as quite saucy enough, then you're probably a candidate for Mills & Boon's latest addition to the stable, the Blaze imprint, in which the hero and heroine barely have time to swap a bit of witty banter before getting down to business in a variety of locations culled from a reading of Hello! magazine.

That a Mills & Boon novel will present its reader with a fantasy of romantic fulfilment, in which the alpha-male hero voluntarily gives up his evasive ways and commits to monogamy with the heroine, is a given. What is less immediately apparent is the way that the novels also provide a fantasy of "upper-class" life. Sometimes this upper-classness is expressed in terms of money, with a shipping magnate or a sheikh as the hero. In other cases, the fantasy is rooted, no more accurately, in the English class system. For instance, in The Once-a-Mistress Wife, the hero is "an English lord" called Kane Brentwood (not a name you see very often in Burke's). Although this peer of the realm can thrust and explode with the best of them, he has the distinctly non-U habit of saying "pleased to meet you" on being introduced to new people. This perhaps explains why he is no longer tramping the ancestral grouse moor, but instead runs an investment company in Manhattan.

Since both the setting and the author of The Once-a-Mistress Wife are American, perhaps these jumbled class signifiers are inevitable. Less understandable, and therefore more interesting, is when they pop up in a British title. In English Lord, Ordinary Lady, by Fiona Harper, the punk-heroine Josie is on the run from her smart background (she's actually "Lady Josie", but never uses the title). Eventually, she is obliged to go home, which gives us the chance to see what she's been trying to escape from all this time. Her mother, presented as a model of autocratic hauteur, spends her time running a finger along the mantelpiece for dust and ticking Josie off for her "inappropriate" behaviour. In fact, she's a ringer for Hyacinth "Bouquet".

The fascination with social class that runs through Mills & Boon is fitting given that the company started life in 1908 by producing not romantic fiction, but etiquette books. The Edwardian period, flush with cash and all sorts of new kinds of mobility, was full of people trying to ease themselves into a different station from the one into which they had been born. How-to manuals were predicated on the belief that there lay, just out of reach, a finer way of life that could be accessed if only you knew the entry code - which fork to use, how to tie your scarf. That these books were always slightly "off" in their representations of how things were done in the best circles (for what peer of the realm or society lady would really need to make a living by advising the plebs how to enter a drawing room gracefully?) didn't really matter. At some level, readers knew that their Cinderella moment of transformation, in which they threw off their everyday persona of clerk or typist and passed unnoticed as a lady or gentleman, would never actually arrive. Reading about it, imagining that moment again and again, was enough.

Just as these early Mills & Boon etiquette manuals spoke to the desire for social transformation, so the company's more recent fiction provides a permanent waiting room for the emotional and material life that you always felt should be yours. That the moment of arrival never comes is what drives the seemingly unstoppable sales (the books are even being published in Polish now, for all the new immigrants). As with pornography - to which Andrea Dworkin famously likened romantic fiction - this hankering for a set of different, better circumstances is endlessly catered to. How apt, then, that when I wanted to change my life all those years ago, it was to Mills & Boon that I turned first.

That's it!

Meanwhile, over at the Mirror, they've reviewed Trish's book. Go see her blog.

And it's my choice to come up with the Pink Heart Society nomination for Male on Monday ...