HARPERS FERRY, W.Va. -- The Washington Romance Writers' annual spring retreat hasn't officially begun, but already the line between reality and fantasy is getting fuzzy.
It's this place, a hotel and restaurant called the Hilltop House. This place could put notions in your head, the kind you haven't considered since you crossed into curmudgeonly geezerdom and decided that the concept of the happy romantic ending should be tossed onto the same pile with those envelopes that say: "YOU MAY HAVE ALREADY WON $1 MILLION!!"
The fact is, the place sits atop a 200-plus-foot cliff overlooking the Potomac River that really is wind-swept. The fact is, the hair of those who step out to admire the splendid view of rushing water and rocky cliffs really is wind-tousled. Just as the romance novels are wont to say. And get that name: Hilltop House. Say it in a breathy voice and see if it doesn't evoke Gothic motifs. Handsome, brooding heroes with violent tendencies. Family secrets stashed in the attic. A busty heroine baring cleavage as she flees a spooky Victorian.
In such a place a person can dream. Or at least consider alternatives. The thermal currents on which turkey vultures soar all weekend in the river valley are invisible, but there they are. What else, then?
Something draws these pilgrims, and not just to the retreat this weekend. Not just these few women but women by the millions, riding invisible emotional currents real as staggering romance novel sales. Nearly half the paperbacks sold in the United States every year are romance novels. Nearly a billion dollars a year in sales. Romance Writers of America likes to trot out these numbers. And these: An avid romance reader might consume three, four books a week. These are numbers that get your attention.
On Friday afternoon of retreat weekend, a showery front has just slipped east, leaving everything behind it sunny, shuddering in the breeze. April flaunts the cruelty T.S. Eliot detected. Emotions stir, things quiver with promise. Is it true or false?
The ambiguity fits. This is a weekend to consider the romance, a literary form that seems, at a glance, to offer all the complexity of a Hallmark card. Behind the brightly painted happy-endings facade, however, something's doing. Challenges to the patriarchy, celebrations of female power, reading as act of feminist resistance.
Who knew?
I show up at Harpers Ferry with an overnight bag and a canvas briefcase. These fit in the car. The rest of the baggage -- preconceptions, value judgments, elitist literary biases, all the stuff one attends college to obtain -- suggests the need for a Mayflower van, the kind in which the Baltimore Colts skipped town.
The uneducated tourist stumbles into Romance Land bereft of foreign phrase book or Fodor's guide. The closest thing at the moment is a book stashed in the briefcase: "Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance." The introductory essay of this paean to the romance begins like this: "Few people realize how much courage it takes for a woman to open a romance novel on an airplane."
A shortage of big hair
Members of Washington Romance Writers are driving in from Maryland, Washington, Virginia; guest speakers arrive from New York, Toronto, Ohio, Colorado. Many of the attendees are taking time away from husbands and children, making it a retreat within the retreat that is the romance novel. Romance readers and writers share this connection, this space, this room of their own.
This 15th annual retreat draws more than 100 people, including editors, agents and a reviewer from Romantic Times magazine. All but five of the attendees are women, and only two of the men are writers. Most of the women appear to be between 30 and 50 years old, roughly mirroring the profile of the romance reader as supplied by such publishers as Harlequin, Fawcett and Silhouette. They're in for a weekend of discussion, speeches, networking.
During the course of the weekend, many women ask me: 1. How's it going? 2. Is it what you expected?
The responses: 1. OK, thanks. 2. Uh, well, I guess so.
Truth is, I have no idea what to expect. A romance writer's retreat? What could that entail? Perhaps a workshop: "Hair: Making It Live and Breathe for Your Reader." The anticipation of the event is mostly an exercise in withholding value judgments, as in stifling the sort of crummy attitude expressed in the previous sentence.
What to expect? In recent issues of Romantic Times, publicity photos of many established writers suggest the Midwestern political wife: poofy hair, earrings the size of light bulbs. Yet at the retreat, it's mostly sensible hair and understated attire, the sort that would suit a NOW rally.
(OK, yes, if this were a story on a gathering of male techno-thriller writers worshiping at the feet of Tom Clancy, I would not mention clothes and hair. Firearms, perhaps. Maybe camouflage makeup. Yet, hair and clothes loom large in many romance novels, although not as large as the dazzling weaponry in Clancy's fantasies, male counterparts to the romance.)
By the time all retreat attendees are signed in, there's a complement of women executives, women with advanced academic degrees and women working in academia.
"This is not your trailer park- soap opera-high school dropout kind of crowd," says Maggie Bartley, a Washington Romance Writers member from Columbia who teaches history in Montgomery County.
If that sounds defensive, it's because it is. Who could blame her? Anybody in this field has heard the snide comments. Some romance fans take precautions for public reading, slipping their books into opaque covers. In fact, the retreat goody-bag includes one -- a plastic sleeve the color of cherry licorice.
Always those preconceptions
Laurin Wittig, an unpublished writer from Silver Spring, describes how things went when she told her mother -- a career woman with a master's degree in British literature -- she was writing a romance novel. Her daughter, a woman with an Ivy League education and a master's in public health, was writing one of those books? With one of those Fabio covers?
"When," she asked Wittig, "are you going to write a real book?"
Mom asked the question more than once while Wittig tackled "Love Rules," a story the romance industry calls a "contemporary," as opposed to a "historical." It's about romance blooming on Dupont Circle in Washington between an inevitably willful heroine, Dana Ryan, and the inevitably emotionally detached hero, Grant Maxwell.
Mom remained adamant, however. A real book? When?
"It bothered me," says Wittig, 39. "But you shrug that off. If you're going to write romances, you know that is how it's going to be perceived."
Eventually, thanks to information supplied by her sister writers, she managed a retort: "I said, 'You know, Mom, Jane Austen wrote romances and Shakespeare wrote some romances.'"
Self-help and sex
The Romance Writers' annual retreat includes workshops on plot structure, conveying emotion in language, images of money, humor, career management and working on industry contacts -- an agenda you'd expect at any writing conference, but with a difference. The distinction surfaces in conversation with participants, in the connections revealed between reader and writer, between reader and book.
There's a particular tone, call it "recovery movement confessional." How I Found Romance and Gender Validation. My Secret Pleasure Revealed.
Kathleen Gilles Seidel, whose 12th romance novel is scheduled for publication in June, tells how she would read romances while working on her doctorate in British literature at Johns Hopkins University in the mid-1970s. The books were affirming, entertaining and, read in bed after a day immersed in literary analysis, "a way of getting back to reading as a primary experience. Getting back to that love."
Did anyone know she read these books?
She shoots a look across the table. Clearly I have asked one of the more idiotic questions she's ever heard.
"It was hard enough finding a woman's bathroom in Homewood," says Seidel.
In those days, novelist Jennifer Crusie would have been among those looking down on romance readers. She wouldn't have touched a romance novel herself. She was an intellectual, a feminist, on her way to earning two master's degrees and pursuing a Ph.D. in literature at Ohio State University.
That's where the romances came in. As part of doctoral research she was doing in 1991, she read romances. Lots of them. "I sat down to read 100 Harlequins in one month," she says.
Sounds like a fraternity hazing ritual. Yet Crusie found it eye-opening. The books were variously awful, pretty good, wonderful. And they were almost invariably morale-boosting for Crusie, who at the time was a 41-year-old single mother who was feeling "beaten down, terribly depressed."
The novels told a different story. Women faced obstacles and triumphed -- over and over and over again.
"If you keep reading stories where you win, you start believing that you can win," Crusie says. "It was such a radical experience. I thought, 'If this is what happens when I read them, what happens if I write them?' "
This self-help undercurrent breaks the surface completely Sunday morning, after Kay Mussell, an associate dean at American University who has written a book on romance, gives a talk on the differences between pornography and romance. During the question-and-answer session, a woman in the audience throws a hush over the room. She's recovering from the trauma of years of childhood sexual abuse, she says. And romance novels have helped. Thank you for that, she tells the assembled writers.
In an interview later, the 53-year-old woman from Vienna, Va., says she began reading romances about 10 years ago. She found that the novels helped her to recover from shame, "to validate my right to enjoy sex, to validate me as a sensual, sexual person." These days, she says, her husband of 26 years is inclined to buy the books for her. One could say their sexual relationship has improved.
Her story brings to mind a piece Psychology Today published in 1985: Two psychologists reported a study showing that women who read romance novels made love 74 percent more than those who did not. Then there's a little newspaper clipping posted near the bar at Hilltop House. It's a woman's letter to "Dear Abby" last year:
"By chance, I started reading romance novels. Suddenly my sex drive increased dramatically. Some of them are very descriptive, and they caused me to think about sex throughout the day (something my husband says he's always done) ..."
Fantasy or feminism
The point here is that romance readers develop a personal relationship with the books, and that many romance writers started out as readers and have a particular bond with their readers. These romance writers talk about the reader's life and reading experience in ways that one doesn't hear in interviews with writers in other fictional forms.
Seidel, who switched to romance after trying and failing to publish "literary" fiction, puts it this way: "This is my sound bite. I went from writing a novel that would change people's lives to writing a novel that would change their afternoon."
This mental picture of a woman at home reading a romance becomes a backdrop for the retreat. By some accounts, Ms. Avid Romance Reader is devouring three or four books a week. She's returning endlessly to this fantasy world. What is she looking for? What will bring her back for more?
This reader has been the subject of scholarly analysis, market research, psychological study. By some lights she's just sitting down to read a nice story, slipping into what one television ad used to call "the wonderful world of Harlequin Romances." The ad called it a woman's "disappearing act."
This expression captured the attention of feminist critic Tania Modleski, author of "Loving With a Vengeance." Modleski wrote that she could not "think of a better phrase to describe at once both what is laudable and what is deplorable in the appeal of such fiction."
On the one hand, Modleski says, it's a reminder that women need to make themselves more visible in the world. On the other, the romance is typically a story of a woman betraying herself, vanishing into the shadow of patriarchy by accepting that there's just one route to happiness: marriage.
Janice A. Radway, author of "Reading the Romance," writes about the ambiguity of the romance. There's no answering the key question, she says, of whether the form is "fundamentally conservative on the one hand or incipiently oppositional on the other."
In other words, the very act of reading is a way for women to resist the demands of husband and family. At the same time, Radway says, the stories validate the oppressive system that makes the resistance necessary in the first place.
Not so, argues my field guide, "Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women." Several writers make the point that the romance is a story of a woman's triumph. The heroine brings a difficult and powerful hero to understand that she's got the answer. She knows the way to happiness, not him.
Hence, the heroes in these books can often be jerks. He's a two-headed beast, a combination hero and villain. The heroine must tame him. Naturally, he's variously difficult, detached, emotionally damaged, potentially violent, brooding. In short, a big pain in the butt. Women don't really want to live with a man like that, romance writers say. But if the hero's just a sweetheart, where's the story? It's the same reason the James Bond villain is never played by Alan Alda.
But this sort of criticism is not made about Ian Fleming or Tom Clancy or Dashiell Hammett or any other writer of what could be considered male romance. The field guide notes the distinction:
"Most people understand and accept the way in which fantasy works when they sit down to read [Robert] Ludlum, [Stephen] King, [Anne] McCaffrey," wrote novelist Jayne Ann Krentz. "But, for some reason, when it comes to romance novels, critics worry about whether the women who read them can tell the difference between what is real and what is not. Of course the readers can tell the difference."
Kay Mussell, who has taught college courses on genre fiction, including the romance, says the romance is gaining some acceptance in academia. Still, the author of "Fantasy and Reconciliation" says literary critics tend to "assume the genre is one thing. What is missing in the criticism is the acknowledgment of individual voices."
Not that there isn't plenty of gushing romance prose on the market that reads like genre satire. But there are also writers such as Crusie, whose stuff is much sharper than the stereotype allows. Here's the opening of Crusie's "Tell Me Lies" (St. Martin's Press, 1998):
"One hot August afternoon, Maddie Faraday reached under the front seat of her husband's Cadillac and pulled out a pair of black lace underpants. They weren't hers."
HED: The business of romance
The idea that all romance is alike may rile romance fans, but the notion has been part of an extremely effective sales strategy first employed by Harlequin Enterprises. Staggering romance sales say something about the female psyche, but also a lot about salesmanship.
In this romantic, cliff-side setting, in the company of women immersed in creating uplifting fantasy, it's possible to lose sight of the fact that the folks who made the romance novel a huge financial success did so by applying all the romanticism of, say, Procter & Gamble.
In the early 1970s, Harlequin Enterprises showed the book publishing world that books could be sold like mouthwash. Under the leadership of an executive who had come from Procter & Gamble, Harlequin, aided by market research, introduced new romance "lines" identified by uniform packaging. It launched subscription sales and moved its books out of bookstores and into supermarkets, drugstores and discount department stores. It even offered books free in boxes of detergent.
This didn't do much for the image of the romance as serious literature, but it did sell tons of books, and other publishers soon followed suit.
Folks from the business side of the romance industry appear at the retreat to offer advice, encouragement, tips. Two-thirds of the writers here -- some who have been at it 20 years -- have never published a romance novel. Yet they plug away. One woman is writing a time-travel novel; another is writing one involving rape and abduction. These fevered imaginations enjoy freer rein, as industry standards have steadily relaxed since the late 1970s. More sex is OK. So is more violence, heroines older than 26, heroines as executives, lawyers, doctors.
W. Somerset Maugham said: "There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."
Once upon a time, it might have seemed romance novels were the exception. But that was Friday. By Sunday it doesn't seem so simple. So the Mayflower van has been lightened up a tad.
Certain things are still clear in Romance Land, however. As Laurin Wittig's manuscript title says: "Love Rules."
A real boook? Not yet. Still just an unpublished manuscript, a thing as dreamy as the surroundings of Hilltop House. But who knows? At least her mother's coming around. Now when she tells people about her daughter the aspiring romance novelist, she quickly adds: And did you know that Jane Austen wrote romance novels?