We shall retire to Bedlam
From the Oh No She Di’int Desk, we have a so-called college professor claiming that Jane Austen’s novels are just like modern romance novels.
McDaniel College English professor Pamela Regis, author of “A Natural History of the Romance Novel,” has another message that could be summed up as follows: Read your romance proudly. Don’t apologize for it, because you don’t need to.
Romance novels have been unfairly scorned, she argues.
After all, Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” recognized as a classic, follows all the conventions of a romance novel.
Regis defines romance novels as works of prose fiction that tell the story of the courtship and betrothal of one or more characters.
We would expect such a trite comment from a Very Young Person reading P&P for the first time, but really, a college professor? Can’t she recognize that it is about so much more?
To refute the claim of bad writing, just look at “Pride and Prejudice,” she said.
*head explodes*
Once again, with feeling: if Jane Austen were selling her novels today, they would not qualify as genre romance novels. They would be considered mainstream commercial literature. They are not about romance as much as they are about life–and romance certainly is a part of life, but please do not ghettoize Jane Austen’s novels in such a way. We really have nothing against romance novels, though they are not our particular cup of tea, but such a comparison is just silly.
June 13th, 2006 at 11:52 am
they are about life
Here, here!
I love romance novels as well as Jane Austen, but with all the layers in her work (comedy, romance, family history, character studies, …) it is difficult not to see that her work is so much more.
I actually read some (not many) romance novels, which gave me the feeling of having read “a real book” but I would never compare them to Jane Austen either.
June 13th, 2006 at 12:29 pm
My goodness Professor Regis has a broad definition of “romance novel.” Perhaps she is confusing “romances” with “romance novels.”
Being some two-hundred years old, Jane Austen’s works might be now classified as romantic as per dealing with the past. Though it was not the past when they were written.
I enjoy reading romance novels from time to time. They are easy to hold one handed, and somewhat more entertaining than the incessant Dr. Seuss in my house. I love “Cat in the Hat” as much as the next person, but after the 100th time, it gets old.
Still…(back to the point) Jane Austens works are in no way romance novels. Let me at that cluebat!
June 13th, 2006 at 10:49 pm
I think Professor Regis’s point was inelegantly put. I view Pride and Prejudice to be no more of a romance novel than Jane Austen was a Romantic - but, however, its impact on the contemporary romance or chick lit genre is such that its framework is regularly thieved to fit a generic storyline around. Girl meets boy, boy insults girl, girl violently dislikes boy, boy suddenly starts to find girl attractive, girl rejects him… I don’t need to go on. I can’t be certain that P&P was the first novel to put forward this framework, but it seems to be recognised as such.
June 14th, 2006 at 4:21 pm
I was just bemoaning a similar offense this morning - I’ve been researching mass-market romance (for a romance book club some friends are forming - I think it will be a lot of fun), and came across an article in the Journal of Poplular Culture that said of Harlequin romances: “Its product differs little from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice… Just as Jane Austen drew a heroine who was essentially an ordinary girl of modest upbringing, so the contemporary Harlequin author creates the same type of heroine.” But the whole article was pretty awful (and the writer’s credentials suspect), so I tried not to take much offense.
Though perhaps, as Niamh insightfully suggests in her above comment, these arguements are just poorly phrased. Vivien Jones, a scholar at the University of Leeds who has edited many of the Penguin editions of Austen, has a very nice intro to P&P that talks about the novel’s connection to romance literature without doing Austen any injustice.
June 17th, 2006 at 10:02 am
P+P is an official literary romance of the late 18th, early 19th century but can only be classed that way if compared to other romantic novels of the time as put next to the wishy-washy romances of today it is so much more. I’m doing an essay on the novel for my GCSE’s and researching into the generic conventions of literary romances of the period and it does seem quite conventional so can see where Professor Regis is coming from but her definition of a romance is more than a little vague.