Few of them are getting rich off their books but the genre is making them more money than it used to.
Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood in the 1995 film of Sense and Sensibility: a competent moral agent drawing only on her intelligence and experience.
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This year is the bicentenary of Jane Austen's death and her celebrity continues to grow. But relegating Austen's work to plots about 'whether the heroine gets her man' belittles her achievement.
Sexuality presents us with personal and private concerns that are also very political.
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Perhaps we can think of the love letter and other gestures of romantic love as forms or techniques that mediate the violence of time, dispossession and exclusion.
For all its millions of female readers, romance fiction has been dismissed as sappy, trashy and dangerous to read.
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Can a gender studies academic also write Mills and Boon novels? And can purple prose be as empowering as a pink pussy hat? The answer is yes, and yes again.
A young Aboriginal woman falls in love with an escaped Japanese POW in 1944. Anita Heiss' new book entwines romance with questions of enmity and friendship: who is fighting whom?
Buttons open to the waist, skin gleaming with sweat, hair tousled, intriguing flashes of curves … men on the covers of classic romance novels, or “bodice rippers”, are objectified in many of the same ways…