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At last, the perception of popular fiction by women as “silly novels by lady novelists”, as George Eliot sniffily put it back in 1856, is changing. Next year, the British Book Awards will recognise romantic fiction for the first time. The recognition is long overdue.
This welcome news came in the same week as the deaths of two doyennes of the form, Joanna Trollope and, at just 55, Sophie Kinsella, only a couple of months after the loss of national treasure Dame Jilly Cooper. Between them these publishing power houses produced more than 100 books, sold millions of copies, and inspired hit films and TV series, most recently last year’s star-studded adaptation of Cooper’s 1985 Riders.
Few writers have such a defining impact that they create a whole new genre: the bonkbuster, or Aga saga, as the novels of Cooper and Trollope patronisingly came to be known. The first of Kinsella’s mega-selling Shopaholic novels in 2000 followed hot on the heels of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones and the birth of “chick-lit”.
Jane Austen, whose 250th anniversary was celebrated this week, has mischievously been called the original chick-lit novelist. Her genius was to invent a form of storytelling that kept readers entranced by seemingly trivial matters. Since then, as Sally Rooney has pointed out, the stakes of the English-language novel have been love and marriage. With their acute awareness of money and class, seasoned with a generous sprinkling of wit, Cooper, Trollope and Kinsella are very much part of this tradition.
As with Austen, their fiction tells you what life was really like at a certain period – especially for women – better than any history book. In her sex-and-champers sagas of the upper classes, Cooper distilled the competitiveness and excess of the Thatcherite 80s. Trollope’s darker tales of desperate housewives in country towns embraced the changing shape of modern families. And Kinsella’s Shopaholic series spoke to young women with small flats and big overdrafts in the noughties, when credit was cheap and the high street thrived. They all captured the zeitgeist.
Some of the criticisms levelled against these novels are fair. Cooper’s attitudes on gender stereotypes and race now seem dated at best. Although, as Trollope insisted, Agas are only mentioned twice in her work, her fictional worlds are financially well insulated. And Kinsella’s novels unapologetically romanticise consumerism. None of these writers claimed great literary prowess. “I’m no lyrical stylist … and I certainly wouldn’t describe my novels as intellectual,” Trollope admitted in a Guardian interview. Instead, they wanted to comfort and entertain; “to cheer people up”, as Cooper said.
Romance is all about escapism, so it is no surprise that the genre is flourishing today. While publishing, crime fiction aside, is struggling, sales of romantic novels have soared since 2020 alongside online communities like BookTok that have enthusiastically popularised them. Last year saw the biggest sales since records began, thanks mainly to the rise of another new genre, romantasy. In the run-up to Christmas, Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros had earned more than any book, in any category, this year.
There has also been no shortage of more conventional romance, including Jessica Stanley’s hit debut Consider Yourself Kissed and novels from the established names Emily Henry, Ali Hazelwood, Jojo Moyes and Marian Keyes. Without romantic fiction, the book world would be much poorer in every sense. No wonder it is being taken seriously at last.
