Oh no - It's bash romantic fiction week again!
So it’s bash romantic fiction week, as usual. Oh no, not again, I hear you cry. When will this end? Not in the near future, I fear, but we can but try to tackle these prejudices about OUR genre. On Open Book on Radio 4 yesterday the BBC managed to be stereotypical and snide (in my opinion!) about Regency Romance as a fiction sub-genre. A reader had contacted the Open Book Reading Clinic to ask for help in breaking an addiction to Regencies, which she had developed during her studies for a PhD. Personally I can’t think of anything nicer than relaxing and being entertained by Georgette Heyer after a hard day’s study, but I can see that if you genuinely cannot pick up anything other than a Regency romance you might be looking for some advice on how to expand your reading. That’s fair enough. What is neither fair nor courteous, in my opinion, was the view put forward by the studio guest, a novelist and playwright, whose contention was that an intelligent, educated “grown up” woman had a “...