Reformed Rakes

One Burning Heart is the latest book in Elizabeth Kingston’s 13th century medieval series, Welsh Blades, and it is a Reformed Rakes favorite. The book opens on a perfunctory sex scene that could be the stuff of nightmares. Margaret has been married to William for six years, and he's decided to tamper down his ill-concealed loathing for his wife in order to beget an heir. While William married Margaret for strategy, what he doesn’t know is that Margaret also married him for strategy. One Burning Heart is an achingly romantic tale that tackles ancestry, loyalty, and doubt, and Margaret is one of the most compelling historical romance heroines we’ve ever come across.
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Beth’s Substack
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Just Like Heaven was published in 2011 as the first in the Smyth-Smith quartet and follows a family set in the Bridgerton world. Quinn’s most successful series is the Bridgerton series, even before the adaptation, features a large, tight-knit family that run around Regency London acting anachronistically and telling jokes that we’re told are hilarious and finding true love. A lot of romance time and effort has been spent on the Bridgerton series, book and television show, along with Quinn’s place as an outsized representation of romance to the non-romance world and this is mostly outside what we’re going to be talking about today. All the Rakes have read at least a handful of the Bridgerton series and none of us really enjoy the television show that much, so we wanted to read another one of Quinn’s books as our standalone exploration of her writing style, to try and parse what works or what doesn’t for us, along with what might be the longstanding appeal to readers for a Julia Quinn novel.
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Visit our website for transcripts and show notes: reformedrakes.com
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Bluesky: @reformedrakes
Beth’s Substack
Chels’ Substack
Emma’s Substack
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We spoke about Mills & Boon last week and now we're onto Harlequin. While we go through the history of Harlequin, we continue with the lens of how gatekeepers influence the romance genre. While writing this script, I was influenced by John Markert’s book Publishing Romance where he argues that gatekeepers often use their own tastes as a barometer for what readers want. Markert argues another driver for gatekeepers is what they perceive market conditions to be. This often results in gatekeepers acting conservatively as they try and find a product that is similar to yet slightly different from what’s on the market. We talk about a few editors again and how they influenced their authors, Vivian Stephens and her time at Harlequin, how heroines having jobs has been editorial policy since the 80s, and how mass market paperbacks will be dramatically scaled down in the upcoming year.
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Visit our website for transcripts and show notes: reformedrakes.com
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Bluesky: @reformedrakes
Beth’s Substack
Chels’ Substack
Emma’s Substack
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When we look at the history of romance novels, often people pin the start of modern romance history to the 1972 publication of The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss. By doing this, people erase a key evolution and influence in romance, which is the category romance. If you’re from the UK then you already know that the category publisher there is Mills & Boon, and they’ve been a publisher for a little over a century. First starting out as a general publisher in 1908, over the decades Mills & Boon gradually specialized in romance novels. Harlequin, first seeking to re-print their medical romances, eventually bought Mills & Boon in 1971. While we look at the history of the company, we also focus on publishing gatekeepers and how they’ve influenced the romance genre.
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Visit our website for transcripts and show notes: reformedrakes.com
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Bluesky: @reformedrakes
Beth’s Substack
Chels’ Substack
Emma’s Substack
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Pamela Morsi’s books were different than the typical historical romance of the time. Writing stories set in rural America, with poor or working class characters, Morsi was hailed as the “the Garrison Keillor of romance fiction,” by Publishers Weekly. When demand for the Americana subgenre waned after 2000, Morsi switched over to contemporary romance and women’s fiction with 2002’s Doing Good. She continued to write through 2014, publishing 29 books in her long career. She died this past December. Garters, published in 1993, is one of Morsi’s most beloved books. Following Esme Crab, a poor hill girl who wants to marry up, and Cleavis Rhy, a storeowner with aspirations of being a gentleman, Garters is an unusual tale about class, love, and ambition that is goofy, tender, and at times heartbreaking.
Support us on our Patreon!
Visit our website for transcripts and show notes: reformedrakes.com
Follow us on social media:
Twitter: @reformedrakes
Instagram: @reformedrakes
Bluesky: @reformedrakes
Beth’s Substack
Chels’ Substack
Emma’s Substack
Thank you for listening!