“Fresh air in this climate of women who would stop at nothing to get what they want”

Last time on Bewildered Heart, over a glass of Chardonnay and an episode of Mistresses, we discussed the nature of guilty pleasures. The not entirely recent invention of the MIRA imprint has thrown critical assessments of Mills & Boon into jeopardy. After all, how does a Bewildered Heart analyse an ever-changing body of work that responds to disapproval and reacts to progress? MIRA is not completely at odds with the historical canon of the genre, and the majority of Harlequin's product is uniformly indistinguishable, although the coloured covers are a clue to the superficial differences between subgenres. With certain hip twists such as the introduction of teenagers, vampires, ethnics and NASCAR drivers, there is a danger that Romance could become heralded for its diversity, when instead the entire collection of books, across every imprint and from every author, should be defined by their political and narrative consistencies.

The typical scenario sees an alpha male meet a beta female and after however many pages of sex and hand-wringing they live happily after. This has been accepted and unchallenged for a century of unbridled success, and the romance genre had not exactly been struggling before the advent of Mills & Boon. From the viewpoint of behavioural psychologists there is a question of just how much of Mills & Boon's output is reactionary. Women think about weddings and babies, so why not cater to these passions? The company cannot be blamed for finding an untapped market and exploiting its common interest for financial gain. The audience existed before the business, after all. MIRA has given its readers a little more credit by noting that women also like shopping and celebrities, but this is perhaps not quite the feminist victory it at first appears. Harlequin's push for sexual equality is purely market driven, and that may explain their patient wait before they tackle other inequalities, including race and sexuality. There being a separate African-American imprint seems inherently racist. Yet if the publisher is reluctant to lead the way then their role is to adapt to the readership.

However, critics contend readers have been reduced to passive consumers, preferring familiar formulas and classic gender roles. Therefore, romance purveyors are leading the market they created and continue to manipulate. Within this vacuum how can social and artistic progress be achieved? Were Mills & Boon to be specified as a guilty pleasure their failure to engage in public discourse and confront regressive hegemonies would explain away those feelings of shame among readers, writers and publishers. Yet the state of affairs their stories establish and strengthen only help the company on its financial ascent. For Harlequin to maintain its success a vulnerable, passive following could be seen as necessary, and over the years subversion and intelligence have disappeared from the product. Even the supposedly upmarket MIRA offers intellectually-undemanding, superficially engaging stories of celebrity scandal that empower the social and economic status quo. Gender roles are not disputed, the wealthy are romanticised and the world is depoliticised in the name of love.

Romance novels by their very nature explore identity, happiness and relationships. The Mills & Boon world, the one their characters exist in, is alien yet not unrecognisable from our own. Suffering does occur, albeit in back-story, while poverty is a childhood affliction overcome by adulthood without leaving scars. Resentment might linger, but when all billionaires are hard-working, self-made, philanthropic and charming any anger soon disappears. Love solves socio-economic problems and corporations are embodied by a gorgeous male face with the public's best interests at heart. Examples exist in the small sample of books reviewed on this site, from One Night with the Rebel Billionaire to The Billionaire's Housekeeper Mistress, to the likes of Fifty Shades of Grey, where the money-driven control freak hero really just wants to feed the world and cuddle monogamously.

In their analysis of book titles Anthony Cox and Maryanne Fisher viewed the glorification of wealth in evolutionary terms. A rich husband and father is a better provider than a poor one, and in romantic fantasies, as well as life, money is preferable to insolvency. The classic formula tends to show the hero as a man at the peak of his powers, having conquered every aspect of life, with only family eluding him. His idealisation requires he be bestowed with desirable qualities such as determination, passion, muscle definition, intelligence, head hair, detail orientation, creativity and time management skills, all needed in the successful pursuit of a mate and, possibly coincidentally, suitable for a captain of industry. However, for a publisher to constantly value material assets so highly, while carefully ignoring poverty, greed and the harmful effects of capitalism, must surely strike readers as incongruous. Is it really necessary for love stories to argue wealth as a cornerstone of happiness?

Romances are typically centred on a heroine being courted by a hero. Occasionally we see a reversal, if the heroine can know what she wants while remaining likeable. Mostly, however, lovers are pulled together against their wills by cosmic destiny and the sheer overwhelming force of physical beauty. This dissolves characters of credibility, but it does give credence to Mills & Boon's prevailing philosophy that love matters most and transcends colour, creed, politics and religion. Love is the reason for humanity's being and relatively important in its continued survival. Bearing this in mind, should art concerning love be ridiculed to the degree it is? Harlequin’s attitude towards its product undermines the objectives of Secrets Uncovered to improve quality. Writing guides and blog posts merely serve to encourage and inspire new writers to flood the market with more manuscripts and sate the public's desire for more of the same. Big sellers such as Fifty Shades and Twilight do not appear to challenge any notions that readers are tired of Mills & Boon and want better writing, more original structures or rounded characters.

Whether Mills & Boon works as propaganda is not as important a concern as the obvious problem of them continually failing as fiction. The alpha hero and virginal heroine archetypes are restrictive both socially and in terms of narrative. The limitations on plot and character keep authors from expanding the possibilities of form. Intent is immaterial, and not a valid counter-argument for novelists claiming their work is apolitical. The refusal to question and explore social concerns is an implicit endorsement of the world as it is. Authors straddle motivations ranging from ignorance to contentment, claiming that now feminism has allowed for marriage, motherhood and romance novels to be choices the movement has achieved as much as it needs to. The genre may desire to be escapist fantasy, far-removed from reality and thus disconnected from political struggle, but this is a convenient and misguided rationalisation. The refusal to engage with progressive thinking can be seen as willful blindness to injustice or a preference for indecent stories of female subjugation dressed up as idealistic fairytales and sold to women as harmless entertainment. The amount of damage done is debatable. After all, the argument over violence in movies seems unlikely to be satisfactorily resolved. While the effect on readers is tricky to prove the intention of the publishers is curious, especially given the unique nature of Mills & Boon as genre authorities.

“Sophie nearly snorted her coffee”

MIRA, Harlequin's respectable cousin of an imprint, has found cross-over success by side-stepping the conventional trappings of the Mills & Boon formula. Hip, young writers including Victoria Fox and Caren Lissner have found their novels published under geography-based titles such as Wind Chime Point and Temptation Island, thus falling on the less embarrassing end of the embarrassing romance title spectrum. Of equal importance their covers do not necessarily feature models in softcore clinches to an exotic backdrop of a photo studio. As if to further the distance between potential correlations MIRA has its own website full of the pretense that while other romantic options are available they can be found somewhere else, and that somewhere else isn't nearly as debonair and fashionable as the home of The Case of the Diffident Dom and So Tough to Tame. Over at Harlequin's virtual abode an aspiring author will be hard-pressed to find any helpful guidelines for joining the MIRA stable of novelists. The most similar-sounding alternative Bewildered Heart has managed to unearth in the matter of seconds it took to complete a thorough search was SuperRomance, which bears an uncanny resemblance to MIRA by also being a meaningless, invented word.

Increasingly there seems little discernible difference between each of Mills & Boon's series of subgenres, especially now the online market has blossomed and a growing audience wishes to be seen as unique. Nocturne Cravings, Loved-Inspired Suspense and African-American may possibly be self-explanatory, but what of SuperRomance? 'Our stories are big romance novels filled with intense relationships, real life drama and the kinds of unexpected events that change women's lives forever!' Don't be fooled by a handful of those statements which are clearly untrue and several of the others which are consistent with every book the company releases. The key word used was big. Indeed, SuperRomance is defined by its length, averaging an eye-watering 85,000 words. Most romances struggle to justify between fifty and sixty thousand words, dragging out a misunderstanding across four chapters to meet a contractual obligation, so how are SuperAuthors supposed to bulk out their flimsy plots to such an extent? Are there certain key elements that might help extend that flagging second act for an additional one hundred pages?

'A strong central romance that's big in scope and believable in execution. There can be a secondary romance and subplots.' Secrets Uncovered revealed that supporting characters and less important tribulations served as a distraction from the main business of getting it on, but when an extra thirty thousand words have been demanded this kind of thinking is more of a hindrance. The opportunity to explore theme through juxtaposition and female subjugation through a part-time job allows for a richer, more credible landscape, offering deeper internal conflicts and greater emotional resonance to the core relationship. With time SuperCharacters and SuperLocations can be introduced carefully with skilful nuance, and it is for this reason, probably more than all the others, that SuperRomance is all the more critically disappointing. 'High emotional stakes. The characters' goals mean something to them, might force them to make difficult choices and might be in conflict with the romance.' While these aren't necessarily sentences in the traditional sense they are perhaps worthy of examination. If Romance is itself an imprint, and oddly enough it doesn't appear to be, then SuperRomance ups the ante, heightening the drama and introducing truly difficult dilemmas that require sacrifice and compromise. This would suggest that Harlequin has finally published proper novels with satisfying stories, even though the evidence points to the same tired, trite tales with a bunch of tacked on scenes involving a younger sister falling for a rebel.

Next, 'The hero and heroine should work for their happily ever after so give them obstacles and complications that need to be resolved.' This is certainly perceptive, because without events and things to talk about the courtship will last half a page and the author will need to find eighty-four thousand and seven hundred synonyms for happy before their book is finished. Once they have found means to temporarily keep their superhero and superheroine apart how will the impediments be fixed? 'Resolve issues by moving them to the next logical step, but don't wrap everything up in a neat bow!' Surely a SuperRomance isn't super without SuperHeteronormativism and what's more super than tidiness and gift-wrapping? Apparently no one knows, because the guidelines move on without further explanation. With an acknowledged desire for realistic settings, real life dramas, complexity, character depth and believable reactions to larger than life incidents, Harlequin has taken a deliberate step away from the fairytale fantasies of their other series. With this in mind, the idealised endings of old have no place in novels where people struggle for love and question what they want from life.

From there we learn that, 'Tone can vary from the light-hearted to the deeply emotional, from family sagas to light suspense.' This has all the fogginess Mills & Boon is famed for, as if with a hundred different styles of story no one considered separating them on the grounds of mood or genre. At least any tension beyond fleeting appears to have been ruled out, as action adventures with a hint of romance are published by just about everyone else. Nevertheless, there is plenty between family saga and light suspense on the scale of excitement, even though it seems tricky to figure out exactly what the scale would look like. Finally there's the vital inclusion of the wider worldview and, 'a sense of community. Paint a larger picture of the characters' lives by showing their relationships with family and friends, social lives and work.' The previously considered worthless qualities of description and entertainment have a home at SuperRomance. Whereas in the cut-throat corporate office of Modern, the hospital corridors of Medical™ and the idyllic small-towns of Special Moments here an author can explore details outside the staring and emotional-stupidity that amounts to loving in the Harlequin canon.

Crucially, therefore, authors are left with one question to ponder over their post-lunch cocktails. Why write for any series other than SuperRomance, besides the obvious reason of laziness? The task of dreaming up thirty-thousand more words will put off many, but the narrative benefits surely outweigh the negatives of further typing. These imprints appear to offer all the usual expectations of a Harlequin romance only with increased appeal, writing quality and likeability. There seems no reason as to why this is impossible with a less taxing word count, but perhaps the publisher has learned that what works for its rivals might also work for them. MIRA does away with the standard tricks of classic Mills & Boon, and instead positions itself as a publisher of run-of-the-mill chick-lit and bonkbusters. However, this only leads Harlequin away from the corner of the romance industry it invented and continues to monopolise. While the company broadens its appeal and audience there remains the threat of identity loss. This can only be good when the product Mills & Boon floods into the world on a monthly basis is so tired and underwhelming, but their move into longer, contemporary fare inspired by the most popular romance fiction of their competitors can hardly be seen as progress, but rather another sideways step in a history of sideways steps.

“Feeling like a voyeur, he drank in every detail of her private quarters”

In a world built on rationality and sturdy logic there are few questions more beguiling and worthy of journalism as why a new generation of women are reading bonkbusters. Before we answer a conundrum that has been plaguing no one for as long as no one can remember we should begin with a handful of other, perhaps more pertinent, queries, including what are bonkbusters, are a younger generation actually reading them and how can aspiring authors with an eye for a Zeitgeist cash in on this trend before everyone else notices? Thankfully for all concerned the Daily Telegraph's own Louisa Peacock has us covered, as she uses the release of one book to examine a cultural phenomenon that may not exist. Why does this serve as an excuse for a Bewildered Heart post, besides to obvious need to post anything? It is because the author in question, Victoria Fox, is a rare breed of Mills & Boon employee, having broken out of her publisher's homogeneity, through the Mira imprint, to become a household name, depending on the popularity of saucy romantic fiction in that particular household.

British broadcaster Sue Limb may have invented the etymologically-inaccurate term, Bonkbuster in 1989, although sources vary. The neologism has been defined as, 'a type of popular novel characterised by frequent explicit sexual encounters,' but such fiction has been available and successful for decades. Recently, however, publishers have attempted to reach a more youthful demographic, in a bid to escape the genre's stereotypical bored housewife caricature and the negative connotations this produces. Harlequin's desire to subvert conventional opinions of its brand has seen the company embrace the technological advances of digital formats, but this would never have been enough without a change in content. For a publishing house with a series named Modern Mills & Boon has always had to fight against accusations of unfashionable conservatism, as well as more troubling associations with misogyny and the glorification of rape and violence against women. However, these are lazy criticisms given the time that has passed and all the new glaring flaws that continue to undermine the genre.

The surest way to appeal to the twenty-something market is through contracting twenty-something authors to tell the stories they would want to hear. Victoria Fox published her third novel this year at the tender age of twenty-nine. Her career has gained momentum following the success of 2012's Temptation Island, the story of actresses, models and teenage tearaways at a secret holiday destination for the world’s sexiest elite. Like her forerunners, Shirley Conran, Jackie Collins and Judith Krantz to name but three, Fox aspires to write female characters living in a man's world but finding ways to triumph without ever threatening the social status quo. She has found a formula that works, loosely basing each of her books on real-life celebrities, tapping into her generation's predilection for gossip, sex and larger-than-life dramas. Fox's tendency to write sex scenes from the male point of view saw early novels rejected, but she has remained largely committed to playing with such expectations. 'I don't see why it should have to be the model we've got at the moment,' she explains in regards to the erotic content of her novels, but this could apply equally to all the areas of romance fiction she is seeking to update. Victoria Fox is just one of a fresh crop of authors and readers hoping to erode the stylistic and narrative trappings that have held Harlequin back for so long.

For Fox the obvious challenge of working for Mills & Boon involved updating the tropes of the bonkbuster for the lives of modern women. 'I needed to have an alpha male, but I didn't want this alpha-ness to be defined by the fact he was subjugating a woman.' In order to retain the raw sexual appeal of a handsome, yet arrogant, hero and keeping him seductively masculine while dropping the female persecution, Fox has endeavoured to surround her lead couple with secondary characters, presumably much to the disapproval of Secrets Uncovered, her editor, employers and fans. Despite their possible protestations doing this has allowed Fox to portray her hero as a dominant, rugged force by populating the protagonist's world with balding failures and receding chauvinists. Without the heroine to playfully oppress he has to make do with everyone else, but by doing this Fox hasn't so much subverted the rules as done away with them entirely. Has Mira broken with tradition because the standard Mills & Boon format is not conducive to quality story-telling and current gender roles, or has the publisher discovered a niche in the genre with new and innovative ways in which to handle fictional romance incompetently? Awards and success are proof of little, yet Fox has won acclaim for her novels, suggesting her publisher is moving in an improved direction, following years lost in a country estate built on repression all the while running in circles, tripping over shoelaces and knocking into furniture.

Although the title of Peacock's article implied big questions would be dealt with, her interview with Fox amounts to a superficial conversation with an author on a book tour. Mills & Boon's move into the failed subgenre of Chick-Lit has been long and well-documented. The bonkbuster term should only be attached to the likes of Fifty Shades of Grey and Platinum by Jo Rees, the break out successes that find cultural cache beyond their intended market. Why are a new generation of women drawn to bonkbusters, asked the Daily Telegraph's Louisa Peacock, before failing to then ask the one woman who might know. Fox at least understands why she writes them and has an idea about who her fans are. 'I'd say my average reader is of a similar age to me, someone in their twenties, interested in celebrity culture and who wants an entertaining beach read.' Despite there being fewer young people able to afford a holiday on real sand nothing has changed in regards to undemanding paperbacks and Mira shows its parent company’s keen business acumen rather than any motivation to regenerate its image with novels exciting, shocking, juicy and politically-correct.