In early November 2016, Sarah MacLean was 275 pages into writing her latest historical romance novel, The Day of the Duchess. She had hit all the right buttons – a titled (and entitled) duke; a beautiful, estranged wife touched by scandal; and an insurmountable challenge the pair had to mount before they could, well, mount each other. And then Donald Trump was elected. And MacLean couldn’t bear her hero any more.
“I woke up on 9 November and I was like, ‘I can’t write another one of these rich entitled impenetrable alphas. I just can’t,” says the New York Times bestselling author. “It was the story of that horrible impenetrable alpha evolving through love to be a fully formed human, which is a thing we do a lot in romance. And I just couldn’t see a way in my head that he would ultimately not be a Trump voter.”
MacLean is in London for RARE, an annual and hugely popular romantic fiction convention. At this year’s event, for which 1,500 tickets sold in 24 hours, readers turn up with wheelie suitcases to take home as many books as they can, queueing multiple times to get novels signed by the 100 or so authors attending. Romance is a huge industry (the genre is worth more than $1bn in the US alone) – yet, to some, it might seem a jarring relic among the current, wider conversations about sexual politics and gender equality. It’s fair to say it isn’t the most respected of genres. Hillary Clinton recently described it as books about “women being grabbed and thrown on a horse and ridden off into the distance”; a commonly held view that, given the popularity of novels about handsome highwaymen, isn’t entirely incorrect, even if the trope of the agency-lacking heroine is long gone.
Source:
theguardian
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