Normal People is a difficult novel to categorize: it has elements of the bildungsroman and the campus novel, and fits into a tradition of Marxist and radical fiction as well. But it also belongs to a genre that has, at times, been considered entirely separate from the realm of literary fiction: the romance. It centers around the love between two individuals, and the misunderstandings and obstacles that keep them apart. Rooney's blend of love story and social critique has drawn comparisons, for instance, to Jane Austen, perhaps the most famous romance author in English. Austen's books, too, simultaneously skewer upper-class social mores and create heartfelt scenes between characters in love. Austen's books, like Rooney's, have caused controversy, with some readers arguing that they embed radical politics and unsparing criticism into their plots, and others arguing that the romance is by definition a conservative form. Moreover, the romance is a form traditionally written and read by women. Some critics and scholars believe that it represents patriarchal and heteronormative restrictions, while others believe that a dismissal of the romance is itself rooted in sexism. Here, we'll delve into a brief history of the earliest romance novels in the English language, looking particularly at the way in which love stories and politics have intersected since the eighteenth century.
The first romance novels emerged contemporaneously with the first novels in English generally. In the early eighteenth century, during the first days of the English novel, female writers like Eliza Haywood and Mary Davys sold popular fiction about women's trials in love. Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, published in 1740, was an extraordinary sensation. Today's readers might not find the content romantic: it concerns a young servant girl who agrees to marry a member of her mistress's family, but only after he attempts to seduce her, threatening her with crimes from rape to abduction. Richardson framed Pamela's chastity as a virtue to which young readers should aspire, writing in a mode of moral instruction. The enormous response to the novel suggests that these themes resonated with Richardson's readership, but a good many of Richardson's peers found the book absurd. Henry Fielding's Shamela mocked Richardson's portrayal of an innocent servant girl, rewriting the book with a scheming seductress at its center. Already, the romance had become a flashpoint for conversations about the institutions at the center of English society: marriage, servitude, and the church (with its accompanying norms and rules regarding sexuality).
At the close of the eighteenth century, meanwhile, a new genre, the gothic romance, became popular. Women like Ann Radcliffe, author of the popular novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, exemplified the gothic romance. These novels reimagined the romance plot, incorporating elements of the supernatural or the frightening. These novels explored themes of hauntedness, taking place in old, mysterious settings, such as crumbling rural mansions. They often included a Byronic hero—a name for the intriguing, sinister, and seductive male character, towards whom the heroine feels a deep, if perplexing, attraction. Writers like Radcliffe, as well as Jane Austen in her gothic-inspired Northanger Abbey, portrayed innocent heroines unable to distinguish between the supernatural and the rational. In this way, writers of gothic romance challenged gender norms and marriage conventions, simultaneously pointing out the sinister realities within heteronormative structures of their day and arguing that women should be given resources to evaluate their world through a rational, educated lens. Even as Radcliffe produced wildly popular novels meant to entertain, her contemporary Mary Wollstonecraft made many of the same points about gender in her seminal feminist text A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Writers like Charlotte Brontë, in Jane Eyre, carried the gothic romance into the nineteenth century.
In the first half of the twentieth century, books like Daphne Du Maurier's 1938 Rebecca continued to use gothic romantic tropes. But romantic historical fiction more generally thrived. Margaret Mitchell's 1936 Gone With the Wind, and the 1939 film adaptation of it, was a sensational success. Mitchell set her romance within a romanticized version of the antebellum American South, entangling a love story with nostalgia for the institution of slavery. In doing so she reinvented the romance plot in the popular imagination, giving it a sheen of conservatism. Nostalgia would be a core characteristic of the midcentury romance novel by writers like Jean Plaidy. Even outside of historical settings, many saw the heterosexual romance plots of the popular romance novel as conservative, even reactionary—especially following the women's movement and accompanying shifts in American gender and sexuality norms. Today, publishing houses have sought to publish a more diverse variety of romances, featuring people from many cultural and racial backgrounds, including in historical settings.
Though romance novels are more diverse today, critics and readers debate whether they can be truly radical or groundbreaking. This attitude, though, may primarily stem from the recent history of the genre: before nostalgia became a touchstone of the romance, gothic novels interrogated the haunted, complex nature of the past. Before Gone With The Wind came Pamela, sparking scandal and debate. Rooney contextualizes Connell and Marianne's love story within an exploration, and a critique, of class systems, educational systems, artistic institutions, and familial structures. This blend of heady romantic plotline and bold commentary may be as old as the English novel itself.
