Table Of ContentThe Romance Fiction of
Mills & Boon, 1909-1990s
The Romance Fiction of
Mills & Boon, 1909-1990s
jay Dixon
0 jay Dixon 1999
This book IS copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
First published in 1999 by UCL Press
UCL Press Limited
1 Gunpowder Square
London EC4A 3DE
UK
and
325 Chestnut Street
8th Floor
Philadelphia
PA 19106
USA
The name of University College London (UCL) is a registered trade mark used by
UCL Press with the consent of the owner.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available
ISBN: l-85728-266-3 HB
l-85728-267-1PB
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to
reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any
copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any
errors or omissions in future editions of this book.
The permission for the use of extracts taken from Mills & Boon” publications has
been kindly granted by Harlequin Books S.A. Switzerland with acknowledgement to
Harlequin Mills & Boon Limited, UK.
Mills & Boon is a registered trademark owned by Harlequin Mills & Boon Limited,
UK. Temptation is a registered trademark owned by Harlequin Enterprises Limited,
Canada. Silhouette is a registered trademark of Harlequin Books S.A., Switzerland.
Harlequin, Harlequin Presents, Harlequin Romance, Temptation and MIRA are
registered trademarks owned by Harlequin Enterprises Limited, Canada. Mills & Boon
Enchanted is a registered trademark owned by Harlequin Mills & Boon Limited, UK.
Typeset by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong
Printed by T.J. International, Padstow, UK
This book is dedicated to:
The memory of John Boone and Jacqui Bianchi - may their
dedication to the genre of romance fiction live on in their successors.
All the past, present and future authors and readers and editors of
Mills & Boon romances - may your enthusiasm for the genre
never wane.
All those women who have ever defined themselves as feminist -
long may we live.
Mike Smith - because I promised, and because without whom this
book may not have been written.
My parents, Ida and Jack Dixon - with love and gratitude for all
the years of support and encouragement that they have given me
in all my endeavours.
V
Contents
Foreword by Rosemary Auchmuty ix
. . .
Acknowledgements x111
Introduction 1
1 A Short History of Mills & Boon - A very profitable
small firm 13
2 Reader, Author, Editor - Many hours of pleasant
reading 27
3 1910s - Society and Exotic, City and Country 43
4 Hero - You brought me to life 63
5 Heroine - Mirror Image 81
6 War and Aftermath - You give me redemption 97
7 Work - The smothering of the creative spark. . .
could be a sort of murder 113
8 Sex - We got all the damned foreplay over with
months ago 133
9 Love and Marriage - Harbour of desire 155
10 Feminism - I’m not a feminist, but. . . 179
Bibliography and Further Reading 197
Index of Mills & Boon Authors 203
General Index 208
vii
Foreword
Rosemary Auchmuty
A great deal of patronising nonsense has been written about Mills
& Boon romances. As “popular culture” they are fair game for
literary dismissal; as books for women they invite condescension
and ridicule; as the pioneers of brand-name publishing, whose
readers are attracted by a logo rather than an author’s name, they
have come to stand for all that is worst in formulaic writing and
cynical mass-marketing. Apart from their (millions of) readers,
few people have anything good to say about Mills & Boon ro-
mances; while many who have never read one are quite prepared
to denigrate the genre without regard for evidence or truth. As
Sheila Ray, author of The Blyton Phenomenon, wrote of another
equally derided icon of popular culture, “the sternest critics do not
see any need to get their facts right”.’
jay Dixon’s book is different.
Dixon writes as an insider, an avid reader of Mills & Boon
romances. “Personally, I never travel anywhere without one,” she
tells us. She has read - and enjoyed - hundreds of Mills & Boon
romances, dating from the birth of the genre in the early years of
this century up to the present. So she knows what she is writing
about and can set the record straight. As a former employee of the
firm, personally acquainted with key personnel including many
authors, she has a staggering breadth of knowledge of the genre,
its creators and its critics. For those of us who are not so deeply
immersed, many surprises lie ahead in this book.
Dixon challenges many popular myths about Mills & Boon
novels. For example, it is often said that Mills & Boon never
depicted premarital or extra-marital sex until very recently. Dixon
ix
FOREWORD
shows that, on the contrary, both have featured in novels of every
decade from before the First World War. We tend to think of the
typical Mills & Boon hero as aggressive and masterful and the
heroine as passively awaiting her prince. But Dixon points out
that the macho hero conventionally associated with Mills & Boon
only made his appearance in the 197Os, his predecessors including
men who were younger, poorer, and/or physically inferior to the
heroine, and his successors tending towards the “New Man”. Mills
& Boon heroines, too, are far from the stereotypes of feminine pas-
sivity that their critics have led us’ to expect. They are usually work-
ing women - women with life goals independent of their desire for
a maxi’s love - women who are not prepared to take their men as
they are, with all their masculine imperfections, but who seek to
transform them through love, to bring them firmly into the more
humane and egalitarian feminine value system. Many, indeed, are
already married, and the plot turns not on winning Mr Right but
on transforming a problematic marriage into a fulfilling one.
Equally importantly, Dixon writes as a feminist. She demon-
strates, as other feminists have tried to do before her, that even an
apparently reactionary genre like Mills & Boon romances can be
read positively by women. What makes her work different from
that of most of her predecessors is that, as a Mills & Boon
enthusiast who is herself a feminist, she is living proof that such
messages can be taken from the books. In this sense her book is
one big primary source, one woman’s first-hand account of her
reading life.
But it is more than this. Dixon understands the conventions of
the genre as only an insider can. She can “read” the symbols (for
instance, the home as the place of feminine power into which the
hero must be brought) and explain the significance in plot terms of
particular scenes, such as the violent sexual assaults on heroines
by 1970s’ heroes, to which feminists have not unnaturally ob-
jected. At the same time she understands the feminist objections.
She recognizes above all that Mills & Boon romances are histori-
cal documents and must be read in the context of the time and
manner of their production. In this sense her book is a painstaking
historical account of the genre’s development over the century and
the ways it has responded both to historical events such as war
