I spent the wee hours of the morning hiding from an existential meltdown by reading Gentle Rogue.
Yes! It’s another win for the Blood Sisters Book Club. And we’re only on Book 2. My best friend Kelsey wasn’t the only one who clung to sanity on Election Night with a romance read. But can a classic romance novel ever be an exercise in complete escapism? Unfortunately not. Much like the US Election, Johanna Lindsey’s 1990 classic Gentle Roguewas very adept at simultaneously drawing out feelings of giddy joy and teeth-grinding rage.
I’m not sure if I read Gentle Rogue back in the day but I definitely consumed several of the sprawling Malory-Anderson books: a Regency seafaring saga in which every heroine has a dozen male relations who want to kill her lover. This one pits the American brothers of Georgina Anderson against the pugilist former pirate James Malory, the green-eyed black sheep of his aristocratic English family.
Coming back to Lindsey is like coming home: a wave of nostalgia followed by noticing everything that annoyed you about the place when you were a teenager. The deep read started well. ‘The old bachelor nonsense is what makes it feel sooooo old school nostalgic,’ messaged Kelsey, ‘what POSSIBLE reason could anyone get married VOLUNTARILY?” Yeah, the mountain of evidence surrounding said bachelors of happy marriages never registers. 90s romance heroes would totally be flat earthers.
We were reminded of how often the implacable natures of the two main characters were a substitution for, you know, plot. ‘How is it possible for them ever to be together – it has been established that he will NEVER get married. He is a CONFIRMED rake.’ Also, Kelsey, he’s English and Georgina hate hate hates Englishmen now because of her dastardly fiancée. ‘Well I guess that’s it… throw in the towel… I don’t think we’re going to get that HEA.’
We designed fantasy badges – Completely Confirmed Rake – and had a competition to replace Fabio on the book cover. I voted Captain Flynn, Toby Stephen’s deliciously-conflicted pirate in Black Sails. Actually, Flynn’s piratical costume of billowing black shirt and painted-on black trousers are suspiciously similar to James Malory’s ensemble. (I have a theory that the writers of that polyamorous pirate drama are well-versed in genre romance, witness the pirate-queen-falls-for-upright-new-governor storyline.) So plenty of fun and games, but there’s also some very weird and very bad stuff happening in Gentle Rogue.
Um, Kelsey, have you got to the part where Georgiana can’t pass for a 12-year-old boy cause she’s only the size of a 9-year-old? That makes no sense biologically! ‘She’s just soooo dainty…. Growing any bigger would not be ladylike.’ And then there’s the slavery shitshow. The warning signs were there from the start but I tried to wish them away. Probably James the aristocratic pirate will have turned out to have sabotaged slaving ships or something, I naïvely hypothesised, and we will all get to return to our high-seas hijinks in the Caribbean with our conscience clear. Uh, yeah… two hundred pages later and he’s planning to impress Georgina with dinner at his fancy Jamaican plantation house. Fuuuuuuuck.
Other illusions fell away. Like pretty much everything I read in my formative romance days, this novel is het cis white. But we could do a queer reading of a heroines-in-breeches romance right? Well… no. Not a bit of it. Lindsey doesn’t allow even a flicker of queer desire to spark. She gladly sacrifices the dramatic tension of a mistaken identity in order to make the hero aware of Georgie’s gender before ever he’s introduced to his new ‘cabin boy’. He can ogle her cute bottom to his heart’s content. Great. Meanwhile, the heroine spends weeks in breeches, but no time contemplating what a life in them entails. Ug.
We still had one eye on the election as we simulcast the Fated Mates episode on Friday. ‘All the goddamn brothers!’ immediately became Kelsey’s catchphrase. I was pretty Team Jen on this listen and loved that she called out the queer-nulling tactics. But it was also good to hear Sarah’s praise for the sex-positive heroine. It’s awesome that there’s consent on the page in 1990. Conversely, yes, the hero owning a slave plantation is revolting. But we shouldn’t think for a moment that Romance now accounts properly for how all these noblemen and shipping magnates get their money.
Finally, I’m really happy that Sarah pointed out how the ‘all goddamn brothers’ effect is replicated in super successful YA series like Twilight. It clearly speaks to an id within the adolescent female psyche to have a group of protective males around the heroine. But it doesn’t speak to every teenage girl. We hear plenty from Romance readers like me who were hooked early by Johanna Lindsey, but less from readers like Kelsey who she turned OFF from the genre. So I absolutely love that Kelsey is giving romance a chance again because that second perspective is valuable as hell. Take it away, Kel:
‘[Control’s] the whole dynamic, with the entire damn family of men, and it’s portrayed as part of their rakish charm. And this is a Johanna Lindsey staple and I do not enjoy it.’ These Completely Confirmed Rakes are as completely inflexible. Their one-dimensionality means ‘there is never any REAL barrier to the relationship’ beyond said rakehood and therefore ‘nothing to sink my teeth into but my own tongue.’ Yikes! ‘They are archetypes, not people.’ Yes, well, in fairness, Kelsey, Lindsey created these archetypes. And next generation writers can and do fill in these outlines… writers like Lorretta Chase. ‘Oh yes, I can’t wait for Lord of Scoundrels!’
Quite. In the meantime, I’m devouring a Regency palate cleanser featuring another deceitful Georgie – the sexy thief George Turner in Cat Sebastian’s m/m romance The Lawrence Browne Affair. Yum.
Up next: The Book of Dain.
