Romantically minded men
After yesterday’s call for men who write romance, we got ourselves a few answers in the mail. Bella Stander warned that her selections “aren’t genre “romance” fiction, but they are indeed romantic, especially the first two”: THE MEMOIRS OF ELIZABETH FRANKENSTEIN by Theodore Roszak and Anthony Capella‘s THE FOOD OF LOVE. She also mentions Michel Faber‘s THE CRIMSON PETAL & THE WHITE, Starling Lawrence‘s MONTENEGRO and WHERE THE TRUTH LIES by Rupert Holmes (“And reader, she married him!”).
Elizabeth Hand believes there’s some gender bias at work. “Women write relationship-driven mimetic novels with domestic settings, and they’re too often filed under Romance; men handle the same material and it’s Literature. The criminally underappreciated, classic novels of the late Laurie Colwin are a case in point — but maybe that’s because they *do* have happy endings.” Still, she does cast votes for John Fowles‘ THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN (“it may have jumpstarted the whole po-mo fiction machine way back when, but it was also undeniably a romantic novel”) and James Salter‘s A SPORT AND A PASTIME and LIGHT YEARS for being “erotic and elegaical.”
And over at the Telegraph, Ray Connolly argues in favor of romance-writing men, while Liz Hunt isn’t so sure.
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