"At last, the perception of popular fiction by women as silly novels by lady novelists, as George Eliot sniffily put it back in 1856, is changing. Next year, the British Book Awards will recognise romantic fiction for the first time. The recognition is long overdue. This welcome news came in the same week as the deaths of two doyennes of the form, Joanna Trollope and, at just 55, Sophie Kinsella, only a couple of months after the loss of national treasure Dame Jilly Cooper."
"Between them these publishing power houses produced more than 100 books, sold millions of copies, and inspired hit films and TV series, most recently last year's star-studded adaptation of Cooper's 1985 Riders. Few writers have such a defining impact that they create a whole new genre: the bonkbuster, or Aga saga, as the novels of Cooper and Trollope patronisingly came to be known."
Romantic and women’s popular fiction has long been dismissed but is now receiving institutional recognition. Three leading practitioners produced bestselling, culturally influential work that spawned subgenres such as the bonkbuster and chick-lit. These novels combined wit with acute attention to money, class and intimate relationships, mapping social change and everyday female experience. The fiction of the period captures distinct moments in British life: Thatcherite excess, evolving family structures and young urban financial precarity. Celebrated predecessors and contemporaries connected love and marriage to broader social stakes, making popular narratives valuable lenses on gendered social history.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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