I'm currently taking a paper at uni on Victorian literature, and specifically at the moment, Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines. The preposition put forward is that the adventure stories that came out around the end of the nineteenth century, such as Haggard's, Buchan's The Thirty-nine Steps, Dracula, and Sherlock Holmes and the very masculine-dominant view they portray of the world played a part in the empire building and self-belief of the men at the time. Which helped the men of Britain to expand and hold their enormous empire.
So following on from that, my theory is that if these books gave the men of the time the belief to go out and literally conquer the world, then maybe the thriving romance genre is having a similar affect on women. That one of the reasons romances are as popular today as ever, is that they help us to believe in ourselves, and to do the things we must in our ordinary lives. It's generally thought that romance is just escapist fiction, a way of getting away from reality. But modern romances aren't about weak women escaping. Read paranormal and suspense romances. Those women kick butt - often literally. They come up against enormous trouble and strife, and they make it through. They don't just survive; they win.
So maybe in these hard times, that is why romances are still thriving. Because they give us, the women who read them, the courage and strength to believe we can kick butt too. That we can win through.
