In the course of fifteen months, I’ve posted 100 times (!!!), chronicling my journey from being an aspiring novelist, to publishing a historical romance with a small e-press, to selling a contemporary series to a big e-press. It’s been stupefying. To celebrate, here are my top ten posts in no particular order:
- Politics and the Romance Novel: by a factor of several hundred page views, this is the most widely-read post I’ve written. It may in fact be the most widely read thing I’ve ever written. In it, I argue genre romance is political and we should stop pretending it’s not.
- Margaret Mitchell’s Long Shadow: I consider what it means to write Civil War romance in a post-Gone with the Wind world (with a heavy dose of Lost Cause ideology).
- Against Alpha Heroes: I opine against the narrow confines of masculinity for romance novel heroes.
- Why Should You Read Brave in Heart?: eight reasons why you should read my debut novel. If you haven’t read Brave in Heart, what’s stopping you? (And if you have, can I say without being completely obnoxious that writers love it when you review their books. Hint hint.)
- A Fine Romance Friday: Once: my favorite fine romance Friday post, in which I make a case for the Irish indie (and bittersweet romance) Once.
- How Historical?: I ponder what readers mean when they talk about verisimilitude in historical romance.
- Land Where Our Fathers Died: pictures and reflections on my visit to the Chancellorsville battlefield (a setting for Brave in Heart).
- The Waltz That’s Viennes-y: I love Viennese light opera and relate The Merry Widow to romance novel tropes.
- Kern de Sache: thoughts on what we read when we read romance.
- Hard Work: thoughts on why we read romance.
What would you like to see in the next 100 posts?
Emma Barry 
Congratulations on reaching the milestone! Just yesterday I referred to your “most widely-read post” and I’m hoping you’ll write lots more thought-provoking posts in the years to come.
Thank you so much! I very much enjoyed For Love and Money. In my academic life, I write about the relationship between business strategies, policy advocacy, and narrative politics in 19th-century periodicals, so a related topic. ; )
That sounds interesting! Is it at all similar to Jan Cohn’s Romance and the Erotics of Property? She discusses financial success in 19th-century fiction as well as in more recent romances. I’ve also come across a dissertation on “Corporate heroines and utopian individualism: A study of the romance novel in global capitalism.”
Those are both close. My dissertation is not specific to romance but to an unusual 19th-century newspaper that acted really differently from its competitors vis-a-vis author contracts and publicity. The paper published mostly genre fiction, but not within a recognizable genre. The authors sort developed their own house style, which was incredibly successful but collapsed with the paper at the start of the 20th century and then disappeared. The argument is the weird approach to business influenced the narrative content and the paper’s extensive public policy advocacy on the editorial page (all much earlier than people like Richard Ohmann argue this was happening).
Now I’m reminded of something else: Robert E. Weir’s Beyond Labor’s Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor. Unfortunately, the bit about their fiction wasn’t part of the Google Books preview, and in any case I only skimmed it while looking for something else, but I did get the impression that they had a newspaper and also that there was fiction produced which expressed their beliefs.
My final chapter is on Laura Jean Libbey (and the Knights of Labor often show up in her factory girl novels) so I should check this out. Thank you!
What a wonderful milestone! Wishing you 100s more posts and publishing contracts to keep you in lattes and kid gloves permanently! :)
Thank you so much!
Congrats on 100 posts! And the publishing successes, too, of course! :)
It wouldn’t have been possible without your support.