The Art of the Mass Market: Regency Romances!

Once again, I’m trying your patience by taking the long way around the barn to get to the actual feature I intend to call “The Art of the Mass Market”! That feature will celebrate just what it says on the tin: the art of mass market paperback reprints of books originally released in hardcover. And yet, even before I could get once on-target I went off-target with a digression into the covers of sci-fi and fantasy covers I’ve loved for decades (and even then only scratched the surface of the hundreds and hundreds of such covers that snagged my attention over during the long years when science fiction and fantasy were my go-to genres). And here I am going off-target again!

This time the digression is for a sub-genre I love passionately: the Regency romance. Technically, this might be taken to mean any historical romance set during the years 1811 to 1820, when England’s King George III was deemed too mentally unstable to stay on the throne and so his eldest son, the ninny who would upon his father’s death become King George IV, was installed as Prince Regent. Among certain elements of England’s wealthiest and most powerful families, there was about the Regency appointment (with one of their own bon vivants suddenly running society) something of a holiday feeling, a sense that in the absence of the stern parent, social functions might be a bit more gay, a bit more lavish, a bit more carefree.

This wasn’t true for 99% of the population of Great Britain, of course, but you’d never be able to tell that from the positive glut of Regency-set fiction that’s been produced in the last two centuries, and it was never the only reason for the sub-genre’s popularity in any case; no, a huge chunk of that popularity derives from the single most famous Regency romance of them all, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Countless readers have entered the world of Austen’s perfect little novel and felt the exact same reaction as I myself felt and as hundreds of thousands of other readers, from Prime Ministers to Major League baseball players, have felt: the strong desire to stay in that world forever. The strong desire to return to that world for new stories.

Austen herself only wrote so many stories, of course, and only one of them had the precise sparkle of the ur-Regency, that perfect balance of winking humor and pleasing self-discovery. But, reasoned many of the readers whose original desire to write stories came from a desire to write that story, what if something very much like it were available? Something that likewise featured headstrong heroines and haughty heroes and unexpected changes of heart? In short, what if Jane Austen fans wrote Regency novels of their own? Not so much pastiches (although Lordee knows, there are plenty of them as well) as variations on a theme.

And so a cottage industry was spawned. And for decades, the template of these new Regency romances was as tight as one of the corsets so popular among the era’s finer set, the so-called ton: at least one of the star-crossed lovers must be fabulously wealthy (although even the other must not be so gauche as to be actually poor), the path of their true love must be strewn with obstacles they themselves erect (although angry stand-ins for Lady Catherine de Bourgh are of course permitted), they must come to like each other before they come to love each other, and the story must end with a wedding. And the uniformity of the plot-structure was very much reflected in the uniformity of the cover art (thought I’d forgotten about that, didn’t you?), especially for the flagship line put out in the glory days by Signet.

Ah, the sheer promise of enjoyment evoked by those three magic words, “Signet Regency Romance”! I definitely wasn’t alone in feeling that magic – indeed, for years Signet positively banked on it, slapping a guarantee right on the covers of its Regencies, assuring the reader that every box they expect to be ticked would in fact be ticked, that there would be no wretched narrative experimentation conducted on the premises, that there would be only token violence, no serious social issues (no more pressing, for instance, than Dorothea’s fretting about the stage of tenant cottages in Middlemarch, a novel you must not under any circumstances refer to as any kind, species, or type of Regency, lest Eliotites gather en masse and politely egg your house), and – it need hardly be specified – no sex.

And for years, those happy readers got just exactly what they expected, and it was wonderful! Truly appreciating a Signet Regency Romance is a skill, no less carefully-honed and attentive to details than the skill of sonnet-reading. The author’s command of Regency-era slang, the author’s skill at delineating characters, above all the author’s ear for replicating the kind of silvery dialogue that is the best part of Pride and Prejudice – these and other factors can fail or succeed on a mere hairsbreadth of satisfaction, which would cause me to gaze with scorn at those reading-snobs who commented “they’re all the same.”

Although, looking back at the covers of those old Signet Regency Romances, I can certainly concede that they all looked the same. The covers were sunlit little sketches (only later in the procession, around the turn to 2000, do we see covers that are more or less straight-up photographs of models in period costumes) depicting a well-dressed couple having some kind of moment, whether it be tender or inquisitive or even slightly troubled. The settings were almost always pointedly nondescript: a country house library, a wooded pavilion, occasionally a ballroom. Both the men and the women on these covers are well-dressed and physically attractive (although the men get progressively younger as the years bring us closer to the present – they start off downright fatherly and end up nearly epicene), and both are usually visibly happy. In these delightfully stately earlier covers, there’s usually no hint of the dilemma that can reliably be encountered in the book’s first chapter. The weather is always sunny unless inclement weather plays a key role in the plot, and there’s very seldom a third party in the frame, unless perhaps a picturesque menial (the rare Regency set in Venice, for instance, might have gondolier).

There was such comfort in those gently pastel covers! It perfectly betokened the comfort that lay in store for any well-disposed reader in the books themselves. In the best possible way, these Signet Regency Romances (and their cousins at Zebra and elsewhere) were full of inconsequential things (just like that Austen original, but don’t say that out loud, or the Janeites will start borrowing toilet paper from the Eliotites and tp your house all over again), full of flighty chatter and the latest fashions from London and pretty country houses. They were a uniform slim length, and their plots followed a strictly-patterned quadrille, and their authors made sure to omit the very thing that allowed Pride and Prejudice to soar so effortlessly above its peers, that all-seeing social salt of the narrating mind frame. The only social commentary that’s ever done in these classic Regency romances is done half-heartedly and ham-handedly by their heroines in the brief interval before they marry into the landed gentry. These books are Pride and Prejudice with the scorpion sting removed from the tail.

And their enormous charms would have been significantly lessened, for me, if their covers hadn’t cast such a calm, attractive spell! Hence their appearance in this most round-about of regular features! But trust me: sooner or later, I’ll get around to talking about the point of this regular feature – In fact, I may have only one more digression left before we get there. Stay tuned!