Cycling romance, a new subgenre of the short story, proliferated in the pages of cycling and family magazines during the bicycle craze of the mid-1890s. As the Queen wrote on January 8, 1898, "Bicycling stories are becoming quite the thing now," and "one can scarcely take up a magazine without coming across a story in which the ubiquitous bicycle figures in a more or less prominent fashion." These stories, varying in length from three to ten pages, typically feature middle-class women who meet and marry ideal men as a result of their cycling. As a crucial thematic device, cycling drives the narrative forward to its denouement: a happy marriage. Since cycling invariably took place outdoors and exposed women to the excitement as well as the dangers of expanded mobility, cycling romance celebrates values that seem to depart from the domestic love stories—what Margaret Beetham calls "larmoyanty love-tales"—typically featured in Victorian family and women's magazines. Indeed, women's cycling was a subject of great controversy in the 1890s that gave rise to intense conservative objections. By foregrounding women's cycling and all its latent controversies, cycling romance depicts a modern, potentially transgressive femininity that is restless with domesticity and yearns for fun and greater freedom. Ultimately, however, this new femininity is tamed and subsumed under a heteronormative framework of romance and consumerism.