The Purple Heart Throbs traces popular romantic fiction from its beginnings in the 1850s with the kissless sentimentality of The Heir of Redclyffe through the amorous rebellion of later and more abandoned Victorian romance-writers with their swoonings, rosebud lips and heaving breasts.
Development in the twentieth century includes such important landmarks as the torrid, 'sin-ridden' fiction of Elinor Glyn, the religious-cum-erotic fervours of The Rosary, Ethel M. Dell's novels, and the adventurous rape and lusty love in a tent of The Sheik. Then come the 'sophisticated', emancipated love stories of the 1930s, and the somewhat demure romantic novels of today which, though far from being popularly permissive, still sell in their thousands.
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