This work examines the effect of 'nurture' as an aesthetic experience of Sabrina Jeffries' Hellions of Halstead Hall series. 'Nurture' is defined as the care and encouragement required for individuals to grow and develop. Beginning with a survey of recent popular romance criticism, this thesis approaches the genre via aesthetic response theory. I engage with Janice Radway's Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature to provide an introduction to the genre, the significance of the act of reading, and Radway's view of the levels of story and discourse of the popular romance. I disagree with Radway's claim that romances provide temporary satisfaction that distracts women from acting towards social change, and demonstrate instead that they have a high degree of immersivity, which is related to the effect of nurture by the functions of literature it helps to fulfill. My own analysis discusses genre and the act of reading with regard to the creation of nurture as an aesthetic experience of the popular romance, in that the genre is dedicated to giving readers what they need from their texts and the act of reading fulfills certain functions for the readers, whose effects can be seen as nurturing. In my analysis of the Halstead Hall series, I demonstrate that the reader is nurtured directly by the text through the level of story, and vicariously through her identification with the heroine. The texts are also shown to be particularly immersive due to the creation of aesthetic illusion. On the level of discourse, the implied reader is positively constructed, and the text's gaps neither bore the reader nor challenge her uncomfortably. The paratextual conventions of the genre prime the reader for the aesthetic experience of nurture. In my conclusion, I recommend that further research on the effects of literature consider employing empirical studies in order to be able to make definitive statements about textual effects and the factors contributing to them.
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