Romance is not the main focus of this book, but it is discussed.
The most obvious reason for the proliferation of Christian literature is to provide conservative Christians an alternative to the secularizing influences of the dominant culture. And I believe that it is not coincidental that the novel that is most often credited with initiating the development of this unique Christian fiction is a traditional, historical romance, Janette Oke's Love Comes Softly, originally published in 1979. While Oke's novel may not have been a direct response to a change in publishing in the mid-1970s, its immediate popularity was certainly due in large measure to that change. The romance novel, a form of popular fiction that is ubiquitous today, was not particularly promoted until the 1950s. At that time, publishers, noting a decline in their mainstay form of popular fiction, the detective novel, speculated that female readers, always a strong force in book buying, were not attracted to the hard-boiled detective novels of the Mickey Spillane style then in fashion.
[...] as the Women's Movement developed in the early 1970s, some publishers felt that their female readers expected more explicit sex in the romance novel, and the genre changed accordingly. Is it only coincidental that Love Comes Softly, published soon after the romance genre became more sexually explicit, found a receptive audience among Christian readers? (65)
Romance is not the main focus of this book, but it is discussed.