Snobbery and defensiveness are the two banes of romance discussion: because liking romance is low-status, no-one wants to admit how emotionally and imaginatively effective it really is, and because the genre is so derided, people who do like it often want to shield it from the attacks of those whom they feel, often with some justice, just don’t understand. But taking romance seriously means taking seriously both its ability to move us and its ability to harm us, even if I believe the latter is often exaggerated by the genre’s critics. We do not study it in a spirit of condescension: romance is popular because it is powerful, and its power deserves our respect, and sometimes our fear. By treating it as such, it is my hope that literary scholarship can come to a more adequate understanding of a genre that it has historically, and primarily for reasons of mere sexism, treated very inadequately indeed.