Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives

See in particular Chapter 4, on "Romance and Erotica - Fiction By Women For Women." A review written by Valerie Grace Derbyshire in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies cautions that:

there are some claims that are unfortunately inaccurate within this chapter, again undermining the academic rigor of the text. It is certainly not the case, for example, that no man ever successfully wrote romances, and that “Romance and Erotica” is just “Fiction for Women by Women” (105-126). One has only to think of the example of Marius Gabriel Cipolla, who wrote 32 immensely popular romance novels for Mills & Boon under the nom-de-plume of Madeline Ker. This section also features another generalization stating that authors for Mills & Boon avoid contemporary social issues, but one has only to consider the works of Penny Jordan (1946-2011) who wrote 187 novels for Mills & Boon over a period of over thirty years. Over the 1980s, Jordan wrote multiple novels that featured rape and sexual violence, including Savage Atonement (1983), where the heroine is traumatised as a young girl when her stepfather attempts to rape her. They also include The Friendship Barrier, from 1985, which details victim and witness responses to rape, when the heroine Stephanie, is nearly gang-raped by a group of youths. After being rescued by hero Jake, both heroine and hero are forced to work hard to overcome the trauma of the incident. These few examples, from just one author, demonstrate that it is simply not the case that Mills & Boon novels shy away from difficult or controversial subject matter, and the result was that this was the chapter where I found my concerns about the lack of academic rigor most glaring, largely due to my own research expertise.