romance fiction proper is comedy, and the happy ending so appreciated by its readers offers them a reparative vision of the heroine as well as of a possible society in which she might live. The marriage ending is less cooptation, as some would have it, with success contingent upon submission of self to that patriarchal institution marriage than it is reward for self-realization, for a maturation that derives from relationship rather than separation. As such, it is a fantasy, a fiction based less in verisimilitude than in imaginative reconstruction of unmet needs. (239)