Feminist scholar Carla Kaplan contends that because women’s voices are consistently marginalised in contemporary culture, many female characters in women’s writing are engaged in an ongoing search for an ideal listener: someone who will hear their voice and take them seriously. This is something that we can observe regularly in popular romance fiction, as heroines struggle to make their voices heard, both within and without romantic relationships. In this chapter, I examine popular romance fiction through the lens of Kaplan’s conceptual framework, looking at the ways in which the romantic narrative is, in many ways, a journey towards the heroine being heard.
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