This essay is dated 2025 in the open access version available for download so I've given it that publication date despite the ebook version having a 2024 publication date. Here's the abstract:
This chapter introduces the main arguments of this book, which focuses on a recent corpus of Anglophone romantic historical fiction narrating stories of women's journeys to various exoticised locations where they experience conflicts as well as romantic love. This chapter starts by framing our analysis within the fields of popular romance studies and studies of women's historical fiction and explaining our preference for the term “romantic historical fiction”. It provides a brief survey of the development of women's travel writing from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and the connections between women's travel and romantic narratives set in exotic locales. It then offers an overview of how exotic settings have been intrinsic to the development of romance fiction in different historical periods and moves on to consider the uses and abuses of this exotic material in contemporary romantic novels which reinforce or revise this Orientalist legacy. It concludes by briefly introducing the chapters included in the volume.
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This compilation of essays builds on the work of our previous co-edited collection, Conflict and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction: Repairing the Past, Repurposing History(2024), where we argued collectively that the narrativisation of the past through romance can be conducive to reparation and healing, but not without certain social, political or historiographical costs. In this companion volume, we revisit the reparative function of romantic historical fiction to ask: can plots of real travel (and even time travel, as discussed in one of the chapters) empower women while narrating stories of healing for the wounds of the past? Is this work equally reparative for the women who travel as well as for those they encounter in these remote locations? Does the romantic nature of these novels and their exoticist qualities facilitate or hinder a reparative reading of the past? As indicated by the question mark in the title, the work of reparation carried out in the novels is often partial or problematic. (1)
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Australian-born travel writer Mary Gaunt, who travelled widely through Africa, China and Jamaica, co-authored three romantic and overtly racist colonial novels set in West Africa, two of which—The Arm of the Leopard: A West African Story (1904) and Fools Rush In (1906)—were published before she ventured into non-fiction with her travelogue, Alone in West Africa (1911). Beatrice Grimshaw wrote two books about her travels in the South Pacific—From Fiji to the Cannibal Islands (1907) and In the Strange South Seas (1907)—before turning to romantic fiction for Mills & Boon with When the Red Gods Call (1911). Rosita Forbes, one of the most widely travelled women of the interwar years who became famous for her journeys in the Middle East, published nine travelogues and two memoirs about the places she visited between 1919 and 1946, but she also began writing romantic fiction in the 1920s. Her novels If the Gods Laugh (1925), Sirocco (1927) and Account Rendered (1928) drew on her travels, romanticising and Orientalising the Middle East as a backdrop for stories of British love. In a reverse trajectory, Edith Maud Hull, author of the bestselling desert romance fantasy, The Sheik (1919), which Pamela Regis (2003) describes as the “ur-romance of the twentieth century” (115), made enough money from sales of the novel, its sequels and their film versions that she could finally fulfil her dream of actually travelling to the Middle East, after which she wrote her travelogue, Camping in the Sahara (1926). (9)
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what romance as a genre does: it exoticises, commodifies and romanticises but also attempts to bring (admittedly limited) healing and reparation to troubled histories. (18)
This essay is dated 2025 in the open access version available for download so I've given it that publication date despite the ebook version having a 2024 publication date. Here's the abstract:
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