despite the voracious demand for historical romance, the long history of romantic plots in Civil War literature, and the appealingly dramatic backdrop it offers, there has been no recent bump in Civil War romance novels. Civil War romance had a mainstream moment in the 1970s through the early 1990s, but today, there are vanishingly few Civil War romances published by large, mass market romance presses. (153)
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Historical romance novels like Quinn's Bridgerton series are popular because they offer a reader an escape into a fantasy not only of passion but also of glittering gowns and witty conversation. For many modern American readers, though, the white supremacy of the Civil War era and its continued impacts on modern society make it a painful, rather than delightful, setting. (153)
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However, there are two main exceptions to the general dearth of Civil War romance. First, the war era remains a very popular setting for inspirational romances - that is, novels with an explicitly evangelical Christian perspective, typically released by Christian publishing houses and consumed largely by conservative, evangelical readers. Authors such as Michelle Shocklee and Tamera Alexander have recently written book series that follow the travails of white, typically Southern women looking to God to bring them through the devastation of the war. In sharp contrast to Civil War inspirationals, the second exception is books by Black authors such as Beverly Jenkins and Alyssa Cole, who have reclaimed the Civil War setting to write bestsellers about Black heroes and heroines escaping slavery, spying for the U.S. Army, or building communities of freedpeople in the postwar South and West, all while finding love. While Civil War novels are no longer a major part of the mainstream historical romance market, those that do appear play a significant role in shaping the popular modern memory of the war, in ways both forward thinking and deeply damaging. (154)
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Likely due to the commercial success of the Cameron Saga and aided by the popularity of Ken Burns's The Civil War, [Heather] Graham wrote more Civil War novels, including a six-book series set in her native Florida, and republished earlier books that hadn't gotten much notice. Tomorrow the Glory, first published pseudonymously in 1985 but republished in 1994, is particularly notorious today. The novel follows Confederate naval officer Brent McClain and heroine Kendall Moore, who Brent rescues from an abusive Yankee husband. While both Brent and Kendall express their distaste for slavery, they also think it's tangential to the real causes of the war - and when other characters express that opinion, they're depicted as unsophisticated or deluded. While its content is notorious enough, Tomorrow the Glory is better known now for the infamous cover art of the 1994 edition. On the cover is an innocuous painting of a pink magnolia, but the main characters' faces peek through a hole in the paperback. When that cover is opened, spread across the inside cover and first page (an illustration called a stepback) is a painting of the masculine hero clutching the lovely heroine in his arms - the classic "clinch" pose - set against a massive, waving Confederate flag. The hero and heroine in the image are Heather Graham and her husband, painted by artist Pino Daeni. Uncontroversial when it was published, this stepback is now representative not only of the excesses of the bodice-ripper era but also of a generation of romances that recklessly embraced and endorsed the Lost Cause. In this case, though, not only did the characters embody that mythology, but by inserting herself into the cover art, Heather Graham also explicitly situated herself within that worldview. (160-161)
[LV - The 1985 cover of Tomorrow the Glory can be seen at the Internet Archive along with its stepback. The front cover of the 1994 edition has a pink magnolia on the front, as described, and Stephen Ammidown has a video showing the interior here and a post about it here.]
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Despite the path laid by Beverly Jenkins and Alyssa Cole, such innovative Civil War romances remain rare. The Civil War was a painful, complex civic rupture stemming from our nation's original sin, and its memory - including nearly two centuries of cultural products such as romantic novels - has provided the historical and intellectual infrastructure for over a century of political division and racial terror. While there is a long history of turning that deep wound into the setting for a romance, it's largely been a damaging history, one that has traded on old, white supremacist storylines. (166)
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[LV - The 1985 cover of Tomorrow the Glory can be seen at the Internet Archive along with its stepback. The front cover of the 1994 edition has a pink magnolia on the front, as described, and Stephen Ammidown has a video showing the interior here and a post about it here.]
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