During the 1930s, each issue of roughly 160 pages included about 134 pages of fiction and poetry followed by 20 pages of editorial material (with advertisements placed before, after, and dispersed throughout). While this structure suggests a hierarchy that promotes fiction, it also functions sequentially. Each complete story ends with a betrothal, and the editorial departments offer advice on how readers might also earn their happy ending despite their current romantic dilemma.
In this article, I use the 30 March 1935 issue of Love Story as a representative example to consider how the magazine negotiated the discrepancy between the happy endings presented in its fiction and its readers' romantic hardships. By encouraging communication between same-sex readers as well as between the magazine and its readers, Love Story ultimately fostered a homosocial community that taught its readers to learn from its pages and from each other. (199-200)
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Though Love Story affirms that its stories concern “the love of the one man for the one woman” (qtd. in Powers, 2019, p. 44), the bulk of its plots in the 30 March 1935 issue are concerned with the heroine and secondary female characters. Indeed, in some stories, more text is dedicated to the heroine's relationships or conflicts with other women than their developing relationship with their soon-to-be betrothed. (201)
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Conflicts between heroines and strangers or foes also operate on a symbolic level to juxtapose desirable traits with undesirable ones (201)
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Reading across the 30 March 1935 issue of Love Story's short stories reveals the importance of female homosocial relationships in securing an adequate romantic partner—not only in deciding what man would be an appropriate partner but also in establishing the heroine as what the magazine defines is a “good woman”—and thus a woman worthy of marriage. In most cases, the heroines are solidified as “good women” worthy of “good men” through juxtaposition between themselves and their female counterparts. (203)
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Brown was told to “never suggest divorce as a solution” (2019, p. 47) and, if she did not have a suitable response, to suggest that an answer could be found in the magazine's upcoming fiction (2019, p. 49). This explicit classification of the magazine's fiction as educational material for its readers is not surprising; in many of Brown's responses, she reiterates the importance of the qualities that the magazine's heroines possess. (203)
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