How We Got To Where We Are Today... Historical Romance by Decade
Sometimes, when I talk to fellow readers of historical romance or authors, and I mention a name from the past, an author who helped shape the genre, like Kathleen Woodiwiss or Rosemary Rogers, I get a blank stare in return. It occurred to me that as lovers of a genre it might be helpful to read some of the classics to see where we’ve come from and to enjoy the greats who have contributed so much to the craft. So I made this list by decade... Take a look HERE.
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Thanks for your comment, Steelwhisper. Do you have a favorite or two of the "modern" historical romance to suggest?
I believe one of the main problems of the current romance genre is that it has a bottleneck point in the 1950s or 1960s, and left a large part of readers floundering after it became modern category/genre romance then. Or rather AMERICAN category/genre romance.
One of the sub-genres where this is most painful, is - in my opinion - historical romance, where on top of having that one bottleneck, there also is the distortion in evidence which constitutes what Georgette Heyer did to the genre (something I personally consider not a particularly fortunate thing to have happened).
Personally I wished Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel would have influenced the historical romance genre to the extent that Heyer did instead. We'd have a very different, and probably far more open(-minded) and lively sub-genre today instead.