The Isolated Romance Heroine
Letters of Opinionculture / family / female friendship / gender / genre critique / heroine / isolation / romantic conflict36 Comments
A few weeks ago I wrote a post on Romance and life philosophies, and during the vibrant ensuing discussion, Liz Mc2 made a great point about how the more Romance novels narrow their focus to just the couple, the less we see of their interaction and engagement with the outside world. As she put it:
Of course there are exceptions, but when the larger community context is a vestigial part of someone’s life as represented in fiction, so many things that matter to people in real life get dropped out.
On Saturday, Miss Bates’s review of a Ruthie Knox novel prompted a long and winding discussion about, well, all sorts of things, but among the topics discussed was the social and familial isolation of Romance protagonists, especially heroines.
The isolated heroine has long been one of my Romance soapbox topics, because as useful as it often is in a genre where you want individuals to forge an intense, possibly unbreakable romantic bond, it can also make the heroine more vulnerable and disempowered.
We more often see the isolated heroine in historical Romance, whether she be the orphaned governess or powerless daughter forced to marry The Wrong Man (or The Right Man who initially appears to be The Wrong Man). And there seems to be a strong perception that women were more isolated in the past, although I think this may have more to do with the ways in which we conceptualize connectedness and independence and social power in a contemporary context. In any case, historical Romance more often seems to rely on the trope of the isolated heroine to place the heroine in a position where she can meet, fall in love with, and ultimately marry a man she might otherwise never have access to. Whereas authors of contemporary Romance — like Shannon Stacey, Julie James, Erin McCarthy, Kit Rocha, Jessica Clare and others — are more inclined to feature female friendships, if not necessarily close family relationships.
Still, the trope of the isolated heroine is hardly obsolete, as Truly Yours, the book that initially gave rise to the epic Twitter conversation demonstrates. The novel apparently makes use of the ‘innocent girl alone in the big bad city’ trope, with the hero set up as her protector. And I was talking with Jane about Linda Howard’s books, where you see some of her lighter books, like Mr. Perfect, Open Season, and To Die For (the Blair Mallory series), featuring better connected heroines, with darker books, like Dream Man, Diamond Bay, and Shadow Woman, isolating the heroine from family, friends, and even society. Harlequin Presents often makes use of this trope, as well.
There are many reasons that the isolation of the heroine can be useful. I encourage you to read through the Twitter discussion for some of them, including word/page count limits, the creation of conflict, the need for hero and heroine to ‘forsake all others’ for the romantic bond to form, and creating vulnerability in the heroine’s circumstances that hasten her romantic attachment to the hero, who may or may not appear in protector mode. Some authors, like Courtney Milan, often present the heroine as somewhat self-isolating or socially marginalized as a way to illustrate her strength and necessary independence. There are myriad reasons for a heroine’s isolation, and not all of them end of diminishing her relative to a male partner.
Still, the trope’s popularity in genre Romance is interesting. For one thing, it can be characterized as pretty WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) in orientation. Which is ironic, since in so much Western thought, the nuclear family is perceived to be the political, economic, and social core of society, which means that even when the unit is strong from the inside, it must be a meaningful element of the larger society, and for that to be the case, there must be connectedness to outsiders, from extended family to neighbors to childhood friends or those encountered through social institutions (church, organizations, the workplace, etc.). This also goes back to the way in which certain sub genres — historical Romance, Romantic Suspense — seem to make more extensive use of the isolated heroine and why.
How often in the genre do we come across the heroine who has been cut off from family and friends for whatever reason, who is adrift in some fundamental way, and who, in her isolation, becomes the perfect candidate for the ‘found family’ of romantic bonding with the hero. Eve Dallas comes to mind immediately, as the found family is a consistent theme for her relationship with Roarke, as well as all the friends she begins to accumulate after she falls in love with him. Lisa Kleypas’s Travis family series came up during the Twitter convo as an example of a series of books in which family is a very complex notion. But even though there is a strong family ethic at the center of the series – patriarch Churchill Travis is very present in the books – Haven, in Blue-Eyed Devil, is isolated from her friends and family when she is abused by her first husband, and Smooth Talking Stranger’s Ella’s mother and sister abandon her so she will have to take care of her newborn nephew, Luke. Even Ella’s boyfriend refuses to have any part of the baby, although Kleypas does give Ella a strong network of female friends who provide a good deal of support, advice, and interaction, all of which keep Ella from being completely vulnerable and disempowered relative to the wealthy and well-connected Jack Travis. Eloisa James has also written historical Romances with strong female friendships, and I am convinced that one of the reasons Kristen Ashley’s books are so popular is that more often than not her heroines have a) a strong supportive family (that often provides comic relief), b) a wide, outspoken, and diverse group of friends, or c) both a and b.
When a heroine has a strong personal support system, we may get the signal that she doesn’t need the hero, but that the romance is more additive to an already full life than compensatory. Especially when a heroine is portrayed as being professionally successful, I think it’s important to see how those different relationships in her life work to support and sustain her. In both historical and contemporary Romance, I love to see the large, eccentric, perhaps even somewhat overbearing family, not only for comic relief, but also because families are themselves micro-societies, and they have their own cultures and ecologies, which shape children in all sorts of positive and negative ways. Pride and Prejudice, for example, presents a family in the Bennets that is hardly unproblematic, but still very much there and essential to the structure of the novel and the lives of the Bennet sisters. Families may also help catalyze romantic conflict, as in the feuding families trope.
This goes to what I would call the difference between cultivating dependence between protagonists and interdependence. Interdependence has an element of equality, because individuals are dependent on each other to some degree, but they can still be very independent and highly functioning in general. I do think the genre has made a lot of good strides toward equity between romantic protagonists, especially male and female, but I also worry a little that by routinely isolating heroines from friend and family support structures, we may inadvertently reinforce the social agency of men over women.
Of course, there are circumstances where the lack of family – or of a highly dysfunctional family – is essential and even desirable in the genre. The heroine who must marry the man she thinks is all wrong for her because she will be destitute if she does not can give rise to a great deal of emotional conflict and character development carried out in close quarters. Romantic suspense and PNR often utilize the isolated heroine, perhaps because her vulnerability sets up the suspense portion of the story, or her independence gives rise to her power. Thinking about it, I realize that one of the reasons I love Shelly Laurenston’s paranormals so much is because the really strong and complex relationships the heroines have, both with other women and men, including family members, make me believe more strongly in the romantic coupling between two really independent and volatile characters. That they can sustain long-lasting, complicated relationships in other parts of their lives gives me hope that they can do the same in their romantic bonding.
I wonder, though, if there is also a certain lingering fear in the genre that a really strong and dynamic friendship or family relationship will compete with the romantic relationship in a way that would diminish the romance. For example, if a friendship seems more engaging to the reader than the romance, it may undermine the success of the genre imperative of romantic love. And I also have to wonder how many Romance relationships would provoke caring friends and family to warn the heroine away in the strongest terms. All the rakes and super spies and bikers, etc. do not exactly have the best romance resumes, which is part of what makes them so appetizing to so many readers, but also problematic from a real-world perspective.
And in their own way, friends and family can provide a somewhat real-world perspective in Romance. They may be the proverbial Greek Chorus, vocalizing thoughts the reader is likely to entertain. They add layers to the protagonists, and they reveal the network of associations that people routinely have to navigate in their daily lives. But does the well-connected heroine also rub subtly against the persistent notion that somehow women need romantic love for completion, something that I think still drives some aspects of the genre? Or is the isolated heroine merely a trope that helps build emotional suspense and romantic conflict?
I missed your post on romance and driving philosophies from a few weeks ago (I was out of town when it ran) and I’m so grateful you mentioned it. It’s just my kind of catnip. I look forward to reading that whole thread.
With regard to the difference between historicals and contemporaries when it comes to heroine isolation, I have a theory about that, but bear with me since I’m still formulating it.
For me, part of the appeal of historical romances lies in the gender/power disparity that existed at that time. It is still with us, of course, but it was more pronounced in the past, when women had fewer professional opportunities available to them.
Romance, as you’ve pointed out in the past, is all about the power negotiations. But because historical romance is set at a time when women had less power relative to men, I see it as having higher stakes when it comes to the power negotiations. And I wonder if that is one of the reasons the subgenre appeals to its readers. If so, then it’s possible that the female characters are often orphaned, friendless, etc., in order to further heighten this power disparity?
I don’t know if that’s really the reason, though. Historical romance is also often reminiscent of European fairy tales, and those frequently have orphaned heroines, so that could be another reason.
In my own writing I find I actually tend to isolate the hero more than the heroine. I don’t know why I do that, unless it’s because in my experience, women are more likely to have social support networks than men.
Page count definitely comes into play. For shorter books neither the hero or heroine tend to have a large circle of family or friends. I do enjoy books where the characters interact in a substantial way with characters other than their romantic interest. I think that is one of the reasons series are so popular. It is a way for the author to introduce/bring back characters and show the heroine or hero have family relationships, friendships, and coworkers in a limited amount of space.
The isolated romance heroine does tend to occur in historicals the most but I do see it showing up in many urban fantasies in some form. Usually at the beginning of a series the kick-ass heroine has a difficult family history and few close friends. Hopefully as the series goes on this changes but not always, for example while Mercy Thompson has a few more guy friends several books into that series her female relationships are problematic at best.
As a relative newcomer to the genre and a lonely loner on a lonely road, one of the things I sometimes appreciate is a romance in which the heroine doesn’t always have a super great network of super great friends–not because I don’t appreciate and crave those things! but because I currently and personally don’t have them. A surplus of friends and a hugely loving family is rather like salt in the wound, at times, which detracts from the escapist reasoning for my reading.
(I have a lot of other feelings about the isolation of heroines and women in general and the societal norms that can increase and even fetishize that isolation, but those thoughts are best served by additional caffeine and time. I just wanted to offer a different pov to the discussion because it’s one that I think is important to consider.)
@anon: I have a lot of other feelings about the isolation of heroines and women in general and the societal norms that can increase and even fetishize that isolation, but those thoughts are best served by additional caffeine and time . I just wanted to offer a different pov to the discussion because it’s one that I think is important to consider.
I hope you come back and articulate those feelings, anon, because fictional representation is not the same thing as real world life, so the same rules do not always and necessarily apply. We may be more permissive and accepting of some things in fiction and more critical of others, depending on how we read them. Obviously I’ve got some concerns about the idea of depriving female characters of social capital for the purpose of making them suitable for romantic love (and obviously I do not think all isolated heroines are subject to this dynamic), even as I love so many novels with exactly that trope, so I would love to hear both sides of the argument from your perspective.
I went on a small twitter rant on the subject of “revisiting previous couples & sequel bait” last week. I would love to see a heroine with strong family connections and friends. However, the nature of the publishing industry wants sequels, series, and interconnected books. Sadly I often feel that the heroine’s friend/sibling/colleague are only written in to promote the next book. Series with studly groups of spying Dukes/firefighting SEALS/etc. don’t interest me, or excite me. I think I may be an outlier in this matter. I also dislike self-indulgent visitations with previous couples, who drop in to remind the heroine that their sex life is still incredible.
I wonder that my general lack of response to the isolated heroine might be because of my personal background. I’m an only child who moved around often, due to my father’s job. I made connections where I was, but when I moved onto another city, I would shake off the old group and focus on the new. I had to literally ‘love the ones I was with’, in a time when phone calls were expensive & letter writing time consuming.
At the same time I was having normal family disuputes with my parents as a teen who was looking to emancipate herself from family. So an isolated heroine played right into my views of myself, as the heroine of her own story.
This article has given me some food for thought.
I think the genre of romance is often about a move toward community. Community is, of course, embodied by the love relationship, but the move is really larger than that. So Austen’s heroines learn to love and, at the same time, live constructively within larger social relationships. And Jane Eyre finds a social place and a family as she moves toward a love relationship with Rochester. The more isolated the heroine is at the beginning, the more powerful this move can be (as in Jane Eyre), but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other consequences of the prevalence of this theme. These are really interesting reflections on the topic!
I actually have seen a lot of isolated heroines in contemporaries in the last year or two–not because the heroines don’t have family or friends but because their families don’t understand them or their social group turns against them. And not all of these have a move toward a larger community, so the heroine remains isolated from everyone except the hero.
If other writers are like me, they decide about the isolation/community of their characters primarily based on the demands of the story. For instance, my dying seventeen year old had to be an orphan because the plot required her to be desperate enough to propose marriage to a man she doesn’t really know. The story just wouldn’t have worked if she’d had family. So I can totally understand how the recurrence of isolated heroines happens without the authors necessarily making a conscious choice about it.
I like isolated heroines sometimes. I like isolated heroes even more. But I always prefer for there to be a move toward community at the same time the romance is resolved.
Interesting. I do think a lot of it has to do with motivation and stakes. There’s a reason Disney/fairytales always kill off the parents (especially the mothers). Working “without a net” ups the stakes. But often, there’s a found community that takes the place of family (talking mice, grumpy little old men, what have you).
When I’m planning out a character, who their friends and family are is a natural part of that. I’ve written heroines with large circles of friends/family and ones who are utterly estranged from their family and former circle and now rely on maybe a single anchoring friendship. Right now I’m working on what I would call my first isolated heroine (she’s moved and started over, and made friends in the new town, but the hero showing up and his revelations will strain those relationships; and that strain is part of what the book is about and what makes it work).
This is such an interesting post and I have many thoughts on it.
I agree with @Noelle that “the genre of romance is often about a move toward community.” That’s one of the big appeals of romance for me. If one or both of the h/h is still isolated at the end of a romance (except for their love connection) I have more trouble believing in the hea.
Nalini Singh’s Psy/Changeling series is interesting – in the psy / changeling pairings you have a MC whose identity is all about their social / pack connections paired with a MC who may have strong social networks based on economic or family structures, but by definition are emotionally isolated. (Now that I think about it, there aren’t any male psy / female changeling pairings, but there are tons flipped the other way.)
I think I’m less troubled by a heroine who has to be isolated to earn her hea than I am by a heroine who has to be humiliated before she gets her hero and hea. SEP often combines those two tropes (Dream A Little Dream, Ain’t She Sweet, Breathing Room, etc), and while I used to eat her books up with a spoon, I have serious reservations about that.
@Allison: ” I also dislike self-indulgent visitations with previous couples, who drop in to remind the heroine that their sex life is still incredible.”
YAASSS. And don’t they always seem to drop those smug comments when the current heroine/hero/couple is at their lowest? It’s really cruel actually. I hadn’t articulated my loathing of this trope yet in my mind, so thanks!!
“Nalini Singh’s Psy/Changeling series is interesting – in the psy / changeling pairings you have a MC whose identity is all about their social / pack connections paired with a MC who may have strong social networks based on economic or family structures, but by definition are emotionally isolated. (Now that I think about it, there aren’t any male psy / female changeling pairings, but there are tons flipped the other way.)”
@ cleo: must chime in to correct you since “Carressed by Ice” has just that pairing with a male psy/female changeling.
As for the topic in general, I really enjoy the isolated heroine. I’m a bit of an introvert and oftentimes find many relationships problematic, even (or maybe especially) familial relationships which are often fraught with the landmines of shared history/tragedies/hurts/grudges. Maybe for some authors there is a kind of fantasy element to an orphaned character who doesn’t have to finagle family dramas/expectations along the route to love. Love of course creates a new family with a clean slate.
That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy books wherein the heroine has a strong friend base/family base. I do. I just don’t know that (for me) this trope necessarily relates to a societal isolation/repression of women.
Additionally, a lot of isolated heroines appear in urban fantasy/paranormal romance. There’s a great sense of adventure/discovery that goes along with these types of fish out of water stories that I don’t think would be as high-stakes if there weren’t that “all alone in a new world” thing going on. It gives the heroines a kind of brave explorer edge that I find very appealing.
One of my friends only likes romances that solely focus on the main couple.
I like romances that have a strong sense of family and friendship. It adds complexity for me. Like in Jennifer Crusie’s WELCOME TO TEMPTATION and FAKING IT. I think this focus on family is also a reason Nora Roberts novels are so popular.
@pamelia: Thank you! Can’t believe I forgot about Brenna and Judd.
I re-read an older category rom yesterday which ended with the couple’s marriage. The bride had her grandmother there. The groom had around 200 close family members. He literally gestures to the crowd and says ‘This is my wedding present to you.’ The (almost entirely) isolated heroine gets not just a husband, but also parents, siblings, cousins, nephews and nieces and more. It sounds weird as I’m writing it, but within the book it worked for me. It’s possibly the most extreme example I can think of where romance is that move towards community.
In category rom, often the tight focus on the central couple is simply a matter of word count, and the extraneous friends and family have to be cut. But I have enjoyed quite a lot of shorter romances which do manage to include family dynamics for both hero and heroine. I just read Kelly Hunter’s latest – Sympathy with the Devil – and was impressed by the way she depicts both families and the way they interact.
Inter-connected series can be great because they do show that people have and need relationships that are not simply romantic . My beef with them has always been when past or future couples usurp what is suppose to be a specific couples stories. I would rather read isolated romance heroine stories than feel cheated because not enough of the romantic focus was put on the main couple.
My heroines tend to isolate themselves socially and physically. I’m sure that’s partially because I do the same — I work from home, see mostly close friends, and live a good thousand miles from my birth family. For my heroines (and me) it sets up a nice conflict wherein they think they’re just fine, operating as their own little badass islands but discover that they do, in fact, need other people sometimes. So far these gals have all been contemporary heroines. The historical projects I’m planning take into account society at large, but the heroines still don’t have large familial support systems. I have to admit that, as a reader, stories involving ever-present family members or friends make me extremely impatient to see the love interests alone with each other.
I am drawn to romance novels with strong family or community bonds because that has been sorely lacking in my life.
My family–both sides–have been estranged from one another for various reasons at various points in my life, and I moved around so much (and had lots of…interesting experiences) that I have always envied people who had roots in a city or a circle of friends. In fact, when I was a kid, my dream was to marry a man with a huge family, lol (what’s the name of that book Ros?). I didn’t care about wedding dresses or diamond rings, I wanted his family.
Isolation for me has always been a source of painful vulnerability and poverty, financially and spiritually, so I’m not a fan of books that pile it onto the heroine (and connected to this is my irritation with heroines whose emergence from isolation reveals their Special Snowflakeness. I gave up on the Mercy Thompson series after book 4. Ugh.)
And I the find the increasingly tight focus on the h/h aggravating. The relationships the h/h have with other people reveal other layers of their character, which enhances the growth of their romance.
My basic thoughts on the basic premise is that by pushing someone as far down and out as possible, you somehow justify their worthiness of the good fortune they will receive. Call it the heroine-as-charity-case trope, if you want to give it a name.
A good author can use the core concept to great effect. Probably my favorite example would be Linda Howard’s Son of the Morning where the heroine, Grace, doesn’t even have her place in time anymore.
Which…eats up your allotted word count. I was the one who brought that into the Twitter convo. Obviously, that’s not the only reason, but it’s Twitter and, for me personally as an author, the reason that grated the most. As an author, the only thing that limits me now is CreateSpace’s page limits. As a reader, it still grates.
When you have a bunch of family, you have to give them some depth and backstory too, and explain the history and grudges (motivations for MC’s choices), all of which requires words.
I do love the isolated heroine for the sense of superhero-ness it gives her in surviving (possibly flourishing) before meeting the hero. One of the gothic’s raison d’etres is the isolated heroine. Hqn Presents is rife with it and I love that line.
Now, let’s talk about the isolated hero and what HER large family can do for him. My contention is, no MAN is an island or truly a self-made man. So for every heroine with a mentor (aka support system, even if of one and EVEN if it’s the hero “rescuing” or “fixing” her), a hero had to have one too. There are no truly self-made men. (In my last book, my Aspie hero’s bipolar son is his mentor.)
In my romance reading, I don’t see the hero with a true mentor except for the ubiquitous band of brothers (which is, I suppose, an argument against my thesis). But what I mean to say is, I see readers bemoaning a hero-rescue of a heroine, but never the hero in a dark place where he needs help/rescue that is nowhere in sight (or else he’s the also-ubiquitous self-made quadrillionaire, which, I contend, is not truly possible).
And to further derail my own comment, my stepping into the Twitter convo about page count was a jab at Harlequin for cutting word count of the Superromance from 120,000 words in the 80s and 90s (when I was training myself to write for that line because it was my favorite) to 85,000 words. To put that in perspective, that’s 140 pages of lost opportunity for family/friends and/or driving philosophy. There could have been a lot of characterization done in an extra 140 pages.
The more I watch and listen to real people, see how they act toward others less fortunate or struggling, how forgiving they can really be, the more I see there are some truly good people in the world and sometimes the simplest thing is an act of support or mentorship. I also see how cruel they can be, and sometimes, that’s its own stroke of luck.
@Ros: Ros, in that book, has the heroine made connections to his family on her own–so she has actively made it her own community? Or is she just dumped into his community by way of marriage? Because it would seem to reinforce a power imbalance if her community is really just his. That, for me, would make it less satisfying.
I actually really like books with a tight focus on the main couple, and I think good characterization doesn’t necessarily require interaction with secondary characters (although I agree that it does add new or different layers to the characterization). I also think there can be a move toward larger community without a lot of secondary characters. In my own reading, I often skim parts of romances that are heavily about secondary characters, unless they are done incredibly well and are used to actively develop the central romance. I know that’s not a common reading pattern, though.
Janet, I really love your opinion posts, so keep them coming! Always such great food for thought. The past year or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about female agency, family, and community for romance heroines, and your posts have been great complements to my own thoughts.
I do think, as someone here mentioned, that the isolated heroine trope can illustrate her bravery and strength, if done right and within a context that ultimately allows her to save herself. I love stories like that. In fact, I’ve liked a lot of romances with isolated heroines and have written a few, but isolated/orphaned/friendless heroines are increasingly becoming a tired trope for me, especially those that have the feel of lazy shorthand for inner-angst or a way to force insta-dependence on the hero. If her car breaks down, and she somehow doesn’t have her cell phone (because that’s a sly way of isolating her even more), then she has to rely on the billionaire in the limo/bad boy biker who serendipitously rolls up at the perfect moment to give her a lift.
For the most part, I’m drawn to reading romances with complicated family dynamics (Kowalskis forever!), and I really enjoy the challenge of writing families and expansive circles of female friends, as well. It really is a complicated task that takes a lot of word count and author brain space to have to consider tight circles of families and friends with every plot point–whose parents are friendly with whom, who went to high school together, who knows everyone else’s secrets. The biggest trick, though, is balancing readers’ desire that the focus remain on the main romance with demonstrating that the heroine and hero have lives/friends/family beyond that romance. For example, if I give the heroine a large circle of friends, they can’t just sit around talking about their love lives because I’m so over that kind of representation of women in stories. But I have to be careful not to give them too much else to discuss beyond men, then the focus shifts too far away from the story’s main romance. As a reader, that’s often when I start to skim. It’s definitely a challenging balancing act.
We don’t live in a vacuum. Neither do the characters I write. I want family, friends, community–all to be involved in the process of the romance, whether cheering from the sidelines or going: “whoa!–don’t do that!”
They may only be seen/heard/interpreted from the hero or heroine’s POV, but they are there. Which isn’t to say I don’t read the isolated character, but I don’t want a steady stream of them.
@Noelle: Both. She’s got to know some of them herself, and then there are some (out of the hundreds) of extended family she’ll only get to know through the hero. Evangeline, it’s Anne McAllister’s Savas’ Defiant Mistress. I love that whole series of McAllister’s actually. There are two large Greek-American families at the heart of it, and the family dynamics between them all are well-drawn across the series.
*waves* I’m glad I unknowingly triggered that Twitter discussion because I’ve learned so much from it. I’ve been thinking about your concluding questions all day thanks to this terrific post!
As a romance reader, I can enjoy an isolated heroine as much as I can enjoy one surrounded by friends and family. I’ve read both and enjoyed both and not even been conscious at the time of the implications of the heroine’s isolation, or community. I do agree that romance is a genre that moves towards community, but I also agree with Robin when she says that the community can look mighty small, as in a community of two (with maybe the potential of a nuclear family) and that the power differential between the isolated, vulnerable heroine and powerful, established hero is disconcerting and unappealing. (One great example of a series that moves towards community, BTW, is Cecilia Grant’s Blackshear trilogy.) So, I really wanted to think about when the isolated heroine “works” for me, or when she doesn’t.
She doesn’t work when everything is stacked against her, when her ONLY strength lies in her reliance on the hero. For example, I recently had the misfortune to read an erotic romance which had the heroine at the apex of isolation: when she meets the hero, she’s been homeless. She’s without any resources, or support system; more importantly, she lacks inner resources. Her role throughout the novel vis-à-vis the hero, in my understanding, is dependent at best, infantile at worst. The hero controls everything but his feelings for her, which are overwrought and as near hysterical as a hero can get. Emotions run high, but connection is contrived and unconvincing. There is NOTHING/NO THING the heroine has going for her except how the hero FEELS about her and how he places her in his world, including, yes, kind friends and family.
Contrast this with one of the ur-isolated heroines, Jane Eyre. Jane is orphaned and near-friendless when she arrives at Thornfield Hall. Rochester is superior to her in every way: financially, his status and privilege: you name it, he’s got it in spades. What makes them equals is her assertion of self, her will. Jane is aware of her menial status when she says to Rochester, she is “poor, obscure, plain, and little.” She doesn’t even have the “looks” that distinguish even the most helpless of many a romance heroine, contemporary as well as historical. But Jane stands up to Rochester and everything he represents when she says she has as much “soul” and as much “heart” as he, but most importantly, she says, “I am a free human being with an independent will.” What makes Jane Rochester’s equal is her ability to exercise her will in the face of his power, which isn’t just social and financial and physical, but the power he has over her heart. Because what makes Jane equal to Rochester, nay, may even tip the balance to her superiority, is her morality. She exercises her will, her freedom, even though it comes at the lowest point of her life, when she is bereft of love and companionship, when she is betrayed, and destitute. While the heroine of the erotic romance novel I describe above is rescued from the “streets,” so to speak, Jane CHOOSES homelessness over the betrayal of her convictions. (I would argue that another of the great examples of a heroine with a will of steel, even while her actions remain at times catatonically passive, is Rachel in Gaffney’s To Have and To Hold; but to discuss that would take so much more time and DA’s comment space.) I have argued elsewhere that the triumph of the heroine, Jane is a great example of this, is not only that she achieves connection and community in the romantic relationship, but that she is vindicated.
And another way that the isolated heroine such as Jane works is because of her rich inner life (which is, I believe, what gives her the strength and knowledge to exercise her will). A heroine may be isolated, but a heroine whose life is “peopled” with the love of art, or literature, or poetry, or nature, or thoughts of God, or existential or ethical questions is, ironically, not an isolated heroine. (An interesting example of this is Kate Noble’s recent The Game and the Governess). So, the isolated heroine that works best for me is one with a rich inner life that sustains her even when the world is cruel, or has abandoned her and who knows her own mind and exercises her will. I’d like to read more of those.
I also wonder if there isn’t some sort of chicken and egg issue here. People who are newly in love DO fall into a sort of bubble where the rest of the world ceases to exist. I’m sure everyone has had a friend who drops off the face of the earth & you look at the calendar & think, “Well, I’ll give her a call in a few months, she’ll have settled down by then.”
So (a) Being newly in love creates a bubble, which might be portrayed in a romance and also (b) creating the bubble prematurely can, I imagine, create the impression that the relationship is headed in that direction–create an atmosphere of romance.
That being said, some romances seem to dwell really heavily on that first blush feeling; what it’s like to fall in love. Others are more intent on showing you that this relationship is good for the long haul–those would need some sort of community to be at all convincing.
What an interesting topic! I tend to stick with books that isolate the main couple because I hate it when they are upstaged by sequel bait/past couples (I’m looking at you Nora Roberts and JR Ward). I find some authors can write family/friend dynamics really well and I do agree that Ashley’ s ability to do this has contributed to her success.
What I find interesting is that i see just as many heroes in isolation. The popularity of this trope seems to be connected to the need to form a family unit. Nothing is more satisfying then the formation of this unit in a romance (hence the epic epilogue). Also, I find this need for a couple to create/adopt a family unit is one of those topics that is blessedly devoid of gender politics. I’m not talking about the roles the couple will take; just the need for a nurturing societal group. Both people in the couple want some sort of unit or there would be no romance.
@Ros: Sorry, it’s Savas’ Wildcat, not Savas’ Defiant Mistress. Too many Savases to keep them all straight in my head!
I think that sense of community or family is often the appeal for small town romances and family sagas. I enjoy the family sagas, but having grown up in a small town, I know the darker, unappealing side to growing up in one and only occasionally find them done to my satisfaction.
I’m also an introvert, loner and often much happier with my own company than around other people, so I have a lot of thoughts (some of which are probably contradictory) about the isolated heroine (or hero). They do often appeal to me because of my own disposition and personal struggles. I think agency (as another poster mentioned) as well as mitigating circumstances and lifestyle choices are extremely important in whether their journey feels authentic or believable. One’s fundamental nature should never be ‘cured’ by love. Some people have personalities and situations that require a large network of support while others may only need a few key individuals. Part of saving oneself can also be recognizing when to let others help you. Personally, I often feel suffocated by other people and the demands so-called social support systems impose upon me (often with no respect for who I am or my personal, private space). That all said, I don’t care too much for romances that are tightly focused on just the couple because too many don’t go beyond the physical side of the relationship. When I do like them, it’s usually because there has been a lot of focus on internal growth for both characters in the story. I often like marriage of convenience plots because they challenge the couple to really get to know one another beyond physical attraction and work toward different aspects of the relationship.
An interesting subject. The isolated hero or heroine is interesting because it adds an element of suspense or sympathy for their plight, depending on context.
Nonetheless, both as a reader and a writer I like to have either the hero or heroine firmly attached to their extended family and friends; the other party should not be antisocial either, but one can easily achieve their temporary isolation by geographical means.
In one of my books the hero travels to a small town where he doesn’t know anybody (and meets the woman he will marry), in another the heroine is in a foreign country on business, and meets the hero surrounded by his many friends and family. Two big families would get too complicated within the size of the normal romance volume. As it is, scenes with many characters present are not easy to write naturally. If you give every assertive and talkative character as many lines as they would take in real life, you would never get done.
My impression is that people in the past were probably better integrated in their families and local society, on average, than we are today, even if families could be as much a burden as an asset. Being alone and isolated may have felt worse, comparatively speaking, than it does nowadays.
It’s really interesting to me to read the comments on this thread. I was part of the original Twitter conversation and it was really interesting to hear all the different points of view.
I realized fairly recently that I always write isolated heroines. Particularly, motherless heroines. I went to a writing conference once where a speaker said that the way to build an audience was to have a big, happy family in your books that people would want to come back to again and again. I came home from that conference quite depressed because that’s not something I know how to do. If I tried, I strongly suspect it would ring false.
I would like to see more active community involvement in romance, especially involvement in larger communities. In the small town romance, you do see heroines that work toward acceptance into the community sometimes, but more often it seems that once the relationship is solid, her acceptance into the town at large is a foregone conclusion.
In paranormal and romantic suspense, the ties the heroine forms are almost always to the hero’s (often small and insular) community, not the world at large. That is, she is welcomed into the group of wives of the agents/soldiers/demons/shifters, but the sense is that she is signing away the ability to do anything that’s outward-facing. She might become the mechanic who takes care of the vehicles for the super-secret paramilitary group, but she isn’t going to open a mechanic’s shop in the city. Now, of course, if her soul mate is in a super-secret organization, it’s going to make for more awkward conversations about what he does if she has friends outside, but for whatever reason, that’s never a discussion or concern when True Luv comes along.
I don’t read *for* one thing or the other, *for* isolated heroines or ones with big families, but increasingly I wish I could find a stronger sense at the end of a romance that both the hero and heroine were well-integrated into the world at large.
Your observations come at the perfect time for me. I finished up a draft of a book and sent it to a friend who beta reads for me and she said “Do you realize that the main character has no friends at all?”
And no, I hadn’t noticed.
I wonder what it says about my reading habits that I could write a romance where the woman never interacts with any friends and then not notice that I did it!
@Laura K. Curtis: I know what you mean. I’ve had to force my self to remember to put mothers into books. Usually it ends up really helping the story and giving interesting dynamics to the other relationships but I have to actually remind myself that this character has a family.
The lack of family for a main character shoots straight to the heart of Campbellian myth. The hero’s journey starts when the hero must leave family and tribe and enter into a strange, special world *without* help from his support structure. For romance characters, that special world is navigating the ever-shifting landscape of a romantic relationship. Part of the appeal of romance is that the characters are navigating uncharted territory without the net of support structure from family and community, and because fiction needs conflict, family and community are going to provide some roadblocks for our happy couple, otherwise they’re not really relevant to the story.
Having said that, I’m a sucker for stories that involve people finding their tribe. When a person goes from no tribe to big tribe of people who love and care for them in many different ways, it’s a more powerful punch.
It’s a different kind of punch, though, when the two mains have the challenge of integrating communities. It doesn’t mesh as well with the “first blush” exploration of love that so many romances explore. It makes for great ongoing tales, though. As a reader, I will follow a pair through a second story to watch how their love evolves and adapts to their communities, even though the story will inevitably drift from strictly romance.
Wondering out loud here. I can think of lots of non-romances/non-women’s fiction where the protagonist’s family status is either not talked about or is similarly isolated. So, I find myself asking, are we asking something of Romance that we should ask of all fiction or is this question arising from deeply embedded notions of the role of women as either family builders or assumed to under a patriarchal authority? If the female protagonist has no family we ask — why not? And if she does, we ask — why isn’t she independent?
In either case, is the issue that female protagonists can’t win in the analysis discussion or that the role of women can/does/attempts to straddle both realms of agency is in such flux we see issues no matter what?
I can say that, wearing my author hat, that I suspect that if a female protagonist has a mother, then that strongly hints (fairly or not) that the story is going to be about that relationship instead of the character moving through her story while having a mother. Which suggests that my position may be that stories with female protagonists can’t win the analysis game.
Quinn’s Bridgerton series has mother who manages not to derail the female protagonists. Some of the early Coulters also had mothers that did not co-opt a daughter’s story. Maya Banks has some stories where the daughters have mothers.
OK, so I’m done thinking out loud. Hmm.
This post reminds me of discussions I would have with my daughter while reading books aloud. We’d moved from picture books, which have LOTS of parents, to reading novels, which almost inevitably have dead mothers. It used to upset my daughter, until we talked about how the dead mother was a trope, a way for authors to get authority figures out of the way so that kids (who are far more often subject to adult authority than not) can have adventures they wouldn’t otherwise be able to have. After that, every time we came across another parent-less protagonist, we’d laugh, and say “oh, yeah, another dead mother…”
Does the lack of friends/family in romance allow the heroine to have an “adventure,” as it does in children’s lit? Or does it take away her agency, make her more dependent? I’d imagine the answer would vary from book to book,
I totally understand what anon was saying up top. I always felt that way when I read. I had some friends in high school but they weren’t the “drop everything, take a bullet type”. In college I had a few really good friends but we didn’t go out for cosmos and have weekly meetings. We talked and shared. Now in my life, I have zero close friends. I moved to a new area and I haven’t met anyone. I’ve never found friendships to be anything like the books, just as I’ve found romance in books to be totally outside the scope. I didn’t go to high school and magically get a boyfriend. I didn’t go to college and get a husband. I didn’t go to small town America and trip over a hot rockstar home for a holiday.
I understand how books are fantasy and you have to allow some wiggle room and suspend disbelief. I’m all for that since I read primarily romance novels. I just get frustrated when books present a topic like “You will move to small town America and instantly make four close girl friends” and that doesn’t actually happen in real life (not usually).
I had a similar conversation with Tina Reber years ago about my distaste for heroes or heroines always having some dark, tragic past. I’m sorry but the majority of people I know did not have a terrible home life followed by foster care followed by sexual assault/abuse. The number of times a conflict is based on something like that astounds me. Seriously how many happily married couples do you know who has that backstory (seriously think about it)? Where are the two people coming from a stable home falling in love? It’s actually a bit of a rarity. There’s always an orphan or some horrible past relationship that has scarred one of the characters. It’s never just ‘they weren’t the one or we just weren’t compatible’. It is always some horribly tragic thing.
In the case of isolated heroines/heroes I do wonder about it. I have a tight family (immediate) and if I moved across the country I would be on the phone with them at least once a week. In a lot of books, a heroine moves across the country and simply never talks to her family if she has one. She probably had friends back home too.
It’s a weird trope that bothers me time and time again. I don’t expect change but it is interesting to discuss.