The Security Blanket of Romance by Mary Lynne Nielsen
In spite of its 140-character limitations, Twitter can lead to some interesting conversations. I had one recently that included author Camille Hadley-Jones and Dear Author’s own Janine Ballard, who encouraged me to express my thoughts about it in longer form. That conversation? That one of the goals of romance novels is security.
Sure, we all think of love as the primary goal of a romance novel. The protagonists are supposed to find their partner, their soul mate, their one, their only. And indeed, that’s the deserving focus for most of romance. But there are a number of other factors that can drive a relationship as well, and one that seems to underlie romance fiction is the need for security, especially financial security.
Right now, one of the most used (and perhaps overused) tropes of romance is the billionaire hero. It’s patently crazy to think there could be so many billionaires out there just craving a relationship with a poor nobody. But this is seen over and over again in romance novels. Heck, it’s a staple of the Harlequin Presents line. And it’s nothing new: look back at old Presents titles, and you’ll find the word “tycoon” used over and over. It was the 1970s term for billionaire, and both are code words for “a guy so rich, the heroine will never, ever, EVER need to worry about money.”
(An aside—that billionaire can just as easily be a woman, or one man or woman in a LGBTQ partnership, or a protagonist in a ménage, etc. For ease of writing, I use hero and heroine in this blog post.)
And honestly, it’s a bit ludicrous. If some gentleman presented himself to me as a potential life partner, I wouldn’t turn him down because he was only worth 850 million dollars and not a billion-plus. Those terms—billionaire, millionaire, tycoon—represent the ultimate in financial safety. It’s the concept that, even if some money is lost, the partner of this wealthy person will not be left out in the financial cold. In today’s world, where homes are worth more than a million in key markets, we’ve had to move to the next extreme of billionaires.
So why is this such an enormous, ubiquitous, and long-lasting trope? Studies have shown that women manage most household finances. (In a 2011 TD Ameritrade survey, 87% of women in the US claimed that they are solely responsible for overseeing their households’ budgets, and 94% percent said they take charge of paying the bills.) Women, the dominant market for romance novels, are keenly aware of the challenge of meeting the monthly budget and managing those expenses. In addition, as most romance readers are female, if you consider the hard-wired biological and psychological imperative females have to find a provider for their young, you can understand the demand for creating romance novels with heroes who can unquestioningly offer that type of security to their heroines. In today’s world, we don’t need someone who can provide that daily kill brought in fresh from the tundra; modern security is financial—someone who can make the challenges of our budgets go away. And that’s led us to tycoons, then millionaires, and now billionaires.
Even when the hero isn’t at this extreme, the idea of some level of financial security is interwoven in romance. If the hero is a mechanic, he often owns the shop. If he’s an artist, he’s a successful rock star, or the owner of his tattoo shop, or a world-renowned sculptor. The entire genre of doctor/nurse romances produced by writers like Betty Neels revolves around the concept of the well-paid and highly respected physician as hero. What does seem to have disappeared is the classic middle-class hero: the accountant versus the CEO, the marketer versus the owner of the ad agency, the computer programmer versus the startup owner.
So what drives this diminishment of the middle-class hero? Perhaps the extreme of dukes and billionaires we’re seeing in romance fiction right now is a reflection of the growing income inequality that exists in our current society. And with that income inequality has come a growing sense of job insecurity. Gone are the days when you would be guaranteed to retire with the gold watch from the company that hired you in your 20s. Millennials today expect to work in many different jobs, and perhaps multiple jobs at once, to make ends meet and to move forward in the work market. That may be why so many tradesmen and business owners are the heroes of our romance novels today. You can’t be downsized or fired if you own the company or if the business is family (like the recent trend for mafia and motorcycle club romances).
Statistically, the biggest sources of friction and struggle in marriage are tied to finances. So it can be hard for readers to believe that a couple will have their HEA without some degree of financial security. Yes, we can still find romances with true middle-class heroes—authors like Cara McKenna, Olivia Dade, and Shannon Stacey come to mind. They don’t guarantee financial security for their protagonists, but neither are we left with the couple confronting poverty. (Even Depression-era romances, like Morning Glory by LaVyrle Spencer, usually end with the protagonists in better circumstances than those they started in.) But these middle-class characters have become harder to find.
Security comes in many different forms. In historical romances, we see that stability and security interwoven with title and station. There’s a reason we see so many dukes and lairds from the UK, or princes or counts from Europe, in historical romance. Many nobles were landowners, and land (and the rents from them) was a major source of wealth in historic times. So we don’t see the middle-class equivalent of a titled hero—a baron or a knight—that often. No, he’s got to be a duke—the highest of the high, the most secure.
It wasn’t always this way. There were more earls and viscounts, and even vicars and doctors, as heroes in the historical romances of the 1980s and even the 1990s. And you can find the occasional doctor hero today from authors like Courtney Milan. But just as we’ve moved from the vague tycoon to the more precise millionaire to the extreme of the billionaire in contemporary romance, the move to duke heroes, the highest of all possible noble English titles, became the norm rather than the exception in historical romance.
And if the historical romance hero isn’t noble, he’s usually wealthy. Even when a heroine marries down, like in Her Man of Affairs by Elizabeth Mansfield, the hero has a decent job and won’t leave her anxious for money. Since up until relatively recently, women rarely could own property in their own name, finding men that could provide financial stability was crucial. And when the nobleman hero isn’t rich? Financial security matters regardless of sex, even in historical romance. That hero is often seeking an heiress, with the exchange being his title for her financial riches—a variation on the actual fortune hunters of history. The additional factor in romance fiction (both historical and contemporary) is that, along with monetary stability, there is an exchange of love and fidelity.
This final element of security ties back to that underlying theme of love. The love in a romance novel is lasting, and that permanence, that sense of fidelity and longevity, is another form of security. To create emotional security through the lasting promise of the HEA is yet another means of creating a sense of overall security for the reader. So when the romance novel hero and heroine offer their fidelity, love, and devotion and receive all that and more back from their partner, they gain perhaps the best of all types of security. And when one of those partners is financially successful? That’s the icing on the security cake.
Is this the only element that drives a romantic connection? Of course not; each romance novel consists of multiple elements that make protagonists work to deserve one another. But security—emotional and financial—is something most of us seek, consciously or unconsciously. So I don’t think it’s surprising that readers want heroes and heroines in romance novels who offer their counterparts not only love and, through that, emotional stability, but also the reassurance that—dare I say it?—only a billionaire can bring.
Billionaires are so passé. Now we’re moving on to trillionaires. Sigh ….
I agree with what you’re saying here, but would add a parallel comment to what the hero brings to the heroine gist of your piece. Using the HP as the proto-rom of security blanketness, the heroine, if the romance is done well, brings complementary qualities to the hero’s wealth. She, at times, may mitigate his rampant (among other things … nudge nudge wink wink) capitalism. She may bring art, or community mindedness, etc. She often heals something isolated and broken in the hero, offers a sense of belonging and/or family that is missing. So, no matter what angle you take, the romance genre really does fulfill Plato’s idea of the incomplete self being made whole by the beloved.
A final note: one of my favourite romance is Cara McKenna’s After Hours, not at all for its erotic content (which is standard stuff, I gather), but for one particular “economic” moment. The hero, though a humble orderly in the psychiatric institution where they both work, tells the heroine that he has savings. He owns his home in a downtrodden, kind of apocalyptic Detroit post-economic collapse and can afford to finance her ambition to further her medical studies. The reader knows this couple won’t be “rich” billionaire level, but they will have a good life, make ends meet, maybe bring up a family, modestly, like millions do every day all over the world. After Hours’s hero may not have the fantasy Greek yacht-island, etc., but he can still help the heroine fulfill her ambitions, he can still, as long as he’s healthy and strong, ensure her future. The precariousness of their lives … illness, unemployment, etc. are on the periphery, but can easily ruin their planned future. The genre’s beauty is in keeping the monsters at bay: the distance those monsters have, economic or otherwise, is part of its “infinite variety.”
@Miss Bates: After Hours is one of my **all-time fave** romances, and this particular book is why I cited McKenna in my article. To me, it was far more satisfying than any billionaire fantasy, because its grounding in the kinds of reality that we all face every day made it more *real* to me, more rooted, more possible.
(Seriously, folks, if you haven’t read this book, I highly recommend it if you can handle the erotic elements. It’s marvelous.)
I concur with your theory on the HP titles–the heroine balances the hero in her expansion of his world view and experiences. I didn’t cite it in this article because those aren’t necessarily viewed as elements of safety in our world, as money and titles are/were. But I completely agree–this is what has made HP the long-lasting, successful series line for Harlequin that it is!
@Jayne: Then again, houses used to cost 30K. We evolve our parameters to our times…. :-)
One of the most interesting things to me in both the op-ed and the Twitter conversation was the idea that the gradual evolution of heroes from wealthy or even just well-to-do to billionaires might be related to income inequality. That makes sense as we’ve also seen, as you said, more working class heroes and for that matter, motorcycle club member heroes or even mobster heroes. It’s not a trend I’m crazy about, but as the middle class has been eroding, it makes some sense for it to fade some from romance novels.
Mind you, I don’t think that’s the only reason for it. I think a lot of it also has to do with the entry of so many new authors into the romance market all at once. Billionaires and mobsters alike are a way to grab the reader’s attention quickly, and in such a saturated market, anything that gets readers’ eyeballs on a book has some value to the author as it gives her book a competitive advantage over books that don’t do that.
This op-ed also got me thinking of how most genre fiction has to do with safety and security, for reasons having to do with getting readers to turn the pages. In thrillers, a killer presents a threat to someone’s personal safety. In mysteries, the murder is a threat to order and peace, which mean safety and security. In westerns (a genre that has largely disappeared), outlaws served a similar function. In the fantasy genre, there is usually a threat of political oppression, chaos or war–but all of these threaten the safety of the land. Science fiction is an interesting case, but even there, safety and security are threatened in some way.
Romance being a genre that likes to focus on relationships, it makes some sense that economic security would be a factor. What’s interesting is that money problems rarely feature as a conflict between the characters as they do between partners in a marriage or other relationship where finances are joined. I suppose that’s because that particular conflict hits so close to home for authors and readers as to be unromantic.
I think this essay is right on target. Though personally I prefer not to have billionaire heroes because I have seen what can happen if a poor person marries into a billionaire family: loss of old friendships, loss of career, isolation. I imagine it can work out better than that, but it is not an easy thing.
Maisie Dobbs series of historical mysteries actually tackles this question: what happens if you start poor, collect some friends, then get unexpectedly rich and try to help your friends who are struggling? I highly recommend the novels, actually, because they treat it very insightfully in my opinion. But the short answer is: it gets really complicated because people like to be independent. So they will often reject aid and the relationship will get strained. Or else you may get another extreme, as represented by lottery winners in modern society: lots of people expecting handouts and ruining the relationships in a different way.
There is a lot of food for thought for here. Essays like this always make me examine what I’m reading — Elsie Lee’s Passions of Medora Graeme at the moment — in which the heroine is the one with all the financial security — and what I write — often a hero who sacrifices his title/lands/professional status/fortune to achieve the HEA. Every once in a while I will talk to a reader who says that this diminishes the HEA or spoils the fantasy for them. For me, the fantasy is a union of equals, and if a vast power differential exists between the hero and heroine, it has to be leveled for me to believe in their lasting happiness.
@Janine: Gee, the comment fields are a lot easier than 140 characters, now aren’t they? :-)
Vis a vis economic inequality: As we discussed in our Twitter chat, I think this is partially why we’ve seen the recent emphasis on billionaires and dukes; it’s a counterbalance to the inchoate dread we can all sense when major resets/recessions like that of 2008 occur. But if they arose in reaction to that, then the growth trend in indie/ebook publishing in the 2010s (itself partially a result of the effect of 2008 on the publishing industry) simply piled onto what was popular.
But this is a cyclical trend instead of a new one. The tycoons and doctors of yore were the fantasy and security of their days. [I do wonder if doctors faded from general view when the scale of medical school debt became far more public! :-)]
Vis a vis security throughout fiction: We’re taught about our core survival needs of food, clothing, and shelter. We need food to survive; we need clothing and shelter to confront our environment. So we’re hard-wired from our core needs to search for things that will make us feel secure. And anything that threatens this builds a sense of unease, which isn’t anything someone wants. So in our fiction? We want the monsters to be defeated in horror. We want the quest to be achieved in fantasy. We want the bad guys vanquished in westerns/thrillers. We want the mystery solved; we want the romance settled. So we always seek security. The general focus of this blog post was the financial aspects of that. But as I noted at the end, the extensibility could go on for quite a ways.
But I think the reason financial stability as an aspect of the HEA comes to the fore is that statistics show that financial difficulties often lead to the collapse of marriages, and that financial conversations are among the most difficult in a marriage. So I’m not surprised there’s an avoidance of this, or a setup that makes the discussion unnecessary, in romance. So many people face this in their reality that they don’t want it in their romance reading. It does indeed hit too close to home.
@MD: I’m so glad you enjoyed the direction of this article, MD! It’s reassuring to poor schmucks like me who have written them. :-)
It’s interesting that the fantasy aspects extend even into the billionaire setup. As you note, it’s an unequal partnership IRL, and there are many subtle aspects of class and money that can make a continuing relationship a challenge in this situation. Nothing in real life, even a transition to riches, is ever easy.
And lottery winners are a classic example of that. There are many cautionary tales out there of lottery winners who were doing OK prior to their wins who are bankrupt now because they conflated their wins with infinite riches. Add to that the friends, relatives, and sycophantic hangers-on who want or expect a handout, and you complicate life even more. You could write a current-day Beauty and the Beast story with this theme. :-)
But the dependency is a fascinating aspect. I think this ties back to Miss Bates’ point that the hero/heroine has to counterbalance his or her financially successful partner through artistic or social welfare satisfaction, or as I indicated in historicals, through titles and land wealth. Independence, in the sense of recognition of the unique and precious values your partner brings, is a key aspect of a relationship.
@Donna Thorland: Donna, I’m glad this post helps supply one of our core survival needs: food of thought for the mind! :-)
It does depend on what the fantasy of romance is for you. For some, the fantasy is that no one sacrifices anything and everyone gains a bit. I like that you explore the equal ground for your protagonists, and it’s interesting to consider that with Miss Bates’ observation that what someone brings to a relationship may not directly correlate to what the partner brings (money versus community, for example).
But I do agree that we seek balance in the relationships we find in romance novels. Even in menage stories, you want to see a balance of feeling between the multiple protagonists! I think without it, there’s a lurking feeling of discontent. And the HEA, at its essence, is a sense of contentment and joy.
Another interesting aspect about Harlequin Presents (and a lot of other tycoon/billionaire romances) is just how many of those rich heroes earned their fortune, rather than inherited it. A startling number in contemporary romances have somehow miracalous pull themselves up from poverty to billionaire status before they hit 30 (thanks to their great programming skills or knowledge of how to play the market). Even if the family had been wealthy, often there was usually a reversal fortune that the hero fixed before the story started and in fact the hero has surpassed the money-making abilities of previous generations because he is not stodgy or traditional, but rather an innovator and maverick.
In historicals this trope is usually about a despised younger son/cousin, who inherits estate and title that have been ruined by all the so-called “proper” heirs (who have usually died in scandalous ways). It’s the hero, who fixes things either by using the fortune that he has already acquired elsewhere or by acquiring a fortune during the course of the story in some type of innovated way. He doesn’t allow social norms about how the nobility should comport themselves to stand in his way of acquiring wealth.
I think this is really important — the hero must not just be rich, he must have become rich by his own efforts. I think this plays into the idea that if something should happen and all that money were to disappear (e.g., 2008 crash), the hero would know how to rebuild his wealth. He’s not just a passive recipient of wealth, but an active builder of it.
@Donna Thorland: I agree with you that there’s something very satisfying about a hero who sacrifices his fortune, career or social standing to be with the heroine. I wrote one of those myself (though it didn’t sell). I also love books where the heroine starts out with more. If a book ends with the balance of power between the hero and heroine too far off, whether for reasons having to do with wealth and status or whether for reasons having to do with their emotional growth and commitment to the relationship, then it has failed for me.
@Kathryn: That’s a very interesting element of this, Kathryn. I think a lot of this has to do with how people perceive “trust fund babies.” The stereotype is that they don’t truly know how to “work,” and that many of them lose the funds their forbearers earned. We remember Henry Ford’s accomplishments far more than we remember his children. The merit we give to hard work is ingrained in our culture, so I’m not surprised to consider that our wealthy romance novel protagonists prove their value by earning their wealth.
The exception I can think of is the current trend of mafia romance. In these, the protagonists are often second generation, and they’re usually trying to escape this lifestyle!
Having said that, I do find the “I’m a bazillionaire, and I’m just about 30 years old” character to be a bit much. Most of us can name these folks on our two hands. It’s the challenge of wanting the wealthy protagonist to also be youthful. And that’s a whole ‘other topic of conversation!
@Mary Lynne:
To put this another way, I was taught long ago that the one element which ALL fiction must have is suspense. Suspense doesn’t necessarily mean guns and physical danger, but it does mean that a character has to want something and be thwarted in attaining it. There have to be obstacles, so that we keep turning the pages. Suspense is that quality that makes us feel the need to keep reading.
Sometimes what’s at risk isn’t financial or physical, but emotional–a central character may lose the love of another, or discover that he or she never had it to begin with. But that too is a kind of danger or risk. So if we accept that conflict and suspense are the building blocks of all fiction, then it’s not at all surprising that some form of safety and security always has to be at risk.
I feel like an odd duck, but I learned early on that a man isn’t going to save me. The financial security offered by a billionaire or a duke has never appealed because I have firsthand knowledge of the strings attached for access to a powerful man’s wallet. (Yeah, the heroine is supposed to tame his power to something less controlling, but I can’t fully buy into it *g*)
@Kathryn: this harkens to a convo I’ve been having on FB, but this scenario has frequently come across to me as American ideals about money and morality. The heroes have to work for their wealth–even if it’s not entirely accurate–because of this country’s foundational myths about labor and success. That is, this country is a meritocracy, and those with wealth earned it free and clear. Jen Hallock linked to a particularly insightful op-ed in the NYT about America’s deliberate delusion about class in this country.
To tie this into the disappearance of middle-class heroes in romance, I admit this status inflation frustrates me because of–have to go there–how it’s playing out IRL. Pop Culture doesn’t develop in a bubble.
Having dated a broke bro, I certainly concur that it’s a lot more reassuring to date someone who can at least take care of himself financially. In real life it was a huge romance-killing downer, and who wants to deal with that?
A bit tangential to this post, but I’d argue that Cara McKenna doesn’t just write middle class characters, she writes quite a few working class ones, which is even less common in the genre. Flynn in Willing Victim & Brutal Game, Erin and Kelly in After Hours, Eric in hard Time, and all the heroes in that boxing/MMA trilogy all come from more of a working class background. Many of them have difficult family circumstances that are dealt with on page (e.g. Erin’s sister in After Hours) even if they themselves are on the right track. That’s really not something we get a lot of in the genre, and it’s great to have an author who focuses a larger part of the socio-economic spectrum.
The billionaire fantasy doesn’t really work for me; I can’t imagine ever needing so much money and it’s too much suspension of disbelief for me. But I do get how that kind of fantasy appeals in a time of uncertainty. To some extent this seems like the same kind of appeal as bodice rippers and other dubious consent romances back in the day: it’s the kind of hero that is powerful and goes after what he wants without taking no for an answer. To some extent all those SEALs who now populate romantic suspense also seem to serve a similar purpose: the all-powerful, super-capable guy, though he offers a different type of security – though that too has its appeal in this day and age. I don’t know, I prefer heroes that seem more like people I might encounter IRL – but to each her own :)
@Janine: I agree with it in terms of conflict and safety. Not all conflict has to be suspenseful. But I think the idea of safety as the haven from conflict is an interesting one to consider.
@Camille Hadley Jones: Pop culture is often a reflection of underlying elements of our culture as a whole.
I read that Times piece–I’m a subscriber–and it was fascinating. Just as there’s the myth of meritocracy, there’s also the 20th-century myth of the middle class. We’ve all been raised in the US to see it as the dominant class, yet recent years have shown the actuality of lower-class versus upper-class growth. Yet the elements that made the middle class–home ownership, tax deductions, savings–are also what elevate them into upper-middle class and even more. You can find the article at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/opinion/sunday/stop-pretending-youre-not-rich.html.
I also don’t like the idea of the hero saving the heroine. I’d like to believe she recognizes her worth, just as he comes to recognize it.
@Jennifer: *Exactly.* This is what drives this element of romance. Financial insecurities are at the root of many problems in our lives, and it undercuts everything we do. Thank you for saying this!
@Rose: You can definitely look at Cara McKenna this way. She’s written both middle-class and working-class protagonists. Bottom line, she’s a master at it, and thank heaven she (and other authors like Mayberry, Stacey, Cane) is there to counterbalance the trend.
I love the way romance can handle all walks of life, rich and poor, in its stories.
What a great phrase you use here: “fantasy appeals at a time of uncertainty.” Since we just lived through (and for many, are still in) unsettled economic times, a prevalent fantasy that trended in romance novels was centered on economics through the billionaire romance. If you look at the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was economic uncertainty and massive social upheaval as well through the women’s liberation movement. And then the first true modern romances appeared, starting with Woodiwiss and Rogers, featuring bodice-ripper covers and the alpha hero taking all (dubious consent before we even thought up that term). In more settled times, that trend pulled back a bit (although it never truly went away).
There’s an ebb and flow in the romance genre, which you can certainly find when you look at the question of establishing a sense of security in and through romance novels.
@Mary Lynne: Can you describe a conflict that isn’t suspenseful? I think to be effective it does have to create a sense of suspense in the reader, a desire to know what happens next.
@Janine: I think there are a number of conflicts that have to do with contrast. For example, one person wanting to live in the country, another wanting to leave. It’s a struggle, it’s a barrier, but it isn’t necessarily highly suspenseful. I think it creates tension, which is what the reader wants to see addressed and how it will be resolved–but isn’t suspense in the classic sense.
@Camille Hadley Jones: Yes I think that the idea that working for wealth is connected in part to type of USian belief (e.g., the prosperity gospel) that sees work, virtue, and wealth as being strongly and positively connected. However — it looks like this has gone beyond the American version — look at all those Harlequin Presents, written by British or other Commonwealth authors. Even many of the sheik and princes from small European principalities have to be men who have (re)built their family wealth or founded their own wildly successful business while waiting to take over the country.
I wonder if the tycoon/billionaire story isn’t just about ensuring that this romance will succeed because the couple won’t have money worries, but also about trying to validate a certain idea of good capitalism or good wealth accumulation versus a bad type. In a world where wealth inequality is in fact an acknowledged problem, one of the things a writer can do (whether consciously or not) is say my hero is good rich person — he cares for his family, he sets up charities, produces good products, invests his nation’s wealth wisely, etc. And of course most importantly has the good sense to admire and support the heroine and her interests.
@Kathryn: Kathryn, I think you’re right about the “good” billionaire. Our rich protagonist has to be virtuous, our what does that say about the poorer one who falls for him/her?
The part of this I don’t know is how much of this is built into the Presents line, that is, the guidelines that Harlequin gives to their authors that shape the overall structure of this series line. That may mandate the “good rich person,” as you say. And that in and of itself would be a reflection of the prosperity gospel.
@Mary Lynne: I think we’re just getting hung up on semantics. Suspense (in the meaning that I’m talking about) is tension. Dictionary.com defines suspense this way:
noun
1.
a state or condition of mental uncertainty or excitement, as in awaiting a decision or outcome, usually accompanied by a degree of apprehension or anxiety.
2.
a state of mental indecision.
3.
undecided or doubtful condition, as of affairs:
For a few days matters hung in suspense.
4.
the state or condition of being suspended
In the romance genre people talk about suspense as in romantic suspense, a specific subgenre, but that’s not the meaning of the word that I’m using.
@Janine: I was looking at suspense as the genre term for romantic suspense. So yes, we had a semantic split. :-) Thank you for clarifying!
@Kathryn:
I thought about the prosperity gospel, too. It encourages the worship of the rich, because if God showers blessings on people in this life, not the next and those blessings are material and visible, then the rich are God’s favorites.
I kind of like rich guys, but there are so few billionaires in real life and the foreign ones probably earned their money in dubious ways. Remarkably few Russian billionaires earned their money in a free and fair market. Fewer still in Ukraine. I suspect the same is true for the Greeks. In many places, the way to make money is to get the government to give you a monopoly or other advantages, like building permits in a city like Moscow, where they are hard to find. In countries like Russia and Greece, I suspect that’s mostly bribes, but in other places, like the US, it’s done through donations, lobbyists and PACs.
One reason I enjoy re-reading so many Georgette Heyer books is she was always up front and practical about financial matters. A Civil Contract, for example, is far from typical. And even the great Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet didn’t fall for a penniless man.
But as you mention, historical romance had to deal with women’s limited ability to earn or inherit money. Romance set in the future doesn’t have that problem. Luckily, there are always ways to create problems.
@Carmen Webster Buxton: Yes, there are, aren’t there, Carmen? I think that’s what Janine was getting at with the need for suspense/tension in romance. On the one hand, having the billionaire trope sweep that problem under the carpet is great; on the other, seeing how a couple confronts financial challenges is often one of the most interesting aspects of a romance novel. Two of the ones we’ve been discussing here, Her Man of Affairs and After Hours, do just that. (And they’re not necessarily challenges as much as how they will handle their financial issues.)
In many ways, it’s refreshing to see a romance novel address our monetary realities, even when we know it must be part of a larger HEA.
@Kathryn: I think you’re on to something. Not only must the billionaire tycoon be redeemed, but his wealth as well. So does this mean that money is just as much a character as the protagonists?
@Camille Hadley Jones: Maybe the right kind of wealth is important background information or character trait? It signals that the hero is the hero and that the heroine can feel okay about living this life of luxury because the money is “well”-gotten rather than ill-gotten.