My colleagues might filibuster on, but I'll be far away, thrilled by stories of seduction, the literature of love - the very thought makes my heart go oingo boingo. Now, if I happen to be alone on the Greyhound and find an abandoned Harlequin or Silhouette, left in a tizzy by a lovelorn runaway, I quickly tuck it into my briefcase amid the papyri and incunabula to read furtively in my office, or in my lap during faculty meetings. I had seen the covers, read the titles, knew their popularity, but never cracked the spine of a single one.īut times have changed. I'm a medievalist after all, so to me "romance" (from the Old French romant for story) used to mean a courtly tale of mounted knights and damsels in finery, not those pink-covered, florid, Fabio-emblazed paperbacks with titles like Surrender in Scarlet or My Gallant Enemy.īack in my haughty grad-student ignorance, I looked down my pince-nez at the lot of them. I know I shouldn't be caught reading Rosemary Rogers, and there's no question that, midpage, I blush more than your average Jane Austen character. When I get to the end of a passage like that, I can only think: Dios mio!
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