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[I haven't had much to say here lately, and it occurred to me there are things I've said so often offline that I should find a way to make sure I don't keep saying them again, but maybe haven't said them online. So here you go.]
Things I Say Too Often at Parties 1: Nora Roberts is my Pop-Culture Feminist Hero.
Nora Roberts includes feminist messages in her stories on a consistent basis, right down to the world-building level and all the way through to the smallest character relationships, and she does it in works that have wide commercial appeal. I am always trying to lay this out at parties for people who don't read romance, so I'm hoping that if I write it all up here I'll stop going off at people at cocktail parties.
( Six feminist things about Nora Roberts's work )
It's not that I think Nora Roberts is some ideological paragon of feminism or anything like that. I'm sure there are things she gets wrong, or doesn't get right enough for some readers. Because that's how stories work. What I consistently find it worth pointing out is that she's a successful, mainstream, contemporary author, with a large audience, who gets a lot right, and it's obviously a deliberate part of how her stories are told. And this deserves to be noticed and talked about. If nothing else, think about how many thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people read her books and are comfortable enough with the stuff she puts in there to keep coming back to the next book, and the next one. To me that says there's a huge, very mainstream audience that is comfortable with all of the above as a baseline. Roberts's books aren't generally talked about as noticeably, explicitly feminist, they're talked about as successful commercial romance.
Things I Say Too Often at Parties 1: Nora Roberts is my Pop-Culture Feminist Hero.
Nora Roberts includes feminist messages in her stories on a consistent basis, right down to the world-building level and all the way through to the smallest character relationships, and she does it in works that have wide commercial appeal. I am always trying to lay this out at parties for people who don't read romance, so I'm hoping that if I write it all up here I'll stop going off at people at cocktail parties.
( Six feminist things about Nora Roberts's work )
It's not that I think Nora Roberts is some ideological paragon of feminism or anything like that. I'm sure there are things she gets wrong, or doesn't get right enough for some readers. Because that's how stories work. What I consistently find it worth pointing out is that she's a successful, mainstream, contemporary author, with a large audience, who gets a lot right, and it's obviously a deliberate part of how her stories are told. And this deserves to be noticed and talked about. If nothing else, think about how many thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people read her books and are comfortable enough with the stuff she puts in there to keep coming back to the next book, and the next one. To me that says there's a huge, very mainstream audience that is comfortable with all of the above as a baseline. Roberts's books aren't generally talked about as noticeably, explicitly feminist, they're talked about as successful commercial romance.
