Whatever Epic may mean, it implies some weight and solidity; Romance means nothing, if it does not convey some notion of mystery a...nd fantasy. A general distinction of this kind, whatever names may be used to render it, can be shown, in medieval literature, to hold good of the two large groups of narrative belonging to the earlier and the later Middle Ages respectively. Beowulf might stand for the one side. Lancelot or Gawain for the other. It is a difference not confined to literature. The two groups are distinguished from one another, as the respectable piratical gentleman of the North Sea coast in the ninth or tenth century differs from one of the companions of Saint Louis. The latter has something fantastic in his ideas which the other has not. The Crusader may indeed be natural and brutal enough in most of his ways, but he has lost the sobriety and simplicity of the earlier type of rover.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You need not attempt to shake off or to banter off Romance. It is an evil you will never get rid of to the end of your days. It is... a part of yourself ... of your soul. Age will only mellow it a little, and give it a holier tone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I suspect a demand for real change in power relations will occur only if women ... come to understand that their need for romances... is a function of their dependent status as women and of their acceptance of marriage as the only route to female fulfillment. I think we as feminists might help this change along by first learning to recognize that romance reading originates in very real dissatisfaction and embodies a valid, if limited, protest. Then by developing strategies for making that dissatisfaction and its causes consciously available to romance readers and by learning how to encourage that protest in such a way that it will be delivered in the arena of actual social relations rather than acted out in the imagination, we might join hands with women who are, after all, our sisters and together imagine a world whose subsequent creation would lead to the need for a new fantasy altogether.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Romance reading and writing might be seen ... as a collectively elaborated female ritual through which women explore the consequen...ces of their common social condition as the appendages of men and attempt to imagine a more perfect state where all the needs they so intensely feel and accept as given would be adequately addressed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or ...unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am fully sensible that an historical romance, founded on the House of Saxe Cobourg, might be much more to the purpose of ... />profit or popularity than such pictures of domestic life in country villages as I deal in. But I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older--the natural sequel of an unnatural beginnin...g.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
José's my first non-rat romance. Not that he's my idea of the absolute finito. He's too prim and cautious to be my absolute ideal..., Now, if I could choose from anybody alive, I wouldn't pick José. Nehru, maybe, or Albert Schweitzer. Or Leonard Bernstein.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »