Podcast: Discussing Bodice Rippers and Historical Romance

Check out Sweet Savage Flame’s inaugural podcast, where we discuss the iconic bodice-ripper romance genre.

Welcome to the Sweet Savage Flame Inaugural Podcast

We are excited to announce that we have started podcasting on Spotify, and our show is also available on other platforms. In the first episode of Sweet Savage Flame’s podcast, we delve into the iconic bodice-ripper romance genre.

Rosemary Rogers

Podcast: Sweet Savage Flame Inaugural Podcast

Of Bodices Ripped

“Bodice ripper” is used as a pejorative term by people unfamiliar with the romance genre. Readers and romance authors who try to distance themselves from those older “problematic” books hate the phrase.

I stand in defense of the bodice ripper—the true bodice ripper, which is not simply an old-school historical romance. It was the bodice ripper sub-genre that heralded the new era of romance. Bodice rippers (aka bodice busters, the sensual historical, the sweet-savage romance) were a new creation never seen before. 

These romances depicted pages of sexual scenes—between unmarried couples! And they ended happily ever after (more or less).

Up until Avon released The Flame and the Flower, romances were limited to:

• Romantic Comics
• Barbara Cartland’s vast stable of saccharine Georgette Heyer’s stories
• Light, humorous Regencies
• Mild Mills & Boons/ Harlequins
• Medical romances
• Gothics
• Closed-door historical romantic fiction

If a female reader wanted a little bit more raciness, there was the grandmother of the bodice ripper, Edith Hull’s The Sheik and its sequels. Or lurid pulp fiction released by prolific paperback distributors. There were also authors like Harold Robbins, Jacqueline Susann, and Jackie Collins who had come on the scene in the 1960s.  

Mainstream romance and raciness didn’t mix. They were always “sweet,” ending in kisses of fade-to-black love scenes.  

Then, in 1972, came the (now-reviled) bodice ripper, which was a vaunted expression of women’s liberation.

Thanks to Kathleen Woodiwiss, Rosemary Rogers, and the women (and men) who followed in their footsteps, romances took on a larger scope. The heroines went through the fires of hell and back to get their love.

And yes, the books could be violent, including issues like forced seduction or even rape. Sometimes, the heroine had multiple lovers. In other stories, the hero would be her one and only lover.  

I Love the Bodice Ripper

Personally, I’m all about the bodice ripper.

Too many modern romances don’t do it for me. I have little interest in reading about the Dukes, Marquesses, and the rest of the exalted gentry who inhabit most contemporary historical romance.

There are scoundrels who aren’t really scoundrels at all. Book titles allude to unnecessary guides to seduction–unnecessary since half of the heroines have no sense of propriety.

Many willingly take on the hero as a lover yet refuse to get married because he doesn’t love her.

So interested in becoming a critique of manners or society a la Jane Austen–just with more explicit sex scenes–many books forget to be, first and foremost, fun. 

Please drop a comment, and let’s talk about romance novels! 

I’m a fan of the old-school, schlocky, purple-prosed-written historical romances & vintage Harlequins Presents, and I’m proud of it. Like good B-movies, they never pretended to be more than what they were.

Maligned as chauvinistic junk (and admittedly, some were, but so what?), many were historically accurate adventurous epics. They had plots that (sans sex) would make Zane Grey or even Sir Walter Scott proud.  

Thanks to romance authors like Roberta Gellis or Deana James, and many others, I know more about medieval politics, the American Old West, nautical terms, archaic social mores, and wars (Napoleonic, American, and English Civil, the Crimean, and the American and French Revolutions) than I ever learned in school.

Of course, I got my information from other sources, but the older romances were often quite historically authentic in facts and mindsets.  

Old-School Romance Novels

From what I’ve seen on romance forums and blogs is that among a substantial number of readers, there’s a yearning for a return to the best “old school” romance  be it classic, vintage or retro. Because I am not an academic but an autodidact. I do not speak from a official podium but this is classification of classic, vintage, retro, contemporary, and modern

Classic romances have the quasi-legitimate stamp of literature because they are old. Antiques are valuable. Be it a furniture, knick knack, or a book. If 100 years qualifies as antiques then classic romances written 100 years ago or more. From Pamela, to Pride and Prejudice, to Jane Eyre, to The Sheik, And more.

For vintage romance think old Dell and Mills and Boon category romances from the 1950s, stories about nurses falling in love with doctors, secretaries with their powerful businessman, bosses and young tutors and caretakers who fall in love with their students or wards. Single withered widowed or in some cases divorce, fathers. And of course Gothics, Historical romances where the hottest love scenes would be left to your imagination and never put on the page. Basically vintage romance ends somewhere in the 1970s when the bodice ripper crazed revolutionized romance and then Harlequin released the most successful category line of all time Harlequin presents soon after.

Retro is at least 20 years earlier than where the romance genre is right now. It’s relative. But as far as Sweet Savage Flame typically stop discussing the romance genre around 2001 because  technically the year 2000 was the end of the 20th century. So by the beginning of the 21st century cover art was no longer a old art form that began with models and photography and sketches and paintings but were created in a vast array of digitized forms.  Ebooks, Independent publishers, Amazon Kindle, hundreds of fan sites on Angel fire and geocities and discussions on Yahoo forums… That is when retro becomes contemporary arrow romance even if the book is a historical romance, it is A contemporary era romance. 

Modern is basically When it became popular for readers of romance to claim, romance is okay to read because it’s “It’s not your grandmother’s genre anymore.” changes began before 2020 but I would Mark the covid pandemic as a Big reason the romance is no longer your grandmother’s genre anymore. The readership got younger And while the demographics of the writers and readers became more diverse, social media enabled more–ahem–insistent voices to define the parameters of romance.

And yes, the cover art. Sans serif fonts and cartoon covers are the Hallmark of the modern romance era.

Why some readers want more old school romance

Although not necessarily bringing back the raped-by-every-man-the-heroine-meets plot lines nor the absolute requirement of a pure, virginal heroine who stays faithful while the hero sleeps around.

There’s a desire for more variety:

• Different characters for heroes who have more depth than just being the required alpha rake (which has become a watered-down trope)
• A heroine who grows from the first page to the last
• A variety of locations and historical settings besides Georgian, Regency & Victorian Great Britain
• Fewer wallpaper historicals
• More adherence to cultural norms than inserting modern mindsets
• More than just sex to a love story  

Good writing doesn’t hurt, too. Although, readers seem very forgiving if you give them an engaging story.

The story is paramount; it is for me, anyway. That’s one of the reasons why I love older romances so much; they knew how to keep a reader turning the pages to the very end.  

Let’s Talk Romance

What do you think about this topic? Are old-school historicals and bodice rippers relics of a bygone era fascinating to look at as one would museum artifacts but of no worth to today’s readers?

Do you wish more romances would be like they were in the 1970s, 1980s, or even the 1990s, or are you satisfied with how the historical romance genre has transformed into what it is today?  

Links

I can be found around if I’m around in these places.

My website where I discuss romance in general, in storytelling and real life. jacquelinediazromance.com

Right here at this old school romance blog:

sweetsavageflame.com

Facebook:

facebook.com/jacquelinediazromance

You can email me at 8

Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jacqueline-diaz-romance/support