Selling Women’s History: Popular Historical Fiction in the 1970s

Abstract

In the 1970s the woman’s historical novel was widely visible but in a range of sub-genres regarded as popular fiction and therefore disregarded by literary critics: the historical romance associated with Mills and Boon and Barbara Cartland; the family saga reinvigorated by Susan Howatch; the American-influenced ‘bodice-ripper’ or ‘erotic historical’; the social histories of Catherine Cookson; Mary Stewart’s Arthurian novels. Like the modern gothic of the 1960s which they replaced, these texts are associated with the mass-market paperback. They are also associated with an author or publisher marketed as a ‘brand-name’ easily recognised by readers — ‘Barbara Cartland’, ‘Catherine Cookson’, ‘Mills and Boon’ and so on.