The summer after our senior year in high school, Theresa Romain ’01/02/04 and I worked at a thrift store together.
One of our favorite pastimes (besides staking claims to the best clothes, of course) was buying loads of 25-cent paperback romance novels – old-fashioned bodice rippers, the kind with swooning ladies and Fabioesque gentlemen on the front – and flipping through them together, highlighting bits of dialogue or description we found particularly hilarious and dog-earing the naughtiest chapters.
More than a decade later, I was privileged to read an advance copy of Romain’s first romance novel, Season for Temptation, to be published this October by Zebra Books. The cover is free of any muscle men or scantily-clad women; but just like before, she dog-eared the good parts.
Before settling on the writing life, Romain acquired undergraduate degrees in both psychology and English and a master’s in public history. She explains, “Plan A was to become a therapist. In my last semester before graduation, I suddenly became overwhelmed by the idea … so I studied English instead, just because I’ve always loved reading and I didn’t know what else I wanted to do. From there, history was a natural leap since it’s so intertwined with literature. And really, all three degrees are just different ways to snoop into people’s lives. That’s my ultimate goal: literary snooping and storytelling.”
Her journey to publication is a story in itself. Three and a half years ago, having finished a non-fiction book (a biography of silent film star Margarita Fischer), Romain started writing Season for Temptation, finishing in nine months. “Unfortunately, that first draft of Season sounded eerily like a scientific article.” But after spending a while away from the manuscript (due to a house flood), she attacked it with renewed vigor, revising the whole book, then submitting it to several regional first-chapter contests sponsored by state chapters of Romance Writers of America. A final judge who was an editor read the entire manuscript and made her an offer – it was only then that she got an agent.
It’s easy to see what the editor loved. Season is a delightful read, the story of Viscount James Matheson’s making a prudent engagement to kind, shy Louisa Oliver … before meeting her headstrong, scatterbrained stepsister, Julia Herington, who finds herself as unexpectedly – and inappropriately – attracted to him as he with her.
One of the joys of reading a good romance is in knowing who will end up together, but being mystified as to how; Season skillfully strings the reader along with moments of anxiety and an impudent wit, largely exemplified by Louisa’s formidable aunt, Lady Oliver – who ranks with Jane Austen’s most redoubtable secondary characters.
Like Austen’s novels, it’s set during the British Regency era (1811-1820), a popular time period for romance. Says Romain (with her historian hat on), “It’s the last gasp of the pastoral, pre-industrial society, so in that way it’s very exotic to a modern reader – and yet the styles and fashions of the time appear very elegant to our eyes today.”
Romance novels are often dismissed as fluff or worse (one recent article that caused an Internet uproar called them “addictive as pornography”). That’s a shame, says Romain, since “the best romances I’ve read are among the best books of any type I’ve ever read. Romance is fun to write and to read because it’s optimistic – yet it’s realistic, too. What’s not to like about people working out their problems and supporting each other?”
