Guilty Pleasures

One of the problems Helen Hackett begins with in her book, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance, is the issue of how to track women’s readership.  She quotes David Cressy, a scholar attempting to determine the rates of women’s literacy in the period, saying “unfortunately, reading leaves no record” (6).  Sometimes, however, there is a kind of record.  Aristocratic women such as Lady Margaret Hoby, Lady Grace Mildmay, Lady Anne Clifford, Mary (Herbert) Sidney, and Lady Mary Wroth did keep diaries of their reading.  In the cases of Mary Sidney (the Countess of Pembroke) and Lady Mary Wroth, her niece, they did more than just leave a diary.  Both these women were heavily involved in the writing and publication of romances.  Mary Sidney facilitated the publication and editing of her brother Philip Sidney’s Old and New Arcadias and Lady Mary Wroth wrote her own romance, Urania, published in 1621.  Lady Anne Clifford proudly records (and even displays in a portrait) her reading of romance throughout her life.  Yet, as Hackett reminds us, she “may well have enjoyed more license to read secular works than did women in less privileged circumstances, and may also have enjoyed more license to admit such reading” (8).  Lady Margaret Hoby and Lady Grace Mildmay in their diaries stick to the “safe” topics of religious works, herbals, and housekeeping manuals and make a point to eschew more popular reading.  Hoby and Mildmay’s attitudes toward reading in their diaries seem to be more standard, while Clifford’s is unique.  These gentlewomen, as Jacqueline Pearson states, seem to represent the idea that “women tended not to record recreational reading because they had absorbed the conservative anxiety about it” (7).  Moralists and educationists of the period endlessly warned against the unsuitability of romances as a pastime for daughters and wives, while “foolish female readers” were a favorite subject of satirists.  Yet even if most women did not record their pleasure reading it does not mean that they didn’t read for fun.

When you study the literature and reading habits of the past it often becomes apparent just how much things stay the same.  The anxiety over reading romance novels in the early modern period resonates with contemporary anxiety over genre fiction and popular reading choices.  I am reminded of a story my dad relates: it was during the Harry Potter boom when everyone was reading (and loving!) the wizarding adventures of J.K. Rowling.  He was flying business class on a work trip.  Somewhat sheepishly, looking around at his besuited and austere-looking co-travellers, he brought out his copy of The Prisoner of Azkaban to continue reading.  However, he soon noticed the font style of the book the businessman near him was reading looked suspiciously familiar…the other man was reading the same Harry Potter book, but he had shoved it into the book jacket of a dry business manual.  Who knows how many readers in the Renaissance went around with The Knight of the Swanne encased in the binding of a prayer book…

Yet what makes the genre of romance different even than contemporary popular fiction is the insistence on women readers.  Even modern romance novels are thought to be consumed primarily by a female audience.  It is interesting that in the 1580s, when “female romance-readership was not at all extensive, authors like Lyly, Rich, and Greene were blatantly addressing their fictions to women readers” (9-10).  Hackett makes the case that these male authors wished their works to be perceived as directed toward women.  Hackett states that moralists against women reading romances had three premises on which they based their vitriolic concerns: “that romances exercise undue freedom concerning erotic matters; that women are especially susceptible to the charms of such erotic entertainments; and that the consequent effect of romance upon women will be to make them sexually unruly” (10-11).  The upshot of this is that, if authors addressed their wares to women, they were advertising their work as “racy, lightweight and fun” (11).  For the male reader, there is also an aspect of voyeurism to reading romances—a way to get a tantalizing glimpse into a women’s private chamber and to understand what might excite her reading pleasure.  As Hackett expresses, the end point of this argument is “a pretty depressing conclusion” (18) as it suggests there might have been a much smaller female reading public after all.  However, she suggests that while it may have been exaggerated, and while male readership might also have played a part in the positioning of romances, there still must have been women readers—enough to lead to the established female romance-readership of the mid seventeenth century.