AAR readers have long loved historical romance, a trend that appears to still be true. You chose historical romance (44 votes) as your favorite genre in romance by almost twice as many votes as the next winner: Contemporary romance (26 votes). Fantasy (14 votes) came in next, followed by romantic suspense, historical mysteries, and other, each of which garnered 7 votes each.
What is it that you so love about historical romance? And do books written in another time call to you in this very stressful year?
It seems that most readers of historical romance enjoy novels that contain rich detail, character development and world building. I drifted away from historical romance because the genre became boring and repetitive — most of the historical romances are set in England with a titled hero. I’d like a bit variety in both setting and types of heroes/heroines. If it has to be set in England, perhaps stories with people who are not super wealthy and/or part of the nobility. Or stories that are set in other parts of the world and/or other time periods.
There are few authors who take the time to do the research needed to create a rich and interesting historical setting.
Yes! There is so much interesting history to explore all over the world in such different periods of time and yet historical romances mainly focus on such a small little slice of it. It’s so weird. And I really want to see more working class heroines and heroes.
If you haven’t read Stella Riley, I recommend her as an author who gets the rich details, and character development right, plus her novels are set in the 1700’s instead of Regency period. She has the Rockcliffe series that center around the romance a little more, and another series (Cavaliers and Roundheads) and stand-alones that feature a strong central romance, but also delve into the history of the time (English Civil War, Restoration period). My favorite stand alone books are The Marigold Chain and A Splendid Defiance. Added bonus if you enjoy audiobooks–the narrator, Alex Wyndham is superb.
I answered contemporary to this, not because I like contemporaries better than HRs but because I’ve found myself reading them more than historicals. It’s simply been easier to find the kind of contemporaries I want to read than historicals. But really, if a book catches my interest and I’m still interested after looking into reviews (if there are any), I’ll read it regardless of the sub genre. I’m open to pretty much anything.
As for why I like HR, before I started to read romance novels, one of the genres I enjoyed was historical fiction, so it felt natural to try historical romance just as it felt natural to try scifi romance since I’d long loved science fiction. I’ve also been really into mythology since I was a teenager and it’s been lovely reading a romance webcomic based in Greek mythology at Webtoon called Lore Olympus. It wasn’t that long ago that I didn’t even know there is such a thing as webcomics! I’ve read a few romance novels too based on different mythologies. It’s all really fascinating.
And, because I don’t know how to put this into words after just reading the perceptive comment of Chrisreader’s in the review of Regency Christmas Gifts by Carla Kelly without just repeating what they said, I’ll just quote Chrisreader (I hope this is alright. If not let me know and I won’t do it again.) :
It is indeed true that those are usually not the characteristics at the top of the list that come to people’s mind when they hear the word sexy, but A. Yes, they truly do make for wonderful, deeply touching characters and B. Personally, I find those attributes all sorts of sexy. And perhaps I just haven’t known where or how to look, but I’ve found it easier to find characters with those qualities in historicals than other sub genres.
Thank you for the lovely shout out annik. I think we enjoy the same kind of heroes!
I also read a lot of Historical Fiction which naturally led into historical romance. Philippa Carr (aka Victoria Holt) and her series of daughters starting in Henry VIII’s reign and continuing for centuries was really influential for me.
One author I really love is Judith Merkle Riley- her book The Oracle Glass is one of my all time favorites. It’s definitely romantic but there isn’t anything explicit so it’s not “romance”. It also has a wonderful hero and heroine and a fantastic story.
I’m very greedy and want the amazing story AND all the juicy romance scenes too.
Most of the historical fiction I’ve read has either been written by Finnish authors or been translated to Finnish from other languages. There are only about 5.4 million people who speak this language so only a limited selection of books actually gets translated, which means that for a long time I was constrained by what the publishers had deemed marketable enough to be worth the monetary investment that getting a book translated always is. Unfortunately, nothing has been translated from Phillippa Carr or Judith Merkle Riley (or Victoria Holt for that matter!), but I’ve now been reading historical fiction for a good while in English too, so I can choose from a much, much bigger selection of books. (I had to read easier genres for a long time first before I felt comfortable reading historical fiction in English as it is not an easy genre for me to read even in my own language, though certainly worth the trouble.)
The Oracle Glass by Judith Merkle Riley sounds absolutely amazing – just the kind of stuff that I like! Daughters of England looks fascinating too, but I must confess that I’m a bit daunted by the length of the series. Then again, if you’re enjoying it, it’ll probably only feel like a good thing that it doesn’t end too soon. Thank you so much for the recommendations!
Judith Merkle Riley is great. She was a very well respected history professor here in the US. I love her books, even though they fall under historical fiction rather than romance they all have a romantic element and they all end happily.
The Philippa Carr books are a mixed bag. There are some that don’t end happily at all. They also don’t really rely on each other necessarily. They see the stories of each woman’s daughter but you can jump in and and read one if a certain time period interests you more. You also don’t have to start at the first one.
I didn’t know you are from Finland (or Suomi as a Finnish friend taught me). Your English is even more impressive then because you are used to a slightly different alphabet as well.
That must be very frustrating when you can’t get the books you want to read (I know how I get). I’ve noticed personally that popular English language romances seem to be available the most in Spanish and German translations. At least from what I have seen on Amazon.
For years I was frustrated because the third book in a series Judith Merkle Riley wrote was only published in German! And she’s a native English speaker. It finally was released here in English years ago and I was so happy to get it.
Judith Merkle Riley is great. She was a very well respected history professor here in the US. I love her books, even though they fall under historical fiction rather than romance they all have a romantic element and they all end happily. Sounds wonderful! I reckon her books must be impressive in their historical accuracy/authenticity. I very much appreciate a romantic element in the historical fiction I read and a happy ending is also more than welcome especially now what with all this horribleness going on in the world. As long as I’ve been reading historical fiction, I’ve been particularly drawn to stories told from women’s point of view and/or where women are central characters. Seems like other Riley’s books are like that as well. Besides The Oracle Glass I’ve already started eyeing Margaret of Ashbury Trilogy. If only my bank balance didn’t look so sad… The Philippa Carr books are a mixed bag. Okay, that’s good to know. I’m going to have to go back to Goodreads and really dig into the descriptions of each book, so I can figure out which ones interest me the most and where I’d like to start. And thank you for stating that not all of them have happy endings. I don’t obviously require them in the books I read in general, but I’m the kind of person who prefers to be spoiled if that’s the case so I can prepare. I didn’t know you are from Finland (or Suomi as a Finnish friend taught me). Now that I think of it, I’m not sure I’d actually mentioned here at AAR that I’m Finnish before this. I did say that I’m from Northern Europe at some point, but I might not have specified it further. But yes, I’m from Finland or as we Finns say Suomi (kudos to you and your friend!). We do indeed have a bit different alphabet with our ä and ö letters. And while I know very little about linguistics, I believe Finnish is also morphologically very different from English. So it certainly wasn’t easy to learn English (and it’s not like I’m done learning), but my understanding is that generally it’s even harder for people who speak English to learn Finnish. That must be very frustrating when you can’t get the books you want to read (I know how I get). It is indeed frustrating. I mean, it is not such a big source of frustration to me now and hasn’t been for a while, thank goodness, but when I literally could only read fiction in Finnish it was absolutely maddening. I’ve noticed the same as you when it comes to popular romance novels – quite often there are Spanish and German translations available. At the online bookstore where I usually purchase my paperbacks there are sometimes also Swedish translations. But then, there are about twice as many Swedish speakers, around 18 times as many German speakers and something like 90 times as many Spanish speakers in the world as us Finnish speaking folks (and that’s only counting the native speakers), so there’s obviously a lot more purchasing power in those markets than in our puny one. Which makes the fact that it’s a very limited selection of romance novels (or any novels) that gets translated to Finnish understandable, but not any less frustrating. If you can’t sell like E. L. James or Nora Roberts the chances are your book won’t be translated to Finnish. And seriously, considering all the childrens books, classics, thrillers, fantasy, science fiction, topical general fiction and literary fiction etc. that does get translated at a steady if not the world’s fastest pace, romance is very much treated like a literary pariah here. The situation is a bit better as far as women’s fiction and chick lit go, but not much. It’s very disheartening. When, out of absolute nowhere, The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary got translated I felt like throwing a party. For the first time since I started reading romance books I could buy my grandmother (the only person I know in real life who likes romance novels) a book I’d both read and liked. And it doesn’t just concern translated romance novels, but also books written in Finnish. Historical romance by Finnish authors fares a bit better but contemporary romance – forget about it! And since we don’t have Amazon or any equivalent platform here (unlike Spain or Germany for example, I buy my books from amazon.com) it’s kind… Read more »
I have an ex aupair who is Finnish and who is a translator for films. Finnish is one of the most interesting languages on earth!
First of all, I’m so jealous of your ex au pair’s language skills. You really have to know your stuff to be able to do translations. Secondly, it is so interesting to hear that! Even though I can only write and read and very badly speak English and thus can only compare those two languages, it is my understanding that Finnish is quite different from all the Germanic and the Romance languages for example. There is so much stuff that we Finnish speakers do in a pretty unusual way. As I said I don’t much understand linguistics, but there are things like when in English you say ’in the car’, we say ”autossa” with ’auto’ being the basic form. Or if you consider the word ’sheep’, for example, which in Finnish is ’lammas’, the plural forms are ’sheep’ in English (so not the most typical) and ’lampaat’ in Finnish, the genetives of the plural are ’sheep’s’ and ’lampaiden’. We don’t use prepositions or articles or apostrophes, we inflect words like crazy and not just nouns but adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs too. The whole language is based on stuff like that. All that considered plus the whole business with ä and ö letters, it does make a pretty peculiar language. To be honest, sometimes it throws even me that ’Enhän minä rääkkääkään’, for example, is actually standard language. (It translates roughly as ‘I’m not actually tormenting [anyone]’.)
Not that you needed some sort of weird, clumsy mini-lesson in Finnish language – I just find this stuff really fascinating and thus get easily carried away. :)