Uplifting Lust

E.S. Turner

• Passion’s Fortune: The Story of Mills and Boon by Joseph McAleer
  Oxford, 322 pp, £25.00, November 1999, ISBN 0 19 820455 8
• The Romantic Fiction of Mills and Boon 1909-1995 by Jay Dixon
  UCL, 218 pp, £11.99, November 1998, ISBN 1 85728 267 1

When the Berlin Wall came down ten years ago the publishers Mills and Boon moved swiftly into the breach. In a single day, we are told, their West German office gave away 750,000 copies of romantic novels to East German women. These escapers, it was assumed, now needed all the escapism they could get. In the benighted East their appetite for fantasy-fodder might – or might not – have been fed by titles like Daughter of the Stasi, The Reluctant Informer or Betrayal in Marxstadt, but here was escapism Western style, ‘wholesome’ and ‘hot’ at the same time (Joseph McAleer’s rating). It was wholesome in the sense that these paperbacks with their innocuous strong-man-and-starlet covers contained no swearing or four-letter words or blasphemies or gratuitous squalor, but hot in the sense that a high proportion of them offered scenes in which besotted lovers – doctors and nurses, as likely as not – engaged in free-ranging carnal joys, described at luscious length. The encounters seem to have been getting ever hotter, with the participants no more committed to hallowed union than they are to the missionary position. Today’s romantic novel has become one of the major curiosities of literature. Was this the blend of sugar and spice the women of Eastern Europe had been waiting for? Apparently, yes. Eastern Europe has proved ‘a huge new market’. In 1992 Poland bought 15 million Mills and Boon titles and the firm’s banner flew on Valentine’s Day above the former Communist headquarters in Warsaw.