![]() ![]() Throughout the 1980s, the British were captivated by the doomed marriage in 1981 of 33-year-old Prince Charles and 20-year-old Lady Diana, step-granddaughter of “Queen of Romance” Barbara Cartland. This was also the shoulder-pads decade of career feminism and the UK’s first woman Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. ![]() Aware of dismissive or hostile attitudes to the genre, Marxist, Freudian and feminist psychoanalytic critics debated issues around mass readership, cultural representations of desire and fantasy, and the conservative or transgressive nature of popular fiction. In the 1980s, feminist academics (including myself) became intrigued by romance reading, partly because-paradoxically-the rise of the women’s movement in the 1970s was matched by significant growth in sales of romantic fiction. ![]()
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