"I think that women who do read our books know damn well that they're going to get something that could be light but could have some meat to it," Marton says. I don't think it's a conscious thing but some part of you says 'Oh, I can go there' and the same thing is reflected in the publisher's overall sales." The financials are buttressed by the fan mail. Something I found particularly interesting was the fact that the authors of the Harlequin Presents/Mills & Boon Moderns which tackle these difficult sexual subject matters have solid evidence that their readers appreciate them: today's authors, who all closely monitor their individual book sales, haven't seen a dip in purchases when the reading gets difficult. I mentioned Monroe's novel when I discussed the ways in which romance novels can provide sex education. Its entire plot revolved around vaginismus, a condition that causes vaginal muscles to involuntarily contract shut. People are far more honest and open about suffering." For Shapcott, the breakthrough sexual dysfunction book was Lucy Monroe's Blackmailed into Marriage. "Now we're just reflecting the fact that people are freer to discuss such intimate things. Though sexual problems have been in HP books for years, they were often "alluded to, talked about euphemistically," explains Tessa Shapcott, executive editor of HP for 13 years. And plots such as these are prominently displayed in the bestselling Harlequin Presents series, not tucked away in one of the publisher's more marginal lines.
Last month, Annie West's For the Sheikh's Pleasure focused on a woman struggling to be physically and emotionally intimate after being drugged and raped during a night out. But today's Harlequin authors are increasingly devoting swaths of their books to upfront discussions of such serious sexual issues. It's not a character or subject that most people expect to find in a happy-ending-in-200-pages serial romance.
The journalist, Patricia Treble, found that in this month's Harlequins was Sandra Marton's The Greek Prince's Chosen Wife, about a woman learning to trust after being sexually abused in foster care.
RfP has found a very interesting article, published in Macleans this month, titled "Harlequin thinks unsexy thoughts" and subtitled "Impotence is just the start: the new romance novels put the 'fun' back in sexual dysfunction".
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