When we look at the history of romance novels, often people pin the start of modern romance history to the 1972 publication of The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss. By doing this, people erase a key evolution and influence in romance, which is the category romance. If you’re from the UK then you already know that the category publisher there is Mills & Boon, and they’ve been a publisher for a little over a century. First starting out as a general publisher in 1908, over the decades Mills & Boon gradually specialized in romance novels. Harlequin, first seeking to re-print their medical romances, eventually bought Mills & Boon in 1971. While we look at the history of the company, we also focus on publishing gatekeepers and how they’ve influenced the romance genre.
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When we look at the history of romance novels, often people pin the start of modern romance history to the 1972 publication of The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss. By doing this, people erase a key evolution and influence in romance, which is the category romance. If you’re from the UK then you already know that the category publisher there is Mills & Boon, and they’ve been a publisher for a little over a century. First starting out as a general publisher in 1908, over the decades Mills & Boon gradually specialized in romance novels. Harlequin, first seeking to re-print their medical romances, eventually bought Mills & Boon in 1971. While we look at the history of the company, we also focus on publishing gatekeepers and how they’ve influenced the romance genre.
In An Extraordinary Union, published in 2017, is the first in Cole’s The Loyal League series, both main characters are attempting to shape the politics of their time through espionage. Elle Burns is a freedwoman who has been living in New England with her parents after their enslaver died and his son freed them. She has an eidetic memory that has been treated somewhat as a party trick for most of her life, including by well-meaning, but thoughtless white abolitionists in the North. Elle joins the Loyal League, a network of spies aiming to aid the Union in the Civil War, to try and use her gift to help the cause. While Elle is working she meets Malcolm McCall, who has been sent by the Pinkertons to collaborate with Elle. He is also undercover—though he lives as a Rebel soldier, using his easy charm and good looks to ingratiate himself into Southern society. Cole takes a setting that has a history in romance, but one that ignores the people most subjugated by it and gives us a story that is part espionage thriller, part slow burn enemies to lovers.
Reformed Rakes
When we look at the history of romance novels, often people pin the start of modern romance history to the 1972 publication of The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss. By doing this, people erase a key evolution and influence in romance, which is the category romance. If you’re from the UK then you already know that the category publisher there is Mills & Boon, and they’ve been a publisher for a little over a century. First starting out as a general publisher in 1908, over the decades Mills & Boon gradually specialized in romance novels. Harlequin, first seeking to re-print their medical romances, eventually bought Mills & Boon in 1971. While we look at the history of the company, we also focus on publishing gatekeepers and how they’ve influenced the romance genre.
