What Romance Teaches Us About Being Heroines

by Sarah MacLean

Forty years ago, the modern romance genre began with the publication of Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame & the Flower. While she certainly stood on the shoulders of Georgette Heyer and the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen, Woodiwiss changed publishing forever with a single, simple, high-concept idea: What if she wrote an adventure story? But what if a woman was the hero? The romance heroine was born.

Woodiwiss‘s Heather fled her tragic life in rural 18th-century England, found herself on the London docks and then in the arms of an American ship’s captain. What ensues is a rollicking high-seas adventure that moves across the Atlantic, to a plantation in the Carolinas, where scandal and danger threaten at every turn. And, through it all, Heather rises to power, winning the day, the man and, most importantly, herself.

Woodiwiss’s books tell the story not only of heroines in…