Romance is a cultural and economic juggernaut. The genre accounts for roughly 35% of all fiction sales, generating over $1.4 billion annually. Millions of women spend hours each week reading, listening to, and discussing these books. Romance drives bestseller lists, shapes how we think about relationships, and influences everything from fashion to travel to TikTok trends.
Despite this massive cultural footprint, romance remains relegated to the literary margins. Major publications review literary fiction, mystery, even science fiction, but rarely touch romance. MFA programs dissect everything from experimental poetry to graphic novels while treating romance as beneath serious consideration. Awards committees celebrate novels about middle-aged men having midlife crises but ignore books about women rebuilding their lives after divorce.
Furthermore, why is it that fans of the genre still feel the need to announce themselves with downcast glances and embarrassed giggles? Readers joke about hiding their Kindle screens; writers offer self-deprecating disclaimers; bookstores shunt the genre into pastel corners. Why are we still perpetuating shame around stories that command such a vast share of cultural attention?
Especially because the romance novels of today are voicey, emotionally intelligent, and structurally daring—capable of both making you weep and making you think. Authors like Emily Henry are writing characters who grapple with complex grief and childhood trauma. Annabel Monaghan explores the bewildering aftermath of divorce and the courage it takes to begin again. Taylor Jenkins Reid is, quite literally, sending heroines to space. This new generation of authors are pushing against convention: crafting layered characters, tackling weightier themes, and delivering prose that demands our attention while still providing the emotional satisfaction the genre promises.
And yet, we’re still not taking these books seriously enough to critique them with the rigor they deserve.
To be clear: the absence of substantive romance criticism isn’t a kindness — it’s a diminishment. When we treat romance with kid gloves, offering only enthusiastic recommendations rather than real analysis, we’re essentially saying the work isn’t sophisticated enough to warrant serious engagement. We’re perpetuating the very literary snobbery we claim to reject.
So, excuse the language — but fuck that noise.
Because if a book is ambitious, it deserves to be evaluated as such. If it’s aiming for craft, we should talk about whether the prose lands. If it’s exploring emotional complexity, we should ask: Does it earn the ending? Does the interiority ring true? Is the story doing what it thinks it’s doing? We should be evaluating character development, emotional logic, structure, and voice with the same clarity we’d bring to any other genre.
And proper criticism means placing books into the broader context as well. Examining how the genre of romance got here—its patterns, tropes, and turning points—and where it might be going next. Who is romance still leaving out? What do readers want now that they didn’t ten years ago? What does a satisfying love story look like in a culture that increasingly mistrusts happy endings?
Criticism doesn’t diminish a genre—it dignifies it. It says: this matters enough to examine closely. Great art doesn’t emerge from protective praise. It grows from rigor. From conversation. From care.
Romance deserves better than our benign neglect. It deserves the kind of thoughtful, substantive criticism we give any other literature that commands this much cultural attention and artistic ambition.
This is a space for taking love stories seriously. And we’ll be doing just that together —every Tuesday.
I’m excited to find this Substack and will be awaiting the next installment! (I already read your Emily Henry piece, which I thought was excellent.) My only question is how you/we are defining the romance genre. Maybe I’m a bit outdated, but I tend to think of people like Reid, Henry, others as contemporary fiction with romantic elements as opposed to romance per se. Am I splitting hairs here? To me, the difference is something like “X and Y have real feelings for each other but need to figure out a whole complex web of other things too” versus “X and Y have real feelings for each other and will spend the next 200 pages titillating me while they dance around each other.” If that’s a fair distinction, I think that can account for the lack of true criticism—there just isn’t really a ton to say about not-very-well-written-but-very-titillating prose. But am I being too narrow in my definitions? I’d be interested to hear what you think!
I am so excited to find this Stack. As someone who finds herself caught between writing WF and not quite R romance, your piece in Emily Henry was so affirming.
Why CAN’T we have literary romance? People live complete lives every day, not one dimensional ones that are focused only on career, only on family, or only on love/titillation (as another commenter described it).