Review
Three stories to celebrate the centenary of the British publishers of romantic fiction, Mills & Boon, are cross-cut. In 1908 Mary Boon, from a wealthy family, and recently married to the lower class Charlie, supports him financially when he and his business partner, Gerald Mills, start a publishing house specializing in brightly-packaged, inexpensive and easy-to-read fiction. Charles' innovative idea is that the readers will also be the writers, actually being invited to submit their own plot-lines for publication. When the First World War breaks out Charlie enlists in the Royal Navy and Mary runs the publishing house herself. She is aware of the lack of passion in her own marriage when she accidentally witnesses a married male employee having sex with a female colleague. On Charlie's return she has become a much more forceful character and it is her idea that Mills and Boon specialize in love stories aimed at the female reader, telling her husband that "Women need romance." In the 1970s Janet, a clumsy,much put-upon secretary, accompanies her elderly, widowed mother to hospital for the latter's hip replacement and she develops a crush on the handsome doctor performing the operation, ultimately making a fool of herself by stalking him and gate-crashing his party where she falls into a hot-tub. On the plus side, she creates a romanticized version of them both,with herself as the glamorous Nurse Violetta Kiss and him as a saturnine love object, mourning his late wife and whom she seduces in his shower. The resultant novel that she writes about them is accepted by Mills and Boon and she is offered work as a staff writer for them. In 2008, Kirstie, a buttoned-up, thirty-something college lecturer specializing in the history of fiction, lives with her reliable but dull partner, Nick, and finds herself attracted to the aggressively sexual Jake, a 23-year-old student who never seems to wear a shirt. After sparring with him in class, she succumbs to a spot of passion in the college library with him, and starts to make herself look more glamorous. Ultimately she leaves Nick for him, knowing that the age gap may provide difficulties but accepting, as Mary Boon had commented some ninety years earlier, that women need romance. |
