I happened across The Blue Castle at the Women for Music book sale last weekend and grabbed it right up. Montgomery didn’t move east with me, and the only ones I’ve restocked are the first two in the Anne series. I haven’t read The Blue Castle in over 30 years though it was a favorite of mine long ago, our family collection of L. I just reread Lucy Maud Montgomery’s The Blue Castle, which is why I’ve been thinking about how (and, a bit, why) we make these distinctions. I had certainly read a lot of books from that more nebulous territory before I ventured into the heartland, but (partly because I didn’t know, or think, much about what made something a “romance novel” instead of some other kind of novel, and partly because I hadn’t read any self-identified “romance novels”) I hadn’t recognized any of them as romances. As with all literary labels, though, “romance” isn’t really that precise:all around the territory of the card-carrying Harlequin-style “romance novel” there’s a vast borderland populated by everything from chick-lit to Victorian marriage-plot novels, all of which have at least some key elements in common with romances, even if it’s only a structural similarity. There’s a way in which that was absolutely true: I had never read anything marketed or labeled explicitly as a “romance novel” (a Harlequin, say). Once upon a time I had never read a “romance novel” - or so the story went.
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