Reformed Rakes

Our third episode where we each recommend a book for the other two rakes to read. Sawyer recommended Nightfire by Valerie Vayle. Simonne is a seamstress who goes to Russia to make dresses for a princess' wedding. Initially, she has an affair with the bride's brother, Trevelayn, before slowly falling for the bride's other brother, Sasha. I (Beth) recommended The Soldier's Scoundrel by Cat Sebastian. Former soldier and son of an earl, Oliver, meets fixer and not a son of an earl, Jack. Oliver out of a mixture of boredom and lust, joins one of Jack's investigation into a client who says she's being blackmailed. Emma recommended A Loyal Companion by Barbara Metzger. One day Sunny loses her dog Fitz, the titular loyal companion, and he's found by future love interest Darius. He's not welcome in the ton after being accused of getting a peer's sister pregnant. The dog helps bring these two together.Support us on our Patreon!Visit our website for transcripts and show notes: reformedrakes.comFollow us on social media:Twitter: @reformedrakesInstagram: @reformedrakesBluesky: @reformedrakesBeth’s SubstackChels’ SubstackEmma’s SubstackThank you for listening!

Sawyer interviews former People Magazine reporter Michael Small about the two(ish) weeks he spent with romance cover model Fabio Lanzoni in 1993. Michael is also the host of the podcast I Couldn’t Throw it Out. Listen to his episode, My Fun, Strange Adventures with Fabio, featuring Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Podcast. Read Michael’s 1993 People Magazine cover story on Fabio: Love for Sale Michael’s Musical: The History of LightSawyer’s previous Reformed Rakes Fabio episodes: Fabio: Part One and Fabio: Part Two Support us on our Patreon!Visit our website for transcripts and show notes: reformedrakes.comFollow us on social media:Twitter: @reformedrakesInstagram: @reformedrakesBluesky: @reformedrakesBeth’s SubstackSawyer’s SubstackEmma’s SubstackThank you for listening!

Set in 1865 during the Second French Empire, Moonrise by Roberta Gayle tells the story of Pascale de Ravenault, the daughter of an acclaimed artist. Pascale is an artist in her own right, though she has abandoned painting in favor of aiding her father in the business side of art. At a salon, she meets British sea captain Jack Devlin. Pascale and Jack butt heads as she fights her attraction to him, forming in spite of his cageyness about his actions that led to the danger and he worries about the gap in their stations and lifestyles. Though Moonrise starts with the promise of political intrigue and possibly sea-faring art thieves, the result is a relatively quiet and sweet book, filled with conversation and meditations on art, gendered roles and personality clashes.Support us on our Patreon!Visit our website for transcripts and show notes: reformedrakes.comFollow us on social media:Twitter: @reformedrakesInstagram: @reformedrakesBluesky: @reformedrakesBeth’s SubstackChels’ SubstackEmma’s SubstackThank you for listening!

Warrior’s Woman by Johanna Lindsey is a futuristic romance set in the year 2139 and follows Tedra de Arr, a highly skilled Security Agent who is too bodacious to lose her virginity to the puny men on her home planet of Kystran. When a failed presidential candidate launches a coup, Tedra, along with her annoying sex pest personal computer, Martha and sensual sentient robot, Corth, flee to outer space. To Tedra’s surprise, she ends up on Sha-Ka’ar, a planet chock full of big beefy blond warriors. Published in 1990, reviews, at the time, were mixed, calling it a successful romance, but a woefully underdeveloped science fiction novel. Cynthia Eisenmenger for Florida Today writes, “Although it is a bold exploration, Lindsey often appears lost in space with this new genre.”Support us on our Patreon!Visit our website for transcripts and show notes: reformedrakes.comFollow us on social media:Twitter: @reformedrakesInstagram: @reformedrakesBluesky: @reformedrakesBeth’s SubstackChels’ SubstackEmma’s SubstackThank you for listening!

Published in 1991, the The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez starts in 1850 where we open on an unnamed enslaved girl as she kills a bounty hunter trying to capture her. We meet the first Gilda, who takes the girl in and raises her along with her partner Bird. Both Gilda and Bird are vampires with certain rules they’ve constructed to live by, including to not kill humans and aim for some sort of exchange when drawing blood from them. Gilda wearies of the world’s cyclical violence and chooses to take the true death, but not before turning the girl into a vampire. The girl, now grown up, takes on the name Gilda. What follows is a series of vignettes from Gilda’s life as she travels and lives across the United States, with the last chapter set in 2050. Gomez said of Gilda in the foreword of the 2016 edition: “Each new decade brings up reminders that the culture has not yet healed the wounds left from slavery and bigotry. Gilda must learn to leave those she loves behind without bending under the further weight of loneliness. Throughout her journey she tries to hold on to her humanity and help others to find theirs.”Support us on our Patreon!Visit our website for transcripts and show notes: reformedrakes.comFollow us on social media:Twitter: @reformedrakesInstagram: @reformedrakesBluesky: @reformedrakesBeth’s SubstackChels’ SubstackEmma’s SubstackThank you for listening!

What makes something a romance novel? Most readers probably have an intuition of where their definitional lines are, and what are the make or break points, pushing something out of “romance” and into a neighboring genre. Critics and professional organizations of authors and publishers might provide a definition, for analysis or award purposes, to create parameters around what is the in and out group. Today’s episode is less about answering the question “what is a romance novel” and more a historiography of that question. When do we start asking it? How have the answers changed in the long arc of romance history? Who gets to decide what the final, be-all, end-all definition is? Are we ever open to change?Support us on our Patreon!Visit our website for transcripts and show notes: reformedrakes.comFollow us on social media:Twitter: @reformedrakesInstagram: @reformedrakesBluesky: @reformedrakesBeth’s SubstackChels’ SubstackEmma’s SubstackThank you for listening!

Today we’re discussing Barbara Pym’s second novel, Excellent Women, published in 1952. Pym wrote mid-century comedies of manners and experienced some success in the first decade of her career and then struggled to publish new novels. Excellent Women certainly has a Miss Bates style heroine, but uniquely has a romance-style happy ending, if you agree that the match Mildred Lathbury makes has the potential for happiness. Barbara Pym was not a romance novelist and most of her works focus on a generation of gentlewomen just young enough to feel the loss of a vast number of potential marriage partners from World War II, but old enough (and backwards looking enough) that they aren’t able to parlay new social and gender class mobility into rewarding professions. They, like Miss Bates, exist in, if not a genteel poverty, a genteel bourgeois existence. They may be the daughters of vicars, but have little hope of getting the vicar to marry them. Pym is writing at the same time as authors like Barbara Cartland and Victoria Holt, cited as precedents for a lot of genre romance fiction we read today. And if Jane Austen is another grand precedent of romance fiction, Pym is at least a cousin.Support us on our Patreon!Visit our website for transcripts and show notes: reformedrakes.comFollow us on social media:Twitter: @reformedrakesInstagram: @reformedrakesBluesky: @reformedrakesBeth’s SubstackChels’ SubstackEmma’s SubstackThank you for listening!

One Burning Heart is the latest book in Elizabeth Kingston’s 13th century medieval series, Welsh Blades, and it is a Reformed Rakes favorite. The book opens on a perfunctory sex scene that could be the stuff of nightmares. Margaret has been married to William for six years, and he's decided to tamper down his ill-concealed loathing for his wife in order to beget an heir. While William married Margaret for strategy, what he doesn’t know is that Margaret also married him for strategy. One Burning Heart is an achingly romantic tale that tackles ancestry, loyalty, and doubt, and Margaret is one of the most compelling historical romance heroines we’ve ever come across. Support us on our Patreon!Visit our website for transcripts and show notes: reformedrakes.comFollow us on social media:Twitter: @reformedrakesInstagram: @reformedrakesBluesky: @reformedrakesBeth’s SubstackChels’ SubstackEmma’s SubstackThank you for listening!

Just Like Heaven was published in 2011 as the first in the Smyth-Smith quartet and follows a family set in the Bridgerton world. Quinn’s most successful series is the Bridgerton series, even before the adaptation, features a large, tight-knit family that run around Regency London acting anachronistically and telling jokes that we’re told are hilarious and finding true love. A lot of romance time and effort has been spent on the Bridgerton series, book and television show, along with Quinn’s place as an outsized representation of romance to the non-romance world and this is mostly outside what we’re going to be talking about today. All the Rakes have read at least a handful of the Bridgerton series and none of us really enjoy the television show that much, so we wanted to read another one of Quinn’s books as our standalone exploration of her writing style, to try and parse what works or what doesn’t for us, along with what might be the longstanding appeal to readers for a Julia Quinn novel.Support us on our Patreon!Visit our website for transcripts and show notes: reformedrakes.comFollow us on social media:Twitter: @reformedrakesInstagram: @reformedrakesBluesky: @reformedrakesBeth’s SubstackChels’ SubstackEmma’s SubstackThank you for listening!

We spoke about Mills & Boon last week and now we're onto Harlequin. While we go through the history of Harlequin, we continue with the lens of how gatekeepers influence the romance genre. While writing this script, I was influenced by John Markert’s book Publishing Romance where he argues that gatekeepers often use their own tastes as a barometer for what readers want. Markert argues another driver for gatekeepers is what they perceive market conditions to be. This often results in gatekeepers acting conservatively as they try and find a product that is similar to yet slightly different from what’s on the market. We talk about a few editors again and how they influenced their authors, Vivian Stephens and her time at Harlequin, how heroines having jobs has been editorial policy since the 80s, and how mass market paperbacks will be dramatically scaled down in the upcoming year.Support us on our Patreon!Visit our website for transcripts and show notes: reformedrakes.comFollow us on social media:Twitter: @reformedrakesInstagram: @reformedrakesBluesky: @reformedrakesBeth’s SubstackChels’ SubstackEmma’s SubstackThank you for listening!