"She wants to talk to me about "Suzy gets saved by a Cowboy" as if it were "Pride and Prejudice."
-Jane Radway's 'Romance and the Work of Fantasy', and Alison Light's 'Returning to Manderley' were really interesting rebukes to the dogmatic critiques of trashy romance novels. In a piece I recently wrote in defense of Barbi, I too challenge that fantasy can provide liberatory spaces and shifting identities, which may or may not be within our reach or best interests outside of fantasy worlds. Rather than dismiss romance novels or Barbies on ideological grounds it might be more useful to assess them from many angles, or as Light suggests left, and right-wing moralism. Both authors extensively site Daphne du Marier's 1938 novel 'Rebecca' as a precurs
or to the Harlequin romance novel. Having never read 'Rebecca, some of Radway's references were completely lost on me. Obviously I should have read Light before Radway. In reading Light as well as a bit of outside reading on 
'Rebecca' I was struck by some of the similarities to F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby', which is quite possibly one of my all time favorite books. The above lusty cowboys and Pride and Prejudice remarks were slightly funny to me in light of the fact that I spent my Friday night last week swooning over
Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy in the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice for over four hours. I love the book and movie. Either one, I prefer to absorb myself in Austin's commentary on social class, gender, and love, in my own company. Pride and Prejudice is many things encapsulated in an absolute romance novel.
It's interesting to note that neither Light nor Radway mention the wildly popular genre of pulp fiction, which precluded the Harlequin romance novel by ten to twenty years. What gives?