The publicity for Pan’s new ‘Pavanne’ romance series relies heavily on the Leg-Warmer Syndrome. This trend was apparent with the tall, sleek women in leotards and leg-warmers who, in a moment of respite from dancing practise, revealed that they did something every year, something else every month, and took the Daily Mail every day. The pages of Cosmopolitan and Honey are full of these modern creatures, whose independence appears in direct proportion to the quantity and brightness of the gear they keep fit in. Throw in a leg-warmer, the advertising departments must say, and there you have the New Woman.
This seems to have been the case down at ‘Pavanne’. Cosmo, Good Housekeeping, Over 21, and Options are to be saturated with such images in the campaign for Pavanne novels: ‘An interesting diversion for women who don’t need one’. Apart from leg-warmers, the New Women who are publicized as the market for the ‘New Romance’ are introduced by such cryptic phrases as ‘Can an Estate Agent Fall in Love?’ – amplified as follows: ‘Jane Forsyth is a partner in a rapidly expanding firm of Estate Agents. What she doesn’t know about the property business doesn’t make money. Like any successful businesswoman, Jane knows how to separate business from pleasure. One of her occasional pleasures is reading a Pavanne Novel. She knows that after a hard day’s work she can afford a little romantic speculation.’ The same applies to Carol Dunn (Borough Councillor), Angela Welch (barrister) and Sue Davey (fashion executive). Reassuring, to know that today’s hard-headed woman still needs a little Romantic icing on the plain cake of working life.
What is it, then, that the successful New Woman reads? Pavanne launches with four novels. Pamela Street’s Light of Evening announces itself thus: ‘He was impossible. Impossible and irresistible. Sophie chose to go where he led – to London, to Chicago, to the South of France. All she had to do was pay the price of choosing, to give up her home, husband and child for another man …’. This was described in one review (the Daily Mail – Leg-Warmers Anonymous) as ‘a deeply feminine blueprint of woman’s eternal dilemma’. Then there’s Columbine by Raymond Kennedy – ‘She waited at the brink of womanhood, when he came back from war looking for life and love. He brought her over the threshold of sexuality, and then he taught her the pain of love…’. An Easter Egg Hunt is a clever mystery story set in an Edwardian girls’ school: ‘On Easter Sunday the girls of the select academy were to go on an Easter Egg hunt. One of them never returned. She was seventeen and deeply in love with an airman already marked down to die …’ (all my italics). ‘A brooding, haunting, highly-charged story’, says Cosmo, another leg-warming ally. The fourth title is Pas de Deux by Olivier Beer, a modern Bonnie and Clyde story of two young criminals doomed to die. Despite translation, this is the only one of the four to show some delight in language, with the sense that writing is anything more than a vehicle for tales which grab your emotions by the short hairs and drag them through plots that to me, at least, are the literary equivalent of pornography. For these novels are structured so as to make reading them rather like trying to peel one’s eyes from an erotic photograph.
This quality is by no means new in ‘women’s romance’. The Woman’s Weekly library, the slushy paperbacks at stations, are part of a tradition that runs from the eighteenth century ‘sentimental novel’ (which Sterne parodied in A Sentimental Journey) – novels full of tears, guilt, pity and remorse – through the Gothic novels and fantasies where the monster of sexuality rears its head from creaking chains in castles and wild, deserted places. There is a certain avid, secret, hungry quality with which one reads both these and many other kinds of novel, a quality which seems to me not unlike that which gives the pornographic its forbidden thrill.
And it turns out that, despite being plugged as different, new and modern, Pavanne books share with their down-market sisters, and their historical (Gothic, sentimental) grandmothers, one key fact: the demon which haunts them, the monster in the wings which gives the frisson of danger in each novel, is no less than women’s sexuality! We have the seventeen-year-old girl in Pas de Deux who eggs her boyfriend on to crime, finishing with a bloody death. Seen through the eyes of the first-person narrator, her young lover, she appears only as amazingly beautiful, and more ruthless than the boy, like the women in countless ‘films noirs’. In Light of Evening there is the middle-aged married woman whose sexual passion, ‘awakened’ by an older artist, pulls her into what is depicted as a humiliating relationship. She is hooked on it like a drug, becomes an alcoholic and still clings to her lover because their sexual passion is so consuming. When she’s away from him, ‘despite her anger and indignation … she longed to be made love to again’ (my italics). Not once do the couple make love together, nor does she make love to him – he does it to her, and she’s addicted. Then there is Columbine, written, like Pas de Deux, from the man’s point of view, about a young World War 2 veteran who loves the girl-next-door, a promiscuous thirteen-year-old (‘unconscious of her own deepest impulses’) whose sexuality arouses scandal and shame, and results in her virtual rape. Finally, in An Easter Egg Hunt the horror and scandal are accounted for by the period setting, as a schoolgirl in World War 1 who becomes pregnant by an airman, disappears – a mystery which is solved as we learn that she died after an abortion performed by a doctor who has a strange and sinister passion for her himself.
There is very little actual ‘sex’ in these novels, yet they are haunted by sex as the out-of-bounds, and the thread which pulls you through them is one twisted out of curiosity, repulsion and fear. The impact of, say, a violent kiss, in an old-fashioned ‘women’s paperback’, is simply transferred onto sexuality at a deeper level. The limits of the out-of-bounds have changed, but exactly the same thrill is manufactured by forays across them. The Pavanne blurb rambles on about ‘scandal and humiliation’ with great accuracy. These are novels full of punishment, humiliation and shame (as if we needed more of those things). Their general message is that sex is fatal for women – literally, in most cases – but still exciting.
And these ‘deeply feminine’ thrills are purchasable, from stands that make them look exactly like packets of tights (don’t let the leg-warmers fool you). Evidently, we busy career women need to buy our tremors of soft-core self-punishment as conveniently as panti-hose, packaging it into our busy days, occasionally taking time off to savour the frisson of that dangerous monster we carry inside – our sexual feelings. They could be our downfall, as these books show, but we know how to ‘separate business from pleasure’, as the ad says: reading novels like these both compensates for, and justifies, suppressing our sexuality in order to succeed in a man’s world. Can a journalist fall in love? Well, let me just say that I was paid to read these books, and rarely have business and pleasure felt further apart.