My Mother’s Books, Part 2--Faith Baldwin (1893-1978)

 Marriage-in-trouble, second chance at love, love triangles, big misunderstandings, and other tropes I regularly toss around in discussing romance novels today, I first learned about reading my mother’s books. I might have lacked the vocabulary to talk about these tropes then, but the stories that contained them were the topic of many conversations I had about books with my mother and my best friend. None of the writers we were reading handled these timeless themes better than Faith Baldwin.

Faith Baldwin was the Nora Roberts of her day. In 1936, at the height of her popularity, she had five novels serialized in magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Ladies Home Journal, published three novels that were serialized the previous year, and saw four of her books adapted as films, including Wife vs. Secretary starring Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Myrna Loy and Love Before Breakfast starring Carole Lombard, Preston Foster, and Cesar Romero. Adjusting for inflation, Baldwin’s 1936 salary would be more than $5 million today.

Although Baldwin never approached the number of novels Roberts has written (200 plus), she was amazingly prolific, writing more than 85 novels in a career that spanned fifty years. A New York Times critic in 1939 wrote admiringly of her “turning them [novels] out a mile a minute, all readable” and called Baldwin “tops in her field.” Her first book was Mavis of the Green Hill (1921), but she made her reputation writing for the popular women’s magazines of the day that produced romances as six-part serials for their large audience. She sold her first serial to Good Housekeeping in 1927, and as her popularity increased, she earned as much as $55,000 for a serialized novel. That figure translates to $725,728 in 2013 currency.

Baldwin had a knack for knowing what her audience wanted and giving it to them. Her heroines were often young, successful women who were forced to deal with conflicts between a new role (career woman) and a traditional one (homemaker). Even a skim of her titles shows how frequent this theme appeared in novels such as The Office Wife (1930), White Collar Girl (1933), and He Married a Doctor (1944). Since Baldwin was writing romance, it is no surprise that marriage always won the battle, and the HEA was arrived at with women’s traditional role supreme.

Skyscraper, first published in 1931—the year the Empire State Building opened—earned praise for offering readers “a new kind of heroine,” a woman who loved her job in the city and, unlike her predecessors, was forced to choose not between two suitors but between financial independence and true love. The heroine’s choice is a real one since company she works for enforces a policy of not employing married women. Her choice is further complicated by the time, 1930, when jobs were scarce, and by her predatory but charismatic, married (although separated from his wife) boss. The novel became a 1932 movie, Skyscraper Souls starring Maureen O’Sullivan as the heroine. In 2003, Feminist Press reissued the novel as part of its Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp series. Alicia Daly of Ms called Skyscraper "a captivating and quietly subversive novel, featuring a spunky young working woman struggling to make it on her own.” She added “Skyscraper declares that despite all challenges, women should insist on their right to have it all."

Working girl heroines or not, Baldwin’s fictional world was largely one of fashionable clothing, private railway cars, and more than merely comfortable incomes. Such a world evidently held great appeal for Depression-era readers who found in Baldwin’s stories escape from the burdens of their own lives. Baldwin’s success was due to her ability to provide the escape while at the same time assuring her readers that the relationship her protagonists built were based on love and honesty, qualities available even to those denied ermine-collared bed jackets. Baldwin was not bothered by those labeled her fiction escapist. In fact, she took pride in offering her readers “some way to get out of themselves” and ruefully acknowledged that the decline in her sales numbers after World War II began could be attributed to the real world offering more excitement than her fictional one.

Sales may have been fewer, but Baldwin still had many tears of success ahead of her. Her books were still being adapted for film: Apartment for Peggy, filmed by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1948; Horsie, filmed by Robert Stillman Productions in 1951; and Queen for a Day, filmed by United Artists in 1951. In the earliest period of network television, she hosted a thirty-minute anthology for ABC, the Faith Baldwin Romance Theater. From 1958 to 1965, she wrote a monthly column for Woman’s Day called “The Open Door.” Even in its final years, the column drew 300 or more letters from readers each month and earned Baldwin as much as $850 per column (US$ 6,255 in 2013).

Baldwin continued writing well into her 80s. Hollywood no longer came calling, but a series Baldwin wrote in the 1970s found a readership. Building on one of her most popular books, Station Wagon Set (1939), Baldwin set another six books in Little Oxford: Any Village (1971), No Bed of Roses (1973), Time and the Hour (1974), New Girl in Town (1975), Thursday’s Child (1976), and Adam’s Eden (1977). By this time, a new generation of romance readers was immersed in Harlequin’s more sensual Harlequin Presents books in which Anne Mather shattered a taboo by including premarital sex and Kathleen Woodiwiss’s many imitators were producing historicals with an unprecedented sizzle factor. But other readers were still finding comfort in the final books of Faith Baldwin. I know because my mother was among those readers, and while I was reading Mather and Woodiwiss, I was also still reading my mother’s books.

Marriage-in-trouble books and second-chance-at-love stories are two of my favorite themes. When I look back, I can identify books from my mother’s bookshelves that introduced me to the tropes and fostered my love of them? What’s your favorite romance trope? Can you remember the first book that made you aware of how much you like the theme?

Reading My Mother's Books: An Introduction

Girl Reading by Charles Edward Perugini

You don’t hear much about them these days, but before the romance revolution that began with the publication of Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower in 1972, women were reading romance fiction. The first romances I read were my mother’s books. One muggy Georgia summer weekday, a short time before I turned ten, I was complaining because I had nothing to read and my dad couldn’t take me to the library until Saturday. Tired of my whining, my mother pointed me toward her books and said “Read.” I did. 

By Saturday, my reading interest had changed because I had discovered romance. I had read Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and a half dozen romances by Emilie Loring and Grace Livingston Hill. I was an avid reader from the time I was five, but it was that summer that my appetite for more and more to read became voracious. I carried a book with me everywhere, snatching a few moments to read lying on a towel at the swimming pool, following my mother down the aisles of the grocery store, even a few times stealing minutes during a Sunday morning sermon. (The last reached a forcible conclusion when my mother found me out.) Over the next couple of years, I discovered other treasures on my mother’s bookshelves—books by Faith Baldwin, Elizabeth Cadell, and D. E. Stevenson.

These were the books that started my life-long love affair with romance. I still have a double handful of my mother’s romances on my keeper shelves. I have since discovered that my experience was not unusual. Some studies suggest that most women who think of themselves as heavy readers began reading for pleasure between the ages of five and nine (63%), and a significant number (44%) read books that were recommended by their mothers or another close relative. (Many of my earlier favorite books—the Anne of Green Gables books and Louisa May Alcott’s books, for example—were also books my mother had loved and wanted me and my sister to read.)

It was many years later when I was in graduate school that I discovered just how popular the romance writers whose books my mother loved and shared with me had been. When I left my romance-reading closet where I had lurked throughout most of my academic career and joined the online romance fiction community, I was bothered by the fact that Loring and the others seemed largely forgotten. I toyed with the idea of writing a book about these gentle romance authors whose books tens of thousands of women readers devoured in an age when the only steam in romance fiction was that rising from the heroine’s tea cup. I even did some research and filled notebooks with copious notes, but other writing for profit and for pleasure always seemed to take precedence.

This week I did some cleaning and decluttering, and one of the decisions I had to make was whether to trash my notes on gentle romance along with some of the books by these authors. Somehow it seemed a betrayal of my mother and the gift she gave me that long ago summer to do so. That’s when a new idea was born: to use this blog for a series of posts paying tribute to the five romance writers I discovered on Mother’s bookshelves. So, beginning tomorrow and continuing through March, appropriately Women’s History Month, every other Saturday, I’ll be posting a tribute post to one of these writers. I’ll still do my regular Tuesday reviews and irregular bonus reviews on Thursdays, but the Saturday posts for this period will be focused on my mother’s books. I hope you will enjoy them.

How old were you when you discovered reading for pleasure? Who introduced you to romance fiction?

Romance Fiction’s Hall of Fame

March is Women’s History Month, and my posts for three of the next four weeks will be a celebration of women. It seems fitting that the first of the celebrations on this blog dedicated to the reading and writing of romance fiction should focus on romance writers.  Almost four years ago, this post appeared on the Romance Vagabonds, but with a few updates, everything I wrote in 2008 holds true in 2012.

Halls of fame are an American tradition. Every sport imaginable has its hall of fame. Most of us know the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York and the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio (and a separate College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Indiana), but there are also halls of fame for the best in soccer, hockey, tennis, cycling, bowling, swimming, motorsports, and so on. The same holds true for music. Whether your preferred genre is rock, country, classical, gospel, or blues, you can find a hall of fame dedicated to the genre’s high achievers. Inventors have their own hall of fame; so do songwriters, cowgirls, astronauts, ukulele players, and Texas Rangers. So why is there no Romance Writers Hall of Fame?  

Now before you accuse me of sloppy research, let me add that I know the Romance Writers of America does have a Hall of Fame. But membership is based on a single criterion: “Upon receipt of her/his third (formerly the fourth) RITA Award in the same category, an RWA member is inducted into the RWA Hall of Fame for that category.” Some of the brightest lights in the romance writing galaxy are on the list that includes Justine Dare/Justine Davis, Jennifer Greene (Alison Hart), Francine Rivers, Cheryl Zach, Nora Roberts (the first inductee and the only three-time, multiple-categories inductee), Kathleen Korbel/Eileen Dreyer, Jo Beverley, Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Jodi Thomas, Kathleen Creighton, and Julia Quinn. But surely a genre that boasts a long history and more than 6000 published books annually in recent years has more than ten writers who merit special recognition for their legacy of excellence in writing romance fiction and sustained contribution to the genre.

RWA’s Lifetime Achievement recipients are a fuller recognition of those who have contributed significantly. This award didn’t acquire its distinguished title until 1990. For the first seven years, writers recognized for their body of work were awarded the Golden Treasure. Perhaps the name seemed purple-tinged and too closely tied to the heaving bosom books of the past. At any rate, in 1990 the award that recognizes annually a living romance writer whose record of excellence extends over fifteen years or more and whose contributions to the genre are notable was renamed the Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2008, in honor of the romance writer who is arguably the highest achiever in the history of RWA, the award was rechristened the Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award. Vicki Lewis Thompson was the first recipient of the award under its new name.

Studying the list of winners provides an encapsulated history of modern romance fiction. The first winner was Virginia Nielsen McCall, who had published more than thirty romance and YA novels by the time she received the Golden Treasure in 1983. Three years later, Roberta Gellis, author of the popular Roselynde Chronicles, a series of meticulously researched Medieval romances published from 1978-1983, was the winner. Kathleen Woodiwiss, whose 1972 novel The Flame and the Flower is credited with revolutionizing romance fiction and inaugurating the modern romance, was the honoree in 1988. RWA paid tribute to the queens of the “Gothic Revival” and early romantic suspense over the next four years as in turn Eleanor Burford Hibbert (aka Victoria Holt)*, Phyllis Whitney, Barbara Mertz (aka Barbara Michaels), and Mary Stewart were recognized. 

In 1995 and 1997 respectively, Jayne Ann Krentz and Nora Roberts were the recipients of the LAA. Both writers were prolific and successful within category fiction and groundbreakers in single-title romance fiction. Krentz’s 1986 novel, Sweet Starfire, combined elements of romance with science fiction to create a new subgenre, the futuristic romance. Roberts’s success with interconnected tales of friends and family in series such as the MacGregor books began one of the most firmly entrenched trends in romance fiction, and her success with reissues of popular books transformed the shelf life of paperback romance novels. Both women also proved themselves able and eloquent defenders of the genre. The Krentz-edited collection of twenty-two essays by romance writers, Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of Romance (1992) received the Susan Koppelman Award for Feminist Studies.  Roberts vocally defends the genre and argues for romance’s unique ability to incorporate elements of other popular genres into its fluid form.

Krentz and Roberts, along with other LAA winners such as Ann Maxwell, aka Elizabeth Lowell (1994), Anne Stuart (1996), Linda Howard (2005), Susan Elizabeth Phillips (2006), Linda Lael Miller (2007), Vicki Lewis Thompson (2008), and Debbie Macomber (2010) continue to produce books that keep us happily reading. Last year, Sharon Sala became the twenty-seventh honoree on this list that includes writers who have shaped the genre over half a century or so, but even twenty-seven seems too few to do justice to the genre’s rich and extensive history.

I’d love to see an International Romance Writers Hall of Fame, something along the lines of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame that from 1996-2004 inducted four writers annually based on “their continued excellence and long-time contribution to the science fiction and fantasy field.” I would hope to see contributions of romance writers before the 1970s honored as well as those since that turning point.

I already have my four nominees for the first inductees prepared.

Jane Austen

Not only do many, many romance readers suffer from advanced cases of Austen-mania, but romance writers, even some like Charlaine Harris who appear to have little in common with Jane Austen acknowledge her influence. Regency writer Carla Kelly acknowledged her debt to Austen in an AAR column (August 2001): "In the odd moments when I manage a witty bit of dialogue or tweak a plot until it begs for mercy, I can wink and think to myself, 'Thanks, Jane.'" Such tributes are too numerous to catalog, but they provide abundant evidence that Austen continues to contribute to the genre.

Georgette Heyer

Think of almost any character type or plot device that we associate with Regency-set historicals, and Heyer readers can point to a book where Heyer used it. The intelligent, independent heroine, the arrogant lord, the marriage of convenience, the innocent disillusioned, the heroine disguised as a male—all these and more are handled with skill and wit in Heyer’s books. Mary Jo Putney calls Heyer the inventor of a genre and Putney along with Judith McNaught, Catherine Coulter, Leigh Greenwood, and surprisingly Robin Schone acknowledge debts to Heyer.

Faith Baldwin

Not many of today’s romance readers know the work of Baldwin, but she was the Nora Roberts of her day, perhaps the most famous and financially successful American romance writer of the early twentieth century. A New York Times critic wrote in 1939, "There ought to be some sort of literary or at least book prize for Faith Baldwin. She can turn them out a mile a minute, all readable . . . all tops in her field."  (Sounds like a description of NR, doesn’t it?) Baldwin wrote eighty-five novels, several of which were turned into movies. She created a popular series, the Little Oxford books that spanned generations. The series included Station Wagon Set (1939), Any Village (1971), No Bed of Roses (1973), Time and the Hour (1974), and Thursday's Child (1976). Although the H/H in these books get their HEA and the sensuality level is sweet, Baldwin did not shy away from issues such as infidelity, divorce, and career and family conflicts.

Nora Roberts

Do I even need to explain this choice? The Witness (April 2012) will be Roberts’s two hundredth novel, more than 175 of them New York Times bestsellers. More than 400 million of her books are in print, and she is the public face and voice of the genre to those outside it. Her MacGregor books made history when The McGregor Grooms became the first Silhouette original title to hit # 1 on The New York Times bestseller list, Perfect Neighbor became the first category romance ever to hit The New York Times bestseller list, and The McGregor Brides became the first Silhouette single title to hit The New York Times bestseller list. Her success with series has been a major influence on the popularity of connected books, and the sales of her reissued titles helped to extend the shelf life of romance novels before digital books were thought of.

Do you think we need an International Romance Writers Hall of Fame? Keeping in mind the criteria of excellence and significant contribution to the genre, who would you like to see included?