Book Review

Purity’s Passion by Janette Seymour, a Guest Review by RedHeadedGirl

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Title: Purity's Passion
Author: Janette Seymour
Publication Info: Pocket 1977
ISBN: 978-0671810368
Genre: Historical: European

imageWell.  That was…unpleasant.

I’m done with the 1970s-early 1980s OG Old School.  That was one of the most unpleasant reading experiences I’ve ever had, and I read The Phantom of Manhattan.  I finished it because I was kind of interested in where this story would end (and how much shit can be heaped upon the head of the heroine), and I have a finely developed case of trainwreck syndrome.  (Also, my copy didn’t stink, so that helped.)

I’m having a really hard time coming up with a Letter Grade, because I’ve read worse, and I’ve read better. I had a more entertaining time reading Passion’s Bold Fire than this, but Purity’s Passion wasn’t badly written, not by a long shot. I just hated reading it.  But it doesn’t deserve an F.  I’m going to call it a qualified C-.

The heroine is Purity, whose beauty and fine young body drive men wild.  She is born in France on the eve of the French revolution, the daughter of the bailiff on the estate of the Marquis de Fayelle. When she is about 8 or so, the French Revolution shows up on the doorstep and kills almost everyone in the chateau.  Purity witnesses all of it.

And it’s pretty clear what kind of a book this is when a woman begs for the life of her lover, and in exchange, goes to the bed of the riot leader, and finds herself orgasmically enjoying the rape.

It’s pretty awful. 

So Purity is rescued from a life of poverty in France by Mark Landless (you can tell he’s the hero because the cover copy says he’s the hero)  (Also he has a scar on his face that does not mar his hotness), and brought to Bath where he is her guardian.  The reason Mark comes for her is because the Marquise was his cousin, and Purity’s father tried to help the Marquise escape from the evil Marquis, and Mark swore to take care of the bailiff’s family, or something.  He did a bang up job, considering the bailiff and his wife were murdered by the French Revolution.  If you think this makes no goddamn sense, you would be right.

Anyway, in the course of the next 8 years or so, Purity falls in Girlish Infatuation with Mark, and makes him the Ugliest Tea Cozy In The World, which he tosses into the fireplace (not realizing she made it) and she is packed off to an upper class, ladies boarding school.  In her dorm, the other girls have found porn, and, as happens in all these stories, start experimenting in all ways that they can without losing their all-important virginity.  They make a pact to tell each other everything about their sexual exploits.

In the course of all of this, Purity meets Freddy, a wastrel younger son who thinks she’s very pretty.  At one point, to discourage his attentions, she shoves him in a fountain.

The lead Mean Girl, Phillida, hauls up the mentally deficient son of the gardener to experiment with, and when he is in bed with one of the girls, he rapes her and she eventually kills herself due to her loss of virtue.  Purity is disgusted by all of this, and refusing to tell them about Freddy, so for her punishment, she is tied to her bed hand and foot.  The Mean Girl tells her she is going to let the gardener’s son have his way with her.

Yeah.

One of the other girls knocks over a candle and unties Purity, she runs home to Mark, to find him in the process of screwing a maid, and she flies into a rage and goes to Freddy’s house, where she tells him she will marry him, and they go to bed.  Mark is like, “Hey ’grats on the wedding, see you there.” After the wedding (where he is cold and indifferent) he goes off with the Army to go fight Napoleon.

And on the wedding night she discovers that Freddy is a sadistic rapist who beats her and ravishes her every night, he’s in serious debt and only married her to make his rich great-aunt happy so the rich great aunt wouldn’t disinherit him.  At some point, she runs into this 18-year-old soldier who was about to leave for a rendezvous with fate at Trafalgar, so she very generously has sex with him so he need not die a virgin.

Her coachman saw all of this go down, and blackmails Purity into screwing him many many times to keep him from telling her evil husband.  Purity falls pregnant, and doesn’t know who the father is- it might be the young soldier or it might be the coachman- but it’s definitely not her husband.  The coachman takes her to a midwife who gives her an abortificant, and in the process the coachman gets killed by a Plot Mob.

Purity doesn’t take the abortificant, and the rich great aunt realizes she is pregnant and is so thrilled she confirms Freddy as her heir.  Freddy is fine with the fact that he’s not the father, until his cousins overhear Purity telling him that she doesn’t know who the father is, they promptly go tell the great aunt, and Freddy beats the shit out of Purity, rapes her (again), and she loses the baby and….he dies, somehow.

He owes a crap ton of money to everyone in the world, so she’s left with nothing, so she heads off to go find a job, because going home to Mark and his slutty screwing of the maids is not acceptable.  This does not work well, since she went to a ladies finishing school and knows NOTHING about ANYTHING.  She gets picked up by a woman who offers her a “position” as a “ladies maid” to a “family” but really it’s a position “on her back” as a “high-class whore” to “men who can afford the fee.”  Purity runs out of the house, nekkid, and is picked up by Alastair Monmouth, who does “stuff” but is also pretty clearly a hypnotist.  He hypnotizes her into taking a bunch of men to her bed.  She knows that she did all these things, but had no control over herself when doing them.  The men, I mean.

The shit hits the fan when Mean Girl from boarding school shows up at the same time as Mark (who showed up because Hypnotist is a war criminal) and Mean Girl throws all this crap in Purity’s face- hypnotist was using her as part of the payment to get these men to do things to further his Evil War Criminal Agenda.  Mark is completely enraged that Purity would fuck men at Monmouth’s command and rapes her as she’s shrieking “Don’t rape me, Mark!  Please don’t rape me!”

We’re at the midpoint of the book, and let us tot it up:  Purity has had consensual sex twice, been raped by six men (two of them multiple times), and nearly raped by a seventh.

So she runs away from Monmouth and finds a Gypsy man that she knew in her previous term of homelessness, and he nearly dies in a prizefight, and while he is in recovery, they trek to Wales and become lovers. After a year or so, the Gypsy leaves her, and she goes back to Mark’s house in Bath with the intent of confronting him. And saying that she now knows what she had for him was just Girlish Infatuation, but now that he’s raped her and she went off on a Gypsy hermitage for a year, she’s forgiven him and loves him.  And if he’s still angry with her for all the things that weren’t really her fault, that’s fine, she’ll leave.  Mark has resigned from the Army and spent the past year looking for her, because he realized that Raping The Woman You Love Is Bad.

Oh, well, then.  Good for him.

Turns out, Purity is not the daughter of the bailiff at the chateau in France, she was the daughter of the Marquise and some dandy at Versailles, and was smuggled out to be raised by the bailiff and his wife.  And the Marquise was the childhood sweetheart of Mark, who fell in love with her daughter (That’s Purity), and was angry at the Marquise because he never got to have sex with her, so he took it out on Purity.

As long as he can identify his anger, or something.

So they get married, he rejoins the Army to defeat Napoleon once and for all, and she follows him to the Iberian Peninsula.  Where who should show up while Mark is away killing Frenchies but Monmouth, who tells Purity that he has proof that Mark let him get out of the country ahead of a charge of High Treason, because of her, thus committing high treason himself, and in order to get possession of that evidence (a letter), she must allow him to fuck her in her marriage bed.

So she does, many times (because he can set a world record for turnaround time).  And then in the morning, he tells her that Mark wouldn’t be so stupid has to put that kind of offer in writing, Monmouth just wanted to fuck her while she was in her full possession of her senses.  And then Monmouth leaves and Mark comes home and it’s all good, except for this whole shame thing she’s got going on, and Monmouth shows up as the guest of honor at a dinner party they were invited to.  Monmouth tells Mark EVERYTHING, all the depraved stuff he got Purity to do, Mark kills Monmouth in a duel and Purity is like “well fuck this noise” and goes back to the Chateau where she grew up and whips all the peasants into shape.

Mark goes on to Waterloo, where he finds a bunch of French POWs that are also Purity’s Peasants, and finds her and they run into each other’s arms and… curtain.

Okay, so there’s a lot to unpack here.  And I really can’t separate the fact that I am a woman in 2010 reading this, with the benefits provided to me by second and third wave feminism, the fact that I live with an activist whose primary goals are ending rape and promoting healthy sexuality (I’ve learned a lot from her), and just the changes in perceptions of women’s sexuality that has happened in the 30 years since this book has been written.  In addition to all of that, there has been several sea changes in the romance genre since the 1970s.  I can’t look at this book in the context in which it was written; because that’s not the context I read it in.

This is about as subjective as you can get.  I admit that.

First and foremost is all the rape.  ALL THE RAPE.  Seven rapists (three may not have know she was not consenting to sex with them, but we’re looking at her POV), including the hero.  Six near-rapes I can think of.  Four partners consensually, two of which raped her before or after she consented.  It’s seriously fucked up.

And even when she is having consensual sex, the author talks about the men “taking her.”  As if she’s not really active in the sex.  Even in the case of the Gypsy dude, where he’s broken and battered and “not yet a real man” she goes to him and offers herself for him to take.  The lesson here is passivity in all encounters.

(I am SO SO glad I was reading Zoe Archer’s Scoundrel on my iPod during my commute to school while reading this book at bedtime.  Archer knows how to write a heroine that knows what she wants from sex and life and is an active participant in both.  Sometimes even the instigator.  Thank you, Zoe, you may have saved my sanity.)

We have several tropes of female sexuality here, and they are all disturbing.  First, there’s Purity herself, who is only allowed to be a passive recipient. She’s cursed with having this body that drives men wild (says so on the cover copy) and the only man that could bring her to orgasm (I think… if I’m reading the 70s euphemisms right) was Mark, until Monmouth comes along (and comes, and comes, and comes- shortest turnaround time known to man, for real) and he deliberately brings her to orgasm several times because that’s the revenge on Mark that he wanted. (Instead of flinging herself off a mountain, she’s flinging herself into a pit of perfect despair.  I don’t even know.)

The second trope is “those women who embrace their sexuality are evil whores” and we see this is Mean Girl Phillida.  She was the one who organized the whole “let’s experiment with the porn!” thing, and she’s presented as mean, conniving, evil, and without morals- she’ll screw anything that moves.  She told Purity that she fucked Mark just to make Purity upset.  She told Mark about Monmouth being Purity’s pimp and being a war criminal, and gets killed but Monmouth’s men on the way (and tries to fuck her way out of it, and fails).

The other girls from boarding school we run into both die as a result of sex- one I previously mentioned killed herself because she couldn’t prove her virginity to prospective in-laws, and the other becomes a low-class whore Purity runs into while with the Army in Portugal, and dies of the pox.

Purity’s own mother is said to have Purity’s same problem- her body just drives men crazy and they can’t help but fuck her, but Purity’s mother didn’t have the same strength of character or whatever that Purity has.  I really don’t know what that means, except maybe Purity refusing to “give her heart” to any man but Mark is strength of character?  I mean, her other options were to give heart to one of her many rapists, so….

Oh, wait.

I know this seems kind of disingenuous, since I liked Magnus from Season of the Sun (to an extent), yet I want Mark dead.  But I do.  I hated all the men in this book.  I feel bad for Purity because her author give her nothing- not a backbone, not a personality, not a talent, not a scrap of luck, nothing.  Hot guy with scar doesn’t make all this better.

Here’s another thing, and I don’t know if it’s a OG Old School issue, or just a result of my small sample size, but there’s no flesh to the character of Mark at ALL.  He’s this guy who stalks in an out of the story with a stony expression, and sometimes Purity thinks wistfully about him (or gets mad at him for screwing the maids.  In fact, she’s more mad at him for screwing the maids than she is mad at him for raping her), but there’s nothing about what he thinks, or feels, or wants.  I mentioned in my review of Adora I want a romance to be a story about a relationship.  Yes, they tend to be more about the heroine than the hero, but the hero has to have something to him other than a scar.  This is all Purity’s story, not their story, and we have no idea what makes him tick, or why she loves him, or why he loves her.  They do, because the story requires them to love each other.

But really, I want to have some words with the author, because who puts her heroine through all this shit?  Seriously?  And to have the end be “and they run across the field into each other’s arms to swelling orchestral music” and THAT IS IT?  No conclusion to what happened with Monmouth?  Does Mark know about the blackmail or not?  WHY IS THE DANGLING END OF THIS ANNOYING THREAD BOTHERING ME.

The argument of “IT’S HISTORICALLY ACCURATE OKAY” doesn’t really fly with me, or at least, not when the abuse of your main character is this thorough.  You don’t have to put your heroine through all of this shit.  You don’t have to make your hero a cardboard cutout with a scar on his face.  You can make your characters likeable, even with all the abuse and horror (okay, that’s more of a dig at Bertrice Small, I admit that Purity was sort of likeable, if you like your friends rather dim).  You can be historically accurate and not make the reading experience so miserable.

On a more shallow note, the writing was, on the whole, not bad.  It wasn’t as over-wrought as Bertrice Small, (can you tell I really don’t like her?) and the dialogue sounded like the author had at least listened to how people talk (and then mixed it with a more formal “this is how people in Olden Times talked”).  However, and this is another convention of the 70s, I’m pretty sure, while there was a LOT of sex (like a LOT), it’s not explicitly described.  There are a lot of mountains of pure bliss, and jumping off mountains, and taking, but no specifics.  Even when Monmouth is making her do all these depraved things, she revolts at his “most outrageous demand,” and he offers to get his servant to make her do it…. But I have no idea what that could be.  Oral on him?  Oral on her?  Anal?  Did they know about heterosexual anal in the 70s?  Watersports?  SERIOUSLY THIS DEMAND WHAT IS IT I NEED TO KNOW.

I know that the mores of how explicit a sex scene can be has changed over the past 40 years- I think we were talking in the Book Club Discussion in September about how nothing is complete without anal anymore, whereas about 20 years ago, the idea of her going down on him was like, DIRTY.  I can’t be the only one that’s read The Pearl, the Victorian magazine of erotica.  For the time, the stories are rather lewd, but not as graphic as they could be.  And as I was reading the section of Purity’s Passion that takes place in the boarding school, it almost seemed like I was reading a cleaned up version of Victorian porn.

Someone in the comments of the Season of the Sun review talked about how these OG Old School books with all the rape are more like forced orgasm fantasies.  Which, if the main audience for this type of book is women who are just old enough to feel like they missed the Sexual Revolution, and are still stuck in the idea that active enjoyment of sex is something forbidden, then yes, I can accept that argument.  It makes me incredibly sad, that this is one of the few acceptable places where women’s sexuality is even up for discussion, and even then it’s all passive reception on the woman’s part.  You are allowed to enjoy it, as long as you didn’t initiate it, and you’re not an active participant.

My own theory on rape fantasies is that part of the attraction is that the onus of the active portion of the sex on the top, so if the bottom has no idea what they are doing, it’s okay.  This is a completely unscientific theory, and does not, obviously, apply to everyone.

Here’s something that’s been turning over in my head for the past week: In the time these were written, by women for women, we, as a society, were still deep in the throes of putting the onus of preventing rape on women (“She shouldn’t have been wearing that short skirt” and “Well what the hell did she expect, being in a bar and having fun”) and still defining rape as unwanted sex that the woman resisted “to the utmost.”  (You want an exercise in Rage?  Look at the Model Penal Code’s suggestions on what rape statutes should be like.  And then thank your lucky stars that very few jurisdictions even considered them).  Anyway, I feel like there is some connection between the romance novels by and for women being so rape-heavy, and the culture being even more rape-culture-y than it is now.  I don’t know if the rape culture created the trend in the literature, or it is just correlation, not causation.  I’ve been pondering this for a while now, and haven’t reached any conclusions.  Any thoughts, or am I just making shit up?

To conclude, as Abigail Bartlet says, “It’s our history. Better or worse, it’s our history. We’re not going to lock it in the basement or brush it with a new coat of paint. It’s our history.” The evolution from this leads to Vivian Vaughn (one of my favorite early 90’s writers, who we will be discussing in the future), La Nora, and the awesomeness that is Joanna Bourne, my beloved Caroline Linden, and my new favorite person, Zoe Archer.  (SERIOUSLY.  SAVED MY SANITY.)  But just because it’s history and we can’t ignore the fact that it exists doesn’t mean I have to read it.

I don’t mind reading with a look of perpetual “WTF” on my face.  I think I’ve made that pretty clear.  But this?  Reading with my lip curled in disgust the entire time?  No.  Many times no.  No more OG Old School- I’m going to stick with the early 90s bubblegum. 

EDITED TO ADD:  I see while digging up the publication info that there is two more books in the Purity Series- Purity’s Ecstasy and Purity’s Shame (and no summaries for either, except apparently there are pirates involved (OF COURSE THERE ARE))). So I suppose that my complaints about the rather abrupt ending were addressed, and it’s possible that Mark and Purity have an actual conversation (but no money on that bet.  Why would they start now?).  However, looking at just the title for Purity’s Shame makes me go, “…my god, Seymour is going to heap another 800 pages of crap on her heroine’s head?” Of course my Trainwreck Syndrome is shouting, “Oooooo!  We HAVE to find out how bad this gets.  WE ARE A COMPLETIST IT MUST BE DONE” but I’m going to resist that urge for as long as I can.

Comments are Closed

  1. Marguerite says:

    Oops. Either I got the HTML wrong, or I’m not allowed more than two links in one post. Anyway, in addition to the listing for Purity’s Ecstasy in the “Sheik” category, they also put it under the “Pirate” section.

    Captcha: lower48. Yes, this may be one of the most rape-a-riffic books in the lower 48 United States!

  2. Carrie Sessarego says:

    Redheaded girl, Don’t do it!  For the love of God!  But pleeeease review Windflower, please pretty please?  You’ll love it – there are pirates and a pet pig.

  3. Zoe Archer says:

    I saved your sanity?

    WOO HOO!

    That’s really all any author can hope for.  Either that, or driving readers mad.  Think of all the lunatics, crouching in corners, muttering to themselves, “The book. The BOOK!” 

    But sanity’s good.  So, you’re welcome. I’m all about heroines with agency, including sexual agency.  Forced seduction?  Meh?  Disconnect with their own sexual desires?  Feh.  Passivity?  Bleh.  Heroines who are just as driven about their ambitions as the heroes?  Yes, please.

  4. Gina says:

    The Kadin by Bertrice Small was one of the first romance novels I ever read, and I remember being all “oh okay, okay, huh that’s not right, hmm, okay” then got to the very rapetastic end and the WTFness of it all hit me. Seriously, I have never been so fascinated and pissed off at a book at the same time. And it’s hitting me again, now that some other commenters brought up that author. Man, that book was a trip, but it sounds like this book takes the cake.

    And my vote is for anal, possibly on him. They had dildos back then, right? Heh.

  5. That’s really all any author can hope for.  Either that, or driving readers mad.  Think of all the lunatics, crouching in corners, muttering to themselves, “The book. The BOOK!”

    I’ve read some of those, too.

    (This is why we love you.)

    That’s one of the things I loved about London.  Once she was given the chance to see that there was more to life, she grabbed it, with both hands.  (And then told it to get on that altar and…. mmmppphmmm.)

  6. Maureen says:

    I hate to point this out, but rape Gothic such as you describe was actually seen as pretty feminist, by many. Meanwhile, a lot of anti-rape epics also included the heroine getting raped a lot or getting into sexually humiliating situations. The difference was that then the heroine kills the rapists, so that makes it perfectly all right. People got mad at me when I suggested that in the 70’s and 80’s, women became swordwielding or magichurling heroines by getting raped, but they knew I was describing the exact truth. Fortunately, most of this is gone, but a lot of it came straight from the rape side of the romance genre.

    Jo Clayton’s Aleytys series is probably the worst along these lines; the Diadem gives her amazing powers, but not until she’s been raped at least ten times per planet. Other picaresque series of this type usually have the woman rising from slave to ruling empress to slave to goddess with lots of sex scenes, like Tanith Lee or… well, there were lots of ‘em in the 70’s and 80’s, but I can’t remember them now. A lot of them were pretty literary, and went for four or five volumes. English women seemed to write a lot of that lush epic picaresque stuff.

  7. Maureen says:

    Tanith Lee’s Birthgrave series. Yeah, that’s a perfect example of this kind of epic.

  8. Zoe Archer says:

    That’s one of the things I loved about London.  Once she was given the chance to see that there was more to life, she grabbed it, with both hands.  (And then told it to get on that altar and…. mmmppphmmm.)

    Heh.  That’s all.  Just: heh.

  9. Char says:

    Reading through the posts and in particular DMs, it occurred to me that this type of adventure over the top rapistic novel might in part be a responce to the Barbara Cartland books from the 60s -on (maybe even now, she left a 100 to be published when she died).

    It is my understanding, and I maybe wrong, that her view was that romance ended with the first kiss, so that’s where her books ended – the first kiss.

    I read a few of her books, I remember them as being peaceful, totally focused on the relationship and it didn’t move very fast and, obviously, not very far.

  10. Suze says:

    I think RHG should read The Windflower next. Sort of a cleanse-the-palate experience.

    THIS!  You’ll be ruined for all other pirate romances, though.

  11. Literary Slut Kilian says:

    I remember Angelique, read some of the books when I was a teen years ago.  Don’t remember a thing except the name and that I was immediately reminded of her and her adventures when I read Misery by Stephen King.  All that rapiness drove me into the worlds of Elswyth Thane, Georgette Heyer and Mary Stewart instead. 

    Thanks for taking a bullet for us, RHG, so we don’t have to.

  12. Carrie S says:

    RHG, I realize this is a slight spoiler, but I just want to reassure you that the pirates’ relationship with their pet pig (in Windflower) is purely platonic.  I just know we can all sleep better now having established that extremely important fact, except for those who are so pure of heart that they didn’t even consider the dreadful possibilities until this very moment and are now reeling in horror.  It’s OK, folks, it’s not THAT kind of romance 😉

    any76 – why do I bother using a stupid initial when 76 percent of the time I forget and type my whole name anyway?

  13. Susan says:

    OMG,  Thanks, RHG, you really took one for the team with this book. Please don’t read the sequels – life is too short.

    Yes, this sounds like a typical bad Old Skool 70s bodice ripper.  Goddess knows I read enough of them back in the day.  They were considered romances, but I agree with those who don’t consider them romances now.  And I agree with those who call them manifestations of the era.  For those who are too young to remember, back in the 70s, there was a lot of uneasiness about feminism.  Yes, more than there is now.  Do some research about the campaign to defeat the ERA and you’ll see what I mean.

  14. infinitieh says:

    Kudos to RHG and OMG to the book!  I’m so glad I didn’t read romances until a couple of years ago (aside from a short spat of Harlequins in college which were strange enough).

  15. Susan says:

    But you know, now that I think about it, I bet the author laughed all the way to the bank. Just like B. Small, R. Rogers, & J. Wilde.

  16. cate says:

    @Erin – I’m with you on Teresa Denys, The Silver Devil remains in my top 20 romances, but the hero, is ,as you said, an utter
    psychopath. The only thing I can say about him is that TD made him faillable, & bizarrely,I like him,whilst loathing him !
    Unfortunately I never made it more than halfway through her only other book.
    As for male writers masquerading as females…Bernard Cornwall ( Sharpe) writing as Susannah Kells – A Crowning Mercy & Fallen Angels, & making a really good job of the romance genre.
      As for the rest of my 70’s,& 80’s BR’s …Now, & oddly enough ,then.  They just make me want to beat someone with my Le Creusets !  …But when you had the limited choice available to a reader of romance in the UK at that time, – Barbara Cartland, Catherine Cookson (  Super Virgins or slit your wrists heroines – you choose !)  I used to thank god for Mary Stewart ,  &  take whatever else I could get my
    hands on with a sigh of relief !!!!!

  17. Brandi says:

    I can’t understand why people would buy and read a whole genre of rape fiction.

    For the same reason(s) lots of people write tons of rape (“non-com”) fanfic now?

  18. I’m so glad to hear that you have enough self-preservation to say “Enough! No more!” with regard to the old school romances. I can say, based only on your review, that this would have been an DNF for me.

    Though the genre has changed in many ways since these kinds of books were popular (thank goodness!), I do think it is this sort of book that non-romance readers still associate with the genre – so is it any wonder the genre gets a bad rap?

  19. SB Sarah says:

    One thing to note in the rape-heavy romances: the heroine, subject of that violation from whomever (or several whomevers) in the course of the plot had a happy ending. I don’t know if I can underscore enough how striking that is to me, and how important I think it is. The female who was forcibly assaulted and initiated into sexuality against her will had a happy ending. Yes, maybe it was with her rapist (Hi Luke! Hi Laura! And Shanna and… I have to stop now or I’ll run out of bandwidth) but she didn’t end up an ostracized, scorned prostitute, dead, or a dead ostracized scorned prostitute. She had a happy ending with love and fulfillment and some purpley-expressed manifestations of joy.

    As Candy wrote (or maybe it was me and I can’t remember) in the Bosoms, the wages of sex are not death or disease. The wages of sex ultimately are happiness. That’s a rather large contrast with what is usually communicated – to wit,  “women + sex = NO NO NO OH GOD WON’T YOU THINK OF THE CHILDREN.”

  20. Erin says:

    @Cate

    “I’m with you on Teresa Denys, The Silver Devil remains in my top 20 romances, but the hero, is ,as you said, an utter
    psychopath. The only thing I can say about him is that TD made him faillable, & bizarrely,I like him,whilst loathing him !”

    That is exactly how I feel about him as well.  He was strangely likable in a unlikable way. lol. I think another point about the SD, yes the first time with Felicia was forced, but Domenico would never have allowed Felicia to be raped repeatedly, gee, I think he would have done worse than letting his hunting dogs tear the guy up lol. I did like the Flesh and the Devil, but not near as well as The Silver Devil.

    I remember hazily my first romance book was a Harlequin by Violet Winspear (I really thought her name was cool beans), I read this at some point in Middle School in the late 70s early 80s.  Prior to that it was the Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan Books, hey they were kinda romances and I got into watching those from the weekly Sunday Afternoon Tarzan Theatre on T.V. I used to think Johnny Weissmuller was pretty dang hot as a kid.  He was a senior citizen at that point, but they had frozen him for all time on film in all of his bare chested manly glory!  Jane was such a lucky girl!
    http://www.geostan.ca/ in the famous words of Pepe Le Pew – He could screech to me with jungle love any damn time he felt like it!

    Mary Stewart was another favorite with me as well. I loved “Touch Not The Cat”
    Then I discovered Kathleen E. Woodiwiss and it was off from there.  Funnily enough the only KW book that I can stomach now is “Ashes in the Wind”

    It’s so much fun rambling down memory lane!

  21. cate says:

    @Erin   – Mary Stewart remains one of my heroines of romance ….And the woman who inspired me to go around the Greek Islands !  Ah ! The Moonspinners ( & not the dreadful travesty of the film of it !)

  22. Erin says:

    Cate,
    I agree about the Moonspinner’s movie even though I like Hayley Mills.  I especially agree with your comment about Mary Stewart.

  23. I’m thinking it deserves the F and a warning for several ‘rape’ scenes.

    It seems though that the ‘rape’ involved in this book may be more of the rougher sex variety. I mean it’s Victorian style and if you look into it they basically started the whole kink thing.

    If it is really ‘rape’ not like the ‘ooo there’s a burgler, please shag me’ bit that you’d maybe do with your boyfriend…than count me out for that novel.

  24. Sharon says:

    I consider the book The Moonspinners and the movie The Moonspinners two completely separate bodies of work.  I love Mary Stewart first and foremost as the gold standard for all romantic suspense, but I love Hayley Mills and enjoy the movie as a young adult/teen adventure story as well.

    M.M. Kaye included a rape scenario in Trade Wind, which is probably the least popular of her historical romances. I like the book overall, like both the hero and heroine, and the scene works somehow—yes, it’s wrong and distasteful, but it somehow fits in time and place and given who these people are and the culture they are inmeshed in.  I think one could write the same book today without the rape scene and the book would be just as good. 

    Love M.M. Kaye, but her mysteries are pretty lightweight, with the exception of Death in Zanzibar which ties in to Trade Wind—I think Death in Zanzibar may have been written first, but I could be wrong.

  25. I think I remember this book—or series of books. It seems like there were several and I think they’re in some boxes out in the garage. Purity’s Impurity, or Purity Visits the Farm—just kidding. These books were written just about the time that the genre was taking off and publishers would buy almost anything. And the advances they paid were much larger than they are now.

    The name of the heroine alone is enough to make me gag.

  26. It seems though that the ‘rape’ involved in this book may be more of the rougher sex variety. I mean it’s Victorian style and if you look into it they basically started the whole kink thing.

    Uh, sure, I suppose, if you define “rough sex” as “rough sex without the consent of one of the participants.”  And she only enthusiastically consented to sex with three people in the course of the story.

  27. Elemental says:

    Wow. Rape can be a very powerful element of a story and character when handled thoughtfully and sensitively, but this….just seems so overblown it becomes faintly ridiculous. You can only have so many horrible things happen to a character before the audience starts to realise they’re being manipulated to feel bad, and start becoming numb to the whole mess. If it is a kind of old-school stealth erotica designed to focus on the rape fantasy, that actually seems better than if it’s meant to be a romantic tale of the triumph of love. At least then, the story would be attaining it’s goal.

    Mind you the theme that you have to undergo years of agony, loneliness and torment (possibly ending in death) before you’re allowed any moments of happiness is tiresomely common in old romances, including a lot of “Great Romantic Stories”. Apart from the lack of rape, one trend I like in modern romances is that the characters are often allowed to enjoy themselves a bit more.

  28. thetawnytart says:

    The review of this book really struck a nerve with me because I was disturbed by the treatment of rape in the book.  As an aspiring novelist who writes romance I have used rape and sexual assault, but not as part of the book that is meant to be romantic.  Rather it was used as a tool to show the growth of the main character and illustrate their triumph over adversity.  If art and writing is meant in part to comment on society I think it makes sense to depict violence against women as part of the evil in our society.  When it is approached from the perspective of conquering trauma might even be a positive thing for women to read about characters who have faced similar experiences and overcome them.  But depicting rape as this book seems to as something that is so ordinary as to be expected even from people you care about is disgusting. 

    @SB Sarah’s comment “One thing to note in the rape-heavy romances: the heroine, subject of that violation from whomever (or several whomevers) in the course of the plot had a happy ending.”
    I think that is an interesting point to bring up and maybe does somehow mitigate the problems with the book.  But some part of me almost wishes she told Mark (?), the one who raped her that she is in love with, to go fuck off and maybe had more problems (although how she could actually have more problems I don’t know) and overcome her trauma on her own and find someone who won’t sexually assault her.  But I guess it is progress to some degree that she got a happy ending.  Lord knows she deserved it. 

    I think the attitudes that created the rape-romance books that told women it was wrong to enjoy sex are in fact changing and that is no longer the norm, at least in the U.S. Definitely a good thing.

  29. Karen H says:

    Life is too short to read crap like this book (so thanks for sticking with it so I don’t have to)!  I started reading romances in the mid-90s and eventually read Rosemary Rogers since “Sweet Savage Love” was held up as a great book.  I couldn’t believe what happened but it was a lot like this Purity plot.  I did read the second book also but by the third, I gave up.  I mean, Steve and Ginny were supposedly the great loves of each other’s lives and they were hardly together but very busy with other folks!  I did try another of her more recent books but it wasn’t much better in terms of the things that the heroine has to go through so I have dropped her off my list.

    On the other hand, I’m still reading Catherine Coulter even though one of her early books (in the Earth/Fire Song series) had a secondary character rape another secondary character in front of the heroine and THEN (I’m still amazed at this) he became the hero of a subsequent book in the series!  TOTAL WTF!!  But it hasn’t happened since and I like the FBI series so I do read her.

    I’m kind of surprised right now as to what people will like as I am finally reading “Outlander” by Diana Gabaldon.  My used bookstore owner commented it was one of the most romantic stories she’d ever read when I told her that I was reading it but didn’t care for it that much.  I’m only going to finish it because I’m 83% through it (it was free for my Kindle or I probably still wouldn’t have gotten around to reading it) and I hate to be a quitter.  But I am NOT planning to read any of the subsequent books and I don’t understand why everybody thinks it’s so great.  Yeah, (spoiler alert ahead for the 3 people besides me who haven’t read the book yet) the spanking and the witch burning and the hand mangling and torture and the heterosexual and homosexual rapes are probably historically accurate but I definitely don’t need to read about them.  And I say the same thing about “The Girl with…” series.  I won’t be reading them either because I read for enjoyment and the things that I have discovered happen in those books to the heroine are in no way appealing to me.  Yes, I’m a feminist and I know the author was supposedly one, too, and Lisbeth supposedly triumphs over the evilness that is done to her but why on earth would I want to read about all that?  And don’t tell me “the writing is great” because there’s plenty of great writing out there and it’s not used to make me sick to my stomach.

    Anyway, I see that my secret word is “means69” and I’ll let you all think of appropriate responses to that!

  30. Philippa Chapman says:

    I was reminded of Angelique as well. I read a few in that series [I was a teenager and they were in a modest ‘pick up and read’ type library at a hotel or something].

    There was another in which the [supposedly] feisty heroine declared she’d never, never NEVER marry Count X because he was lame, ugly and scarred. Did she marry him? Yup, she was basically told to by her parents or some such. Was he all those things? Well, when they finally did the deed it was dark and her hands felt scars on his thighs [I think]. It wasn’t until she’d been laid prostrate and limp with satisfaction that he let her SEE him naked. The scars were minimal and he was otherwise most studly. Did she give him a piece of her mind and put his balls in a vice? [sigh]. Nope. All was forgiven because he was HAWT and could make love all night long. GRRR.

  31. it was used as a tool to show the growth of the main character and illustrate their triumph over adversity. […] When it is approached from the perspective of conquering trauma might even be a positive thing for women to read about characters who have faced similar experiences and overcome them.

    I often find that when a “heroine triumphs over adversity” she does so very rapidly/easily. If she doesn’t, then she’s likely to receive negative comments from some readers, who see her as a whiny, passive victim instead of a strong, confident, admirable survivor.

    I suppose I could have added this as a negative response to the “what have you learned from romance novels” thread because, as I’ve suggested elsewhere, I think some of the embedded messages in romances might make some of us feel worse due to the implicit (or explicit) messages they contain about those who are unable to “triumph” over adversity.

  32. SuperiorJane says:

    Oh My StarZ !

    These sorts of novels were what both of my grandmothers had stacked up in their bedrooms. When I was a little girl I would sneak in there and read snippets. It was horrifying and yet..could I look away ( can you not watch a train wreck ? ) for love nor money.
    One book that has stayed with me ( sadly ) involved the forced “breeding” of slave women on some horrid plantation . I was roughly 8 or so when I found that book on her floor and read the 1st chapter, mouth agape. I was a pretty smart kid and I knew what I was reading was “naughty”…. I just had no idea how so.

    These were also the sorts of “romance” that made me a huge huge scoffer or reading THAT sort of book. Because A. My GRANDMOTHERS read them and B. They were AWFUL !
    If my friend Heather Ferguson had not allowed me to peruse her copy of ” Morning Glory ” by LaVyrle Spencer when I was in 9th grade ( THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU !!! )) I never,ever would have known any different, and would really have missed out.

  33. kkw says:

    I enjoyed the hell out of Old Skool romances, although it is likely that I wouldn’t have the tolerance for them anymore.  I would be willing to read the next installment at let the bitchery know (assuming I can find it).  I actually liked the 70s ones more than the 80s – possibly this is an imaginary distinction I made up in my head – but as I recall, there was a time when heroines had lots and lots of sex, with multiple partners, and lots of kinks, including a heavy serving of rape all around.  They were adventure heavy books, with heros who were ciphers (I’m not sure they had even 2 dimensions) because it wasn’t about the hero, or the relationship.  But then it seemed like it was made a rule that the heroine was only ever allowed to have sex with one man, otherwise she’d be a whore.  So the obligatory raping had to be done by the hero.  Which I found awkward, and infuriating in a way that I hadn’t previously – because it wasn’t like all men are potential rapists and have fallen under the compulsion of this irresistible vagina (which is both unlikely and problematic but I’m pretty good with the suspension of disbelief) but instead Our Hero is the one and only rapist, which just serves to undermine his heroism.  And then, because the heroine was only going to ever have sex with one person, and that person had to be the hero, and heros are not equal to rapists, there were no more rape scenes.  Which was progress of a sort, but the plain vanilla sex that came to predominate for a while kinda bummed me out, as did the restrictions on the heroine’s adventures, sexual and otherwise, so I’m pleased with the diversity that’s available in the romance world today.

  34. Deb Kinnard says:

    Why stop at 90s romance? There’s been a swackload of good romance, both contemp and historical, written in this century. Or do you secretly enjoy a bad read in a “OMW it’s so bad it’s terrific! and now I can bellyache about it” sort of way?

  35. Dragoness Eclectic says:

    *scratches head*

    I must have missed the rapetastic Beatrice Small stories, then. I read all of The Last Heiress series (as of last year, anyway), and quite enjoyed it, and didn’t remember it being at all rapetastic. The matriarch was widowed several times and had lovers as well, but it was all consensual. There was threat of rape by the villains, but fortunately hero & heroine stopped them, like good heroes do.

    Did Ms. Small change her style in recent years or something?

  36. I did a review that hasn’t been posted yet of Adora, which was 12 kinds of rapetastic, and the only other book of hers that I’ve read was The Love Slave which starts with the heroine subbing in for her twin sister in her twin’s marriage bed, goes on to have her kidnapped and raped by Vikings, then sold to a man who trains her to be pleasure slave for a sultan, who then gives her to some other guy, who then gives her BACK to the guy who trained her to be a love slave in the first place, because he’s the hero and that’s where she’s supposed to end up.

  37. Susan Reader says:

    This is going to ramble a bit….

    The school scenes remind me very much, down to the details, of some Victorian porn I read many years ago.  I’m reminded of the main character in Elizabeth Peter’s Die For Love (a mystery, BTW), figuring out that a Famous Romance Writer plagiarized one of her books from Victorian porn.

    A couple of people mentioned E. M. Hull’s The Sheik.  What I find interesting is how utterly Hull rejected rape as acceptable male behavior in her later books.  Sometimes it’s almost pathological, as in The Lion-Tamer where the hero won’t make love to his wife, who adores him (he’s clueless about this), because she might feel assaulted.  It’s a little funnier in Sons of the Sheik, where one of the sons goes out and kidnaps his own European beauty and brings her back to the desert fastness to have his way with her, whereupon he is reamed out by his father for this utterly despicable act.  I remember the kid’s defense as something along the lines of “But Dad, you did it, why can’t I?”.

    The absolute tip-top rapey 1970s WTF for me is Lolah Burford.  I found her books when I was trolling through a used book store in the 1990s.  First up, Maclyon where the hero (on the other hand, let’s just call him the main male character) kidnaps a girl from a party and rapes her for the hell of it.  This binds her to him forever, and about half of the book is about her struggles to stay with him because he is Her Man.  The Scottish Rising of 1745 comes along about Chapter 2 and complicates matters greatly.  They both eventually wind up as bondservants in the Carolinas, and do finish up together in the end.  It’s told in alternating chapters; his experience, her experience, back and forth.  It’s the only book I ever mutilated.  Eventually I ripped out all the chapters about the girl and threw them away.  The chapters about the guy make a resonably cohesive story about a young man discovering that just because he’s young and cute and rich the world does not owe him a living (or even much respect), and learning to deal with it.  The chapters about the girl are just rape-and-suffering on and on and on and on.  She starts off raped by the guy, then by British soldiers, then by a British officer who puts her down a hole and hauls her up every once in a while to rape her some more, then by…pretty much every male character she meets in her quest to be reunited with Her Man.

    But Burford wrote another book, called Vice Avenged.  Here, again, it starts off with the main male character (MMC) raping the main female character (MFC).  But this time their respective fathers (who are both peers, maybe both dukes) get together and decide that the MMC needs to be taught a lesson for punishment.  They arrange things so horrible stuff happens to the MMC (I think at one point he winds up as a galley slave or some such), and every time he makes it out of one mess they dump another one on him.  Eventually the MFC finds out about it, and starts to think that maybe this is a bit too much and gets the fathers to back down.  I think the MMC eventually apologized to her.  In any case, she decides he’s OK and marries him.

    So, two rather different experiences for the females.  Somewhat confused by Burford, I picked up another book by her.  I got as far as the part where the duke discovers his long-lost illegitimate son, brings him into his household, and…seduces him?  I decided I would never understand her characters’ motivations and gave up.  Truly, truly, WTF.  The seventies were a strange time.

  38. Susan says:

    RHG: (In stern voice used when correcting dog)  LEAVE IT!

    And yes, B. Small has changed her style some in the last few books.  For instances of rape of heroines, try Love Wild & Fair and Skye O’Malley.  I’m not sure if she changed because the times did, or if she started to wonder what her grandchildren would think.  Suspect R. Rogers might have the same concern.

    And Susan Reader, you’re right.  The 70s *were* strange.  We had horrible taste in clothes, TV, and music.  I know – I was there.  Disco – what WERE we thinking?  Love Boat – Arghhhh!  Actually, I don’t think Lolah Burford was in the romance category back then.  I would call her stuff historical erotica now, on the BDSM side.

  39. Anne Ardeur says:

    I think I’ve read this, or one in the series.  Or a clone of it, maybe.  When I was 14 (maybe younger.  Probably younger), and thought Kathleen Woodiwiss was the bee’s knees.  And I hated it even then.

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