More On the Subject

Lately, I've been obsessed with this amazing website that reviews and snarks on romances. Unlike other snark-y romance sites, these girls are actual fans and they also are academics - making it for me, the perfect website. It's also helping me come to terms with my love for romances as well as helping sort through the dreck for some really great authors (Tree, you've got to read Loretta Chase). Among their many services they have a feature to help people identify romances they've read and lost. This appeals to my secret librarian side - yet another reason to love this site. However, this amazing summary floored even me, who seeks out the absurd in the world of romance:

"I was hoping you and your army of smart and bitchy readers could help me identify a romance novel I read when I was ten or so (in 98 or 99) and kept digging through my friends’ mothers’ romance novel collections during sleepovers.

The novel’s set in Regency England, I think. The heroine lives in Bath and spends her days lamenting the fact that all the men are foppish dandies and she can’t find one who won’t hide his mantitty with frills and lace. And then one day she puts on a dress in a shop and it magically transports her to Ancient Rome. There, she meets a fearsome guy named Magnus somethingorother who promptly makes her his slave. He does stuff like making her put on boobie-revealing tunics during his dinner parties and so on. Obviously she falls in love with him. But then one day she is magically transported back to Bath. She’s very confused about whether her months in Rome were real or just an opium-den-induced hallucination… But then she digs up some plaque or other that she and Magnus had buried together and she knows it was all real.

Thanks in advance!"

First of all, her summary skills are to be applauded. Having read several response papers that Jason was grading, not to mention various grant proposals, and other requests of this nature, I give the writer big props on 1. telling us what we need to know to make the i.d., but not giving us a long, involved play by play of the book 2. painting a sufficiently enticing plot for those of us who haven't read it to be curious about it, and 3. giving us enough snark to make me want to help her/meet her. 4. her use of "mantitties" and "boobies" in so short a paragraph to underscore the absurdity that is sure to be found in this romance.

Secondly, I am now incredibly interested in getting my hands on the book itself. The description sets up three rarities: 1. although the heroine is Regency English (possibly the most common period of historical romance), the setting is Ancient Rome, this is unusual - Italy is sometimes used as a setting (one of the genre's more exotic ones) but it is always from Renaissance forward and the plot then must have opera singers and/or courtesans. 2. This time-travel takes the heroine from a setting in the past, to even further into the past. Most time-travel romances, start in the present and send the heroine back into the past, or if they really want to shake things up they send the hero from the past into the present (or in the case of Janet Chapman's Highlander series - a whole passel of heroes), further, time-travel romances, when not set in the Scottish highlands, are set in England. Not unusual, is the change in location, time-travel in romances always seems to also include a geographical jump as well -see my note below. 3. If the memory of the person enquiring is correct, the heroine appears to return to her own time, without her man - ok, this is completely unheard of.

Fortunately, about a dozen readers knew exactly which book this was, since I didn't. For those of you interested it's Enlsaved by Virginia Henley.