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The genre of works of extended prose fiction dealing with romantic love existed in classical Greece.[7] The titles of over twenty such ancient Greek romance novels are known, but most of them have only survived in an incomplete, fragmentary form.[7] Only five ancient Greek romance novels have survived to the present day in a state of near-completion: Chareas and Callirhoe, Leucippe and Clitophon, Daphnis and Chloe, The Ephesian Tale, and The Ethiopian Tale.[7]

Precursors of the modern popular love-romance can also be found in the sentimental novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, by Samuel Richardson, published in 1740. Pamela was the first popular novel to be based on a courtship as told from the perspective of the heroine. Unlike many of the novels of the time, Pamela had a happy ending, when after Mr. B attempts unsuccessfully to seduce and rape Pamela multiple times, he eventually rewards her virtue by sincerely proposing an equitable marriage to her. The book was one of the first bestsellers, with five editions printed in the first eleven months of release.[28] Richardson began writing Pamela as a book of letter templates. Richardson accepted the request, but only if the letters had a moral purpose. As Richardson was writing the series of letters turned into a story. [29] Writing in a new form, the novel, Richardson attempted to both instruct and entertain. Richardson wrote Pamela as a conduct book, a sort of manual which codified social and domestic behavior of men, women, and servants, as well as a narrative in order to provide a more morally concerned literature option for young audiences. This conduct book genre has a long history.

Jane Austen is an important influence on romance genre fiction, and Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, has been called "the best romance novel ever written."[30] In the early part of the Victorian era, the Brontë sisters, like Austen, wrote literary fiction that influenced later popular fiction. Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre, published in 1847, introduced the orphaned heroine. Brontë's love romance incorporates elements of both the gothic novel and Elizabethan drama, and "demonstrate[s] the flexibility of the romance novel form."[31]

While the literary fiction romance continued to develop in the 20th century, the new subgenre of genre fiction, which first developed in the 19th century, started to become more popular after the First World War. In 1919, E. M. Hull's novel The Sheik was published in the United Kingdom. The novel, which became hugely popular, was adapted into a movie (1921), which established star Rudolph Valentino as the top male actor of the time. The hero of this book was an iconic alpha male who kidnapped the heroine and won her admiration through his forceful actions. The novel was one of the first modern works to introduce the rape fantasy, a theme explored in Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740). Although women were gaining more independence in life, publishers believed that readers would only accept premarital sex in the context of rape. In this novel and those that followed, the rape was depicted as more of a fantasy; the heroine is rarely if ever shown experiencing terror, stress, or trauma as a result.[32]

The popular, mass market version of the historical romance, which Walter Scott developed in the early 19th century, is seen as beginning in 1921, when Georgette Heyer published The Black Moth. This is set in 1751, but many of Heyer's novels were inspired by Jane Austen's novels and are set around the time Austen lived, in the later Regency period. Because Heyer's romances are set more than 100 years earlier, she includes carefully researched historical detail to help her readers understand the period.[33] Unlike other popular love-romance novels of the time, Heyer's novels used the setting as a major plot device. Her characters often exhibit twentieth century sensibilities, and more conventional characters in the novels point out the heroine's eccentricities, such as wanting to marry for love.[34] Heyer was a prolific author, and wrote

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