Eloisa James's Reading List

"Not particularly. I’ve never gone to a professional football game, and I don’t see myself going to one in the near future. But I will follow a great writer anywhere – into sports, outer space, even the Bronx. I tried it once and I couldn’t do it. I teach Shakespeare all day, and those are the voices that echo through my head. My supposedly modern guys all sound like Shakespeare actors."

"The past is the ultimate escape: we dream ourselves backward, into a time when women wore fabulously interesting and sensual clothing and, perhaps more importantly, to a time when relationships between men and women were highly structured. Hooking up is a far more confusing process than going to a debutante ball. I’m not sure, actually… But I will say this. This book is probably the most intelligently written historical novel I’ve ever read. This is a book that’s as much about marriage as it is about love. “This book is probably the most intelligently written historical novel I’ve ever read” The hero and heroine fall in love during a fractious marriage that changes both of them for the better: this book is the best evidence I can offer for the fact that a man and woman can live an intelligent, sensual, thoughtful and kind life together – even when the partners themselves could never be described as thoughtful or kind. Marriage is a tremendously interesting state, and this novel looks squarely at its best and worst qualities. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"

"As a romance writer, I hugely admire those authors who take on a serious challenge. It’s not particularly difficult to match two smart, funny people, especially if they have a modicum of good looks and at least one paycheck between the two of them. It is far more difficult to create a novel that circles around a relationship that seems impossible. Because we write in a genre (romance), I think it is particularly important that the reader experience some uncertainty – a nervous sense that this time the promise of the genre might not come true (a parallel would be the mystery that is utterly unsolvable halfway through). “It is far more difficult to create a novel that circles around a relationship that seems impossible” In Flowers from the Storm, Kinsale’s hero is a brilliant and dashing nobleman – who’s had a stroke. He can’t speak properly; he can’t make himself understood; he’s been shut away in a morbid mental asylum. Her heroine is someone from an entirely different class, a Quaker who volunteers to help in the asylum. Pairing the two of them – getting past the obstacles of health, class and general moral understanding – was a tremendous challenge, and Kinsale succeeded brilliantly. Romance is like literary fiction or any other genre: some of it is written brilliantly, and a great deal of it isn’t. I don’t think it’s accurate to characterise the genre as a whole. Kinsale’s book offers a thoroughly researched look at treatments for dementia in the period, an accurate description of stroke recovery, and a long story about how a Quaker and an English nobleman could overcome the many difficulties that stand in the way of a match like theirs."

"This book offers a brilliant mix of funny dialogue and a hysterical plot. A wedding photographer is pushed into shooting a porn movie set in a little town called Temptation. The hero is the town sheriff. The plot plays perfectly to Crusie’s talent for creating witty, frantic heroines. I actually think there are very few non-feminist romances, pace Publishers Weekly . Current academic scholarship credits romance for its focus on what a woman wants and deserves in life. They’re all pretty feminist – even historical heroines (who couldn’t hold a job) are forthright, strong women. Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s heroine owns a football team and the hero manages it: ie, she’s in charge of his paycheck."

"I think Ward did a fantastic job of capturing the complicated zeitgeist in America, post-9/11. This is a vampire book that plays directly into the sort of fears raised by the terrorist attack: the ‘good’ vampires fight ‘bad’ vampires, who merge into the general population and can’t be detected (except by the smell of baby powder, hardly an infallible attribute). My sense is that vampires are waning as a sub-set of romance. That said, I think the vampire, in movies or novels, appeals because he is presented as primitive and aggressive, in a way that would get a man labelled a jerk in real life. In romance, he is often described as unable to exist without the heroine. Christine Feehan’s vampires, for example, see only in black and white until they encounter their ‘mate’. I couldn’t read more than a few chapters of Twilight . My daughter is in 5th grade, as it happens, but she is much younger than I was at that age. She’s rereading the Harry Potter series at the moment, which is just where she should be. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s It Had to Be You . Here’s the opening sentence: ‘Phoebe Somerville outraged everyone by bringing a French poodle and a Hungarian lover to her father’s funeral.’"