SOURCE: "The Writings of Catherine Gore," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. X, No. 1, Summer, 1976, pp. 404-23.

In this excerpt, Anderson uses a feminist perspective to identify the "womanly ideology" present in both Gore's work and many present-day romance novels, and argues that is it this motif that is the source of their appeal to women of all classes.

By the end of the eighteenth century woman's position in society was beginning to be discussed in Western Europe. The political revolutions in America and France, with their emphasis on individual rights; the romantic cult of sensibility, which stressed the value of emotions and the heart; the new concern with education, both religious and practical, all led to an interest in previously submerged groups within European society: slaves, Jews, peasants, and children, as well as women. Thus far, most of the scholarship on women in the first half of...