SOURCE: "Introduction: A Secret History of the English Novel," in her The Excellence of Falsehood: Romance, Realism, and Women's Contribution to the Novel, Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1991, pp. 1-15.

In the following excerpt, Ross traces the early development of women's novels against the mainstream categories and especially the label of "romance."

The only excellence of falsehood … is its resemblance to truth.
—Charlotte Lennox

A student in an introductory literature course put a plain brown cover on his copy of Willa Cather's My Antonia because he was afraid the feminine title and woman author would make everyone on the bus think he was reading a "romance novel." The cover was meant to prevent attacks on his taste and, more important, on his masculinity. How did "romance," a category that includes works as serious and carefully wrought as Spenser's Faerie Queene, come to suggest something both trivial and feminine...