‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that any essay about Jane Austen… must be in want of a poorly rendered paraphrasing of her most famous opening lines,’ writes Ella Risbridger in this sharp, gleefully obsessive field guide to romantic fiction. For her, Austen is the genre’s ‘mother’, and she crisply notes that while George Eliot disparaged ‘silly novels by lady novelists’, ‘she does appear to have read a lot of them’.

Risbridger is the author of two cook books, including the award-winning Midnight Chicken (and Other Recipes Worth Living For); a children’s novel, The Secret Detectives; and the editor of anthologies of poetry and food writing. She has read a lot of romance novels, too. At school, her class’s copy of The Other Boleyn Girl was confiscated because its spine was ‘cracked at just the right place so that the book would fall open to reveal Anne Boleyn in bed with her brother and their shared lover’. Later, she quested for ‘joyful queerness’ in the pages of gay fan fiction and, working in a community library, polished off sometimes two ‘kissing books’ a day.

She invites us to picture her as a romance heroine with ‘stripy pyjamas,........

© The Spectator