Reading Lord Jim this week for book club, I was reminded again of the many readings of the word “romantic.” Jim’s trouble (boiling way down) is that he wants to see himself as the hero in some adventure story but does not (always/ever) act the hero. Another character describes Jim repeatedly as romantic. The word popped up again in an earlier book-club choice: The Deerslayer, which its author classified a historical romance. Hey, that’s what I write!
Sir Walter Scott, whose Waverley in 1814 (the same year I set “music story”) was a model of this mode of romance, defined it as “a fictitious narrative in prose or verse: the interest of which turns upon marvelous or supernatural incidents.” According Kay S. House on the Cooper Society Web site, for Scott romances did not have to be about love, chivalry, war, or the Middle Ages, but they did describe a “distant past.” A more-modern definition opposes it to “realistic fiction;” in romantic fiction the characters and situations are more idealized and less true to real life.
The labels on the bookstore shelves don’t give us so much leeway. But it’s good to remember that we romantic writers have nearly the whole of the universe for a palette—everything that isn’t exactly true.
Next book-club book: A Room with a View, with its “radical romanticism.” (according to the back-cover copy) And it wasn’t even my turn to pick.
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