Beatrice Small and the worth of the oft-denigrated romance genre

Hmmm...found an article on Beatrice Small, who is the author of the novel I'm currently reading. She died before completing her 57th novel. And published her first at the age of 41.

Beatrice Small Novelist of Ribald Romances Dies at 77

Nobody would have guessed that “Lust’s Leading Lady,” as Romantic Times magazine labeled her, traced her writing career to St. Mary’s, a school for girls run by Anglican nuns in Peekskill, N.Y.

But that was where she found inspiration for her first published novel, in the family lore recounted by her classmates from Turkey. It was also where she discovered that before a teacher named Sister Mercedes had entered the convent, the nun was known as Ivy May Bolton, one of Bertrice’s favorite childhood authors.

“She imbued in me a great love of history,” Ms. Small said of Sister Mercedes in a 1980 interview with The New York Times, “and she didn’t think it was funny that when I was 13 years old I was writing an epic romance in rhyme” — even if that romance was a risqué one, about an Inca princess who leapt to her death from Machu Picchu rather than succumb to the advances of an evil Spanish conquistador.

As a virtuoso in navigating the fine line between passionate romance and sophisticated smut, Ms. Small preferred to describe herself simply as “a nice lady who lived in the country and wrote books.”

[There's not really that much smut in her books. I'm 60% of the way through and the sex scenes are rather minimal to date on the book I'm reading. There's more smut in fanfiction and other more contemporary novels that I've read. Nor is her prose as purple as some others I've read. The last book I read was actually worse. Of course it wasn't edited, so there's that. These books were published prior to the 21st Century when people were still bothering to edit books.]

She was born Bertrice Williams in Manhattan on Dec. 9, 1937. Her parents, David Williams and the former Doris Steen, worked in the business side of television broadcasting. They named her Bertrice for her grandfather, Albert, who died just before her birth.

After St. Mary’s, she attended Western College for Women in Ohio but dropped out and transferred to a Katherine Gibbs secretarial school. She found jobs as a secretary and sales assistant for an advertising agency and in 1963 married a photographer, George Sumner Small IV, who was about 15 years her senior. They were together for 49 years until his death in 2012 at 89. She is survived by their son, Thomas, and four grandchildren.

Ms. Small’s first historical romance was published by Avon Books in 1978, the year she turned 41. The novel, “The Kadin,” was rooted in stories that a St. Mary’s classmate had told about her grandmother’s experiences as a member of the harem of the last Ottoman Empire sultan.

Ms. Small pursued provocative themes and events in Elizabethan England, Renaissance Florence and other locales, weaving with purple prose a sensual fictional tapestry peopled by strong-willed heroines, lustful princes and virginal maidens, their carnal encounters often managed between kidnappings and escapes.

In “Betrayed,” for example, the protagonist, Angus Gordon, is overcome by the sight of another character, Fiona Hay, in her bath.

“The most incredible urge overcame him,” Ms. Small wrote. “He wanted to lift her dripping from the tub, and kiss her cherry-red lips! He wanted to pull the pins that secured her black hair atop her head and let it fall over her wet shoulders, where he might bury his face in the soft, fragrant mass of her tresses. Then he wanted to carry her to the dark security of the bed space he had only recently vacated, and make love to her until she cried with the pleasure he would give her.”

A friend and neighbor, Andrea Aurichio, said of Ms. Small, “She wrote about sex, she didn’t talk about it,” adding: “She didn’t have any literary pretensions, either. People would call her a pornographer, would say, ‘You just write dirty books.’ She would say, ‘Yeah, I bet you don’t watch television either.’ ”

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