Ten Nights of Love: Grace Livingston Hill

originally posted on February 4, 2010

first big book reading memories

As far as I can remember, my big book reading started at around age eleven, circa 1970. The very first adult romance, I ever remember reading was a hardback copy of Ladybird by Grace Livingston Hill. If I remember correctly our pastor’s wife gave it to my mother. Calling it an adult book is probably a misnomer. I’m pretty sure young adult romances didn’t exist back then. I read and collected many of her books during that decade of my life. They were interesting in their own way. My biggest memory of them, though, are pages and pages and pages of descriptions of rooms, houses and landscapes. I kid you not. All of which is probably why I don’t get all uptight over what other people consider purple prose. At least it moves the action along. Most of the time. Sheesh. (eyes crossing here)

early inspirational romances

Keep in mind that Hill wrote from the 1870s all the way up to the 1940s. There was also such a thing as censorship and attitudes and double standards and all that stuff back then. None of which stopped them from putting sex in the books, I suppose. Hill, though, was what we’d call an inspirational writer nowadays. So, regardless, I don’t believe we’d find anything sexual in her books.

Others from some of the early decades of the twentieth century I’m not so sure about, though. They were simply a heck of a lot more creative about how it was hidden. Ever watched movies from those early decades and noticed how they play with words to hide things that are never seen on-screen? Then you know exactly what I’m talking about. The movies had much stricter codes enforced on them, too. Think about it. Authors could get away with a lot inside those books without anything ever happening on the pages. We call them euphemisms and purple prose. Today’s romances aren’t the only books afflicted with them, either. So, yeah, I’m really starting to wonder about that “no sex” rule. When, exactly, did it go into effect and how they wiggled around it at times.

vintage covers

Don’t believe me? There’s a website called BookScans devoted to collecting and archiving the covers of vintage paperbacks (those from roughly 1939 -1959). Browse it sometime, just remembering that it archives by publisher and then by number and doesn’t have a search feature. It’s an eye-opener. Sex is an obsession in those early books if we go by the covers. Some of the worst examples aren’t even romances. Then again, publishers didn’t call them romances back then. OTOH, hey, how many times nowadays do books get called romances when they’re not?

But back to the point. During that era they were only beginning to figure out what the labels were going to be. So at times it’s difficult to know what is what, at least by our standards today.