Mills & Boon has been a doughty purveyor of romantic fiction to millions of teenage girls and women since 1908. A quick look at its kitschily designed website suggests that its reign as the go-to publisher of mushy romance is unchallenged (it is still privately owned, so hard numbers are unavailable).
And yes, it is still selling romances with such rivetting back-cover blurbs: “Jonas Buchanan is a man renowned for being arrogant and seemingly emotionless, both in business and in his private life. He never combines work and pleasure, and steers clear of any woman who doesn’t play by his rules… .” This is the description for a book improbably titled His Christmas Virgin.
Were it not for the fact that it deals in a lightweight commodity, M&B would be worthy of a case study in sheer business endurance. It has already been the subject of two books, one published by the formidable Oxford University Press, which supply a useful history but no “strategic” business explanation for its extraordinary endurance in an era in which the publishing business has seen some serious consolidation — the prefix Harlequin to the old family shop marks an expansion into the North American market.
It could, of course, be argued that the market for romantic fiction, like porn, never disappears, but that alone would not account for M&B’s endurance. My assessment is that the publishing house has survived and flourished because it has never, ever deviated from its winning formula. Unlike Bollywood that has been suffering ever since its song-and-dance, happily-ever-after blueprint hits metamorphosed into more sophisticated plots, M&B remained true to its values. These values may not appear particularly attractive in these politically correct times, but they certainly serve a market demand.
To start with, M&B as a publishing house never suffered the slightest ideological dilemma. Politically, its instincts were, and are, unabashedly capitalist and conservative. From 1917 on, global ideologies may have been divided between socialists, communists and capitalists, but Che Guavera-type hero or even a mildly Fabian ideologue — and women dig these types too — was not to be found in an M&B. Its heroes were unfailingly rich — sometimes obscenely so — owning industrial conglomerates, banks, mansions, cars, armies of retainers and so on. Some of the more exotic romances were set in former colonies (South Africa, West Indies, Australia), so these tycoon heroes also had “native” colonial servants in tow to play bit parts in promoting their masters’ virtues to the heroines.
M&B also remained more or less impervious to the post-war women’s movements. Thus, the hero was always a dominant character (witness our Jason in para 2). In the sixties, seventies, the heroine was either a secretary, nurse, governess or housekeeper to the hero or to one of his acquaintances. Either way, her role was as an economic subordinate. Interestingly, it was the vamp who was usually the hero’s equal, but the fact that she invariably lost the game made you wonder about M&B writers’ notions of women’s rights.
By the eighties, the rise of women in business and politics was too prominent to ignore, so the odd boss-woman did emerge in deference to the times. But the breed remained rare and even these alpha females eventually succumbed to the thrilling, masterful domination of the hero. The transformation of women was mostly acknowledged in an alteration in their personalities. In earlier M&Bs, heroines were virginal. From the eighties on, the women tended to be sexually active and demanding (which is why the prose of later books also became that much more risqué).
The other notable element of the M&B formula was the strong Caucasian element to the protagonists. Since M&B was a sturdy British business, the protagonists were mostly British and, later, American. The more adventurous writers threw in Spanish, Portuguese or Greek tycoons for variation (and sometimes Dutch doctors) but that’s pretty much as far as the exotica went — Asia or Africa didn’t even figure in the mix unless they were settings for the story.
Going forward, this is the element that’s worth tracking. If you go by what economists are predicting and what the Forbes lists tell you, the developed, Caucasian world is declining and it’s Asia that’s seeing the growing fortunes. The tall, dark, handsome tycoons of yesteryear are now mostly part of the infamous PIGS grouping of indebted nations and Britain and the US aren’t too far outside it. So, will M&B broad-base itself and offer readers Indian and Chinese billionaire-heroes instead? That’s hard to see in the foreseeable future not least because M&B never has bothered with authenticity. So, the Jonas Buchanans of the world will continue to feature in their granite-jawed profusion — at least until the balance of economic power shifts too radically to ignore.
