Love Conquers All Press celebrates all things romance, and romantic. This includes romance books and romance readers. Also, the romance novelist L. A. Zoe.

From Jane Austen to Barbara Freethy, readers who love to read about love have exerted a strong influence on the literature of the world.

Thanks to the Kindle ereader and Amazon, the romance genre has been totally freed from the constraints of Mills and Boon, better known in the United States as Harlequin.

Before Mills and Boon, the genre wasn’t called “romance” as such. Numerous pulp magazines and lines of books devoted themselves to publishing stories of true love. Romance also influenced the gothic novel, the trend started by Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. They, along with suspense novels with young female heroines, were popular lines of paperbacks until sometime in the 70s when, like the western, they died.

Although not exactly romance, but also containing a lot of love stories that turned out happily despite the narrator’s misdeeds and errors, was genre of confessions. These pulps also died out in the 70s.

However, Mills and Boon started the Harlequin paperbacks. With Nora Roberts’s first novel, they expanded the genre to American stories as well.

And many publishers have come out with book lines to compete with them.

And of course, many readers enjoy historical romance. These go back to simple historical novels such as Sir Walter Scott started with IVANHOE.

Georgette Heyer focused on the historical novel as a love story. She made the Regency period of England’s history her own for decades, and it’s still a popular time period for historical romance writers and readers.

The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss launched the genre in the United States, with Rosemary Rogers following.

The Far Pavilions by M.M. Kaye is a magnificent work of historical romance, though the man is the main character. He’s British, but spent his childhood in India disguised as an Indian boy. As a man in the British Army, he falls in love with a childhood friend who’s now a princess who’s been promised in marriage to a king.

Later, Diana Gabaldon wrote Outlander, adding in the twist that the woman was not part of the time setting, but a contemporary woman in the past through time travel. That makes it a combination of fantasy and historical romance, though in her books the emphasis is on the historical romance elements. However, by making Claire a woman of the 20th century, Gabaldon can help the reader to see the past in a different light. She made Scottish highlands a popular setting for romance.

Romantic suspense is an evolution from the books of Mary Stewart and Phyllis Whitney. Nora Roberts branched out into romantic suspense in the 90s. She even write a long-running series of novels that are romances, but also near-future science fiction and suspense (her main characters solve murders) under the name J. D. Robb.

A merger of romance and horror has created the paranormal romancce genre, courtesy of Anne Rice. With Interview With a Vampire, she began the trend of writing about vampires as creatures that could still feel the same love as those of us still alive. That book’s threesome of two men and a six-year old girl (when turned into a vampire) remains one of the more original relationship triangles in history.

Still, Laurell K. Hamilton brought us Anita Blake, a vampire hunter who has affairs with a variety of supernatural creatures. In the young adult market, Stephanie Meyer created a powerful romance between a living teenaged girl and a vampire man a hundred years old. With werewolves thrown in to create jealousy and conflict.

Strangely, fantasy is the modern genre perhaps the least touched with romance, at least in the major works. The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn and Arwen went through a longtime love that had to wait for the defeat of Sauron before they could marry. However, it’s hardly the focus of the story, just a small aspect of the overall story.

The Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series contains love stories, but they too remain in attenuated suspense while the characters carry out their important tasks to fight evil.

George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series breaks all the rules. The only main character who seems to even believe in romantic love is Sansa Stark. Her father and mother had a loving relationship, but all the Starks pay a high price for being the least disfunctional noble family in the 7 kingdoms.

Love Conquers All Press concentrates on publishing the books of romance novelist L. A. Zoe:

Romance Novels by L. A. Zoe – English

Romance Novels by L. A. Zoe – in other languages