Abstract
My article focuses on the analysis of three popular romances by British women authors, with historical settings that range from the 1920s to the 1960s and the present time: Leah Fleming’s The War Widows (2008) and Mothers and Daughters (2009), and Katherine Webb’s The English Girl (2016). These novels revisit the historical context of World War 2 and its aftermath, a backward glance relished by millions of readers worldwide, who travel in time as participants of an addictive sort of historical exoticism. The appeal however does not end here, for these novels also exploit attractive or mysterious settings, and in traditional romance fashion, employ seductive male figures against whose intentions the heroines redefine their identities. As I shall argue throughout this article, the three novels by Fleming and Webb employ a threefold application of the “exotic” trope —historical, geographic, and emotional—as background for the presentation of heroines who, after a period of trials, find their renewed identities and life goals.
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