Reading the Romance

Abstract

AbstractLockdown and the pandemic often put love and intimacy to the test, with partners separated, large families stuck at home together 24/7, and dating much more difficult to arrange. This chapter explores these complexities—intimacy, romance, love—through a reading of Sally Rooney’s Normal People and a survey of romance reading more generally. As a young person deprived of institutional life or a member of a couple starved for new input, the lockdown reader became acutely open to this brand of intimacy. Scenes of entanglement between individuals with limited opportunities for social interaction and group belonging, both those represented in romance and those inherent in the solitary consumption of a book, reflect and potentially redeem these isolating conditions. In this constellation, reading about romance doubles down on what reading tends to be anyway: a thing done bande à part, yet productive of its own feeling of intimacy. This makes sense of what readers themselves told us about novels by Austen and Gabaldon, Tolstoy and Rooney, all of which were pleasurable hinges between the solitude of 2020 and the promise of finding true love; between the desire for meaningful connection, and the reality of a certain kind of solitude that comes baked into the experience of a well-savoured literary romance. Reading validates aloneness, opening up the solitary reader to expectations of romantic intimacy more easily than of friendship. For this reason, the reading of romance has chimed with the deprivations of lockdown in ways that other forms of narrative consumption haven’t.