Category Romance books

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In Love With Love by Ella Risbridger review – a sexy celebration of romantic fiction

From Pride and Prejudice to Fifty Shades, a writer’s paean to the literature of desire

Eva Ibbotson, a doyenne of 1980s romantic fiction, once said self-deprecatingly that her books were aimed at “old ladies and people with flu”. To which Ella Risbridger, who is in her early 30s, sniffle-free and a devotee of Ibbotson’s “sexy and sweet” novels, has this cracking comeback: “If love is the most important thing, and to me it was and is, I want books that think that too.”

From here Risbridger plunges into what she charmingly calls “a field guide to delight”. Jane Eyre rubs shoulders with Ice Planet Barbarians (the bright blue aliens who inhabit the ice planet turn out to be sexy in a Mr Rochester kind of way). Pride and Prejudice makes its inevitable appearance, flanked by its many modern iterations, including the ones with dragons. Mills & Boon novels of every stripe are accorded the kind of sustained attention more usually given to Proust, while Judith Butler’s theories of gender are buttressed by a deft analysis of Rupert Campbell-Black, caddish hero of the Rutshire chronicles by the late, great Jilly Cooper.

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More sex please, we’re bookish: the rise of the x-rated novel

From the Women’s prize to the bestseller lists, authors are pushing the boundaries of how explicit the novel can be – and readers can’t get enough

When the judges awarded Yael van der Wouden’s brilliant debut, The Safekeep, the Women’s prize for fiction last month, they weren’t just garlanding a book that happens to have a few sexy scenes in it. They were responding to a work that engages with the current levels of literary excitement around sex and marries this with sweeping historical vistas and a distinctive sensibility. It was joined on the shortlist by Miranda July’s exuberant odyssey of midlife desire, All Fours, and Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis, a smart, quickfire account of a young academic’s work for a UN deradicalisation programme, which juxtaposes the world of Middle Eastern religious politics with a closeup relish for female sexuality.

While younger generations, at least, have said in recent years that they want to see more platonic friendship and less sex on screen, reading appetites appear to be going in the other direction, with a huge boom in romance and “romantasy” – the romance-fantasy hybrid driven by TikTok and the success of authors such as Rebecca Yarros and Sarah J Maas. We all have strong, mixed feelings about sex, and the cultural landscape reflects the whole spectrum of kinks and hangups. But that means that we have all the more need for writers like Van der Wouden, July and Sally Rooney, who push the boundaries of how explicit the literary novel can be while also giving us new ways of imagining how desire works within lives today.

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