Enjoyment.Independent.co.uk
Television producer Daisy Goodwin commented this week that ‘you can’t have a seriously written romantic book written by a man’. Below, Boyd Tonkin debates this proposition, while seven women authors select characters that work – or not – for them
I don’t know whether such a grand member of the broadcasting elite as Daisy Goodwin would know much about the novels of E V Thompson. A favourite pick of pensioners in libraries, they often feature feisty-looking, period-costumed heroines on their covers: farm girls flouncing at gates, ambulance drivers caught up in the dramas of war, fearless fisherwomen hauling nets from stormy seas. The Tolpuddle Woman, Blue Dress Girl, Paths of Destiny, Chase the Wind… with settings that stretch from China to Cornwall, these romantic sagas delight a large and loyal band of readers, among whom women will vastly outnumber men. And according to Ms Goodwin – if she has been correctly reported – men simply lack the equipment to deliver the female-friendly pleasures of romance. Tell that to Mr James Munro, a former Royal Navy seaman who later served for many years in the Bristol police force. He it is, after all, who writes under the pen name of “E V Thompson”.