In early November 2016, Sarah MacLean was 275 pages into writing her latest historical romance novel, The Day of the Duchess. She had hit all the right buttons – a titled (and entitled) duke; a beautiful, estranged wife touched by scandal; and an insurmountable challenge the pair had to mount before they could, well, mount each other. And then Donald Trump was elected. And MacLean couldn’t bear her hero any more.

“I woke up on 9 November and I was like, ‘I can’t write another one of these rich entitled impenetrable alphas. I just can’t,” says the New York Times bestselling author. “It was the story of that horrible impenetrable alpha evolving through love to be a fully formed human, which is a thing we do a lot in romance. And I just couldn’t see a way in my head that he would ultimately not be a Trump voter.”

MacLean is in London for RARE, an annual and hugely popular romantic fiction convention. At this year’s event, for which 1,500 tickets sold in 24 hours, readers turn up with wheelie suitcases to take home as many books as they can, queueing multiple times to get novels signed by the 100 or so authors attending. Romance is a huge industry (the genre is worth more than $1bn in the US alone) – yet, to some, it might seem a jarring relic among the current, wider conversations about sexual politics and gender equality. It’s fair to say it isn’t the most respected of genres. Hillary Clinton recently described it as books about “women being grabbed and thrown on a horse and ridden off into the distance”; a commonly held view that, given the popularity of novels about handsome highwaymen, isn’t entirely incorrect, even if the trope of the agency-lacking heroine is long gone.



The Flame and the Flower, regarded as the first romance novel, sees the heroine raped four times in the first 100 pages

MacLean, author of 12 romance novels and a Washington Post columnist, was in a tight spot with The Day of the Duchess: the novel was due just three weeks after Trump’s election. She called her editor. “I said, ‘I can’t do it.’ It was a bad day. But my editor was also a wreck about the election and understood.” So MacLean rewrote the entire book, giving extra context to Malcolm Bevingstoke, Duke of Haven: now he’s a changed man, one who works hard to get a second chance and earns it.

“In my early books I was willing to say they change over time,” says MacLean. “That book though, I was like ‘I can’t even stomach this guy, he’s not sexy.’”

Romance hasn’t always had much regard for empowering women. The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss, a 1972 novel regarded as the first “modern” romance, sees the heroine raped four times in the first 100 pages. But then again, when it came out, marital rape wasn’t a crime, and single women couldn’t get credit cards in the UK or US. The genre has never been divorced from contemporary gender politics – “it is a representation of the women’s movement,” argues MacLean – and authors and publishers are reporting a profound shift now, in the wake of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements or, in MacLean’s case, Trump’s presence in the White House.

‘A representation of the women’s movement’. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

In the 1970s, the archetypal romance hero was forceful, controlling, sexually demanding, the workings of his mind generally incomprehensible to the women he pursued. These days, he might be controlling, but readers are more likely to be given reasons for his behaviour. Rape has not been a plot device for decades – and even when it was, says MacLean, there was a reason for it. “The genre is often dinged for bodice-rippers’ forced seductions [but] there was a reason why heroines were thrown over the back of a horse. Even then, romance was feminist,” she says. In The Flame and the Flower, “you don’t choose to write that on the page if you’re not making a clear statement about what rape is and how the world treats women”.

Some romance tropes have remained constant over time. A quick flick through Audible’s categories reveals how specific readers can be, if they want: books on bad boy princes, expectant princesses, childhood sweethearts, fake relationships, “best friend’s sibling” or “brought together by scandal”. Rich heroes are big: a quick google throws up all sorts of novels about Greek tycoons and Italian billionaires. “It’s the fantasy that you’ll walk into a room and some guy will literally treat you like a princess … It was a clear trope – and then we elected a maybe-billionaire to president. And the way he treats women made that trope suddenly incredibly problematic.”

Anna Boatman, Piatkus publishing director, has witnessed the shift. “I was editing a book recently, and had worked with the author to make her heroine stronger as a character. Once we’d got her to be more forthright, suddenly the powerful, alpha, imposing hero’s behaviour seemed really appalling,” she says. “The way I edit has changed over the past year. You start really questioning things, phrases like ‘cat woman’ – it’s such a disparaging phrase for a single woman, and it pops up in romances. I saw it recently and immediately took it out. I don’t know if it would have leapt out at me in the past, but I thought: ‘I don’t want this intelligent, serious woman to reinforce these stereotypes.’”

I’ve never not written consensual sex, but now it feels like the consent needs to be explicit, vocal and enthusiastic Sarah MacLean

Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, the two US authors who write together as Christina Lauren, have found themselves reassessing their first book, Beautiful Bastard, a 2013 erotic romance between an intern and her boss, as it is being adapted for television. “He’s an ass and the female character is also an ass, so it works. But because he’s the boss, it does have a little bit of the discomfort of the workplace. By the end it’s flipped, and she does have a lot of the power and I feel OK about it. But on television, it just would not fly now, so we really had to show the reason why he’s so cold and arrogant,” says Hobbs. “Instead of just saying he’s arrogant because he’s smart, we’re going to give a reason for him being that way.” Billings agrees: “We would write it differently if we were writing it now.”

MacLean feels the same about her debut, Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake. “I had this scene at the opera where they have a fight and then he lifts her up and puts her against the wall and kisses her. I can remember writing that scene and thinking, ‘This is so hot.’ Now, thinking about it makes me feel really weird. I feel like if I could do it again, I’d do it a different way,” she says. “I’ve never not written consensual sex, but now it feels like the consent needs to be explicit, vocal and enthusiastic.”

EL James’s hugely successful bonkbuster Fifty Shades of Grey came out only six years ago, but its questionable gender politics have begun to niggle at some; the recent film adaptation of the third book, Fifty Shades Freed, was criticised for being out of step with current sentiment. “I remember what I was reading when I was stealing my mum’s books,” says Hobbs. “The heroines were like, ‘No, no, no’, because they were supposed to be like that – ‘I’m supposed to say no until you talk me into it.’ Whereas in books now, the women are owning it.”

However, for all their new awareness, the authors are clear that they don’t want to get in the way of anyone’s fantasies – most proclivities can still be catered to. “Every reader has their favourite trope and every reader has tropes they do not want to read. There are readers who hate ‘second chance romance’, and readers who love ‘brother’s best friend’, but hate ‘surprise baby’,” says Billings.

But women’s fantasies may be changing in the current political climate anyway; MacLean says the blue-collar hero has become more popular (“Mechanics are really big”) while Boatman says career women have begun appearing more often in manuscripts. “The fashions of romance have always changed over the years – they change with the fantasies that women and men want to have,” she adds. “And maybe in the current climate, women are having different fantasies.”

Even Christian Grey might have a hard time getting laid now. “One of the attractions of the alpha male as a fantasy is that feeling that responsibility is just taken away,” says Boatman. “That’s part of the Fifty Shades thing – that he makes all the decisions, and for a working woman that can be wonderful. But I think we are a bit tired of that now. The idea of having the responsibility for sex taken out of our hands is less exciting.”

“At some point, you’re like ‘how many gorgeous billionaire doms with eight-packs are there?’” adds Hobbs.