Women’s magazine romance

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33816, 12 April 1975, Page 10

Women’s magazine romance

Heroines in Love. By Mirabel Cecil. Michael Joseph. 212 pp. N.Z. price $9.95. Can Miss Mirabel Cecil be true? Even the name is suspect. But there is the writer (authoress?) on the book’s dust jacket, framed by wooded parkland, in diaphanous caftan, complete with as provocative a cleavage as any heroine ever sported between 1750 and 1974, the period covered by this survey. There is. cause for wonder. She has written a hard-hitting, well-researched account of women’s magazines since their first apppearance in the late eighteenth century, which is somewhat belied by her image. It would be all too easy to laugh at the romantic period pieces through the ages, if present awareness of women’s condition did hot make them chilling. Obviously, it is no more difficult for women to be duped into stereo typed roles in the twentieth century than it was in the eighteenth, even if roleplaying has swung from Virtue Rewarded to Virtue Abhorred. Early in the piece, we have an account of a foolish virgin and a wise one. The former, Kitty Tasty, falls victim to the wiles of an adventuring lord who fools her into believing that he will marry her if she runs away

with him. So elaborate are his plans that it seems cruel to say the least (or a criminal abduction to be. more blunt) that Kitty founders, ignominiously pregnant and deserted. But then she has been an ambitious wench and must pay the price. Not so, in the case of her friend, Ella Worthy, whose unrelenting chastity lands her Lord Orlando Fitzwilliam. He is saved from the disgrace of a bad marriage by the discovery of some flaw on Ella’s pearly skin which reveals her as having been, all along, the abandoned waif of a noble family. So we follow our heroines through the vicissitudes of thwarted'love with particular emphasis on Victorian heroines. The stories of these young ladies were mirrors of the sentiments of their times. What was being written in popular stories reflected real attitudes and beliefs. The pattern did not change much in the 19505. A story of the period, cited in full, emphasises that all ends well romantically for the truly devout mum who is a happy homemaker. All ills are healed by a batch of schemes, a goodnight kiss for the children, and faith in one's beloved.