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She says that romance novels were part of the evolution of gender relations at the time: “In those books in the ’80s, we didn’t see as a rapist. Writers have been grappling with whether a rapist can be a hero since bodice-rippers-so called because the heroes tended to force themselves on virginal heroines-like The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss and Sweet Savage Love by Rosemary Rogers (both Avon) stormed bookshelves in the 1970s.Ĭathy Maxwell, a longtime romance author whose next novel is If Ever I Should Love You (Avon, Dec.), was in college in the 1970s. “I wasn’t comfortable writing the kinds of sex scenes I had read,” she says, in which consent was, at best, ambiguous. While now known for big, stormy relationships, when Chase began writing in 1987, her books were traditional, closed-door Regencies.