In Laurie Kahn’s illuminating documentary Love Between the Covers, we meet some of the world’s most popular authors, all of whom happen to write romance novels. One of them is Mary Bly, a Fordham professor and Shakespeare scholar who writes Regency romances under the pen name Eloisa James. Despite being a bestselling author, Ms. Bly found it hard to reveal to her colleagues that she wrote romance novels when she wasn’t teaching Shakespeare. She feared not being taken seriously. As the film reveals, this was a common sentiment among other writers who felt their professional life was somehow not enough.

Fortunately the film shows how things have changed, and works as an ode to female empowerment by showing great authors at the top of their game as artists, creatives and business-people. I spoke to Ms. Bly who shared insights about the things that inspire her writing, television, and how her books are like a drug.

After watching the film I bought my first Eloisa James book, in this case A Gentleman Never Tells. The first thing that struck me was how cinematic your writing is in terms of condensation, so let me start by asking, do you ever write screenplays?

I don’t actually, but what you’re saying makes sense because I read screenplays and television scripts constantly. The way we read has changed a lot, we read electronically, faster, and writing has to change too. Right now I’m starting a series that will be based vaguely on Modern Family, so I’m reading the scripts for that. I didn’t think about it, but it probably leaks over into my prose.

Some people say TV is the new literature, what do you think is behind that?

It’s identifying something that’s true and it’s that wildly creative writers are going into TV now. There were great things like The Mary Tyler Moore Show but with all the options available now, there is much more great writing piling up in TV. What that phrase identifies is the excitement of that new foray into a different area.

Right, after all Dickens came up with cliffhangers! I was very surprised to learn in the film that romance readers were early adopters of e-books, because it’s a genre I usually associate with paperbacks, but it makes sense now because they are like drugs in a sense, readers want more and they can get them faster electronically. What opportunities do e-books present to you?

I guess they are kinda like a drug. My favorite praise for my books came from a professor at Columbia who said they were “crack for intellectuals”. Let me give you an example, I published this piece called A Companion to the Essex Sisters, I wrote that series a few years ago, and these days you can do so much with e-books. In that series there was a thread about bullying, so I decided I wanted to write something about the actual bully which is the story you read in A Gentleman Never Tells, that character was a bully as a child, so I wrote about how that affected him and the other characters. Something else I did was I published a 140-page-alternate-ending to one of my early books, and it’s been interesting to hear readers’ reactions. The structure of the book has changed so much, just like on TV, you stay up watching an entire season of Orange is the New Black, and similarly authors have the freedom to provide things in a different manner.

Something else that struck me was how funny your writing was. I have to confess I was half expecting to roll my eyes with all the “corny” passages and costume descriptions people expect from romance novels. Whenever you meet a convert what is usually the thing that makes them embrace romance?

The wit is a big one. Often people have preconceptions because they think every romance is the same and there will be no suspense. The key of romance is you know how it’s going to end, but in the hands of a good romance writer you can’t see that ending as clearly. It’s just like a mystery, if you can see who did it from page one it’s boring. I’m reading a great romance now called Idol, about a plain young woman who finds this drunken guy who crashes his motorcycle into her front yard, he vomits and she hoses him down and turns out he’s a rock star. So I’m sitting there thinking there’s no way this is going to work, although I know the author will make it work.

There’s an unfair disconnect between how massive the romance literature market is, and how underrepresented and unserved women are in Hollywood films. Why do you think studios shy away from making products for women?

I don’t know. I could just be Pollyanna but I think things are changing, I’m a great convert of the X-Men series and women are playing a much bigger role in superhero movies than they were ten years ago. They did have some girl in a bustier, but they also had powerful characters. I watched it with my daughter and kept thinking this was better than what I had growing up. Things are turning around, there’s a huge chance we will elect a woman as President of the United States. My hope is my daughter will get to see that happen and that culture will be more open to things by women.

It bothers me that heterosexual men are expected to watch and own porn, they’re often encouraged to do so, but women often get chastised for reading romance novels, both of which help fulfill emotional and sexual desires. One has obvious technical skills and artistry behind it, the other does not. Is sexism also behind these two being talked about in the same way?

That’s pure sexism, the fact that women become aroused by romance novels makes some people believe they’re bad. The rare thing romance writers ever talk about is how many letters they get from men who claim romance novels gave their wives unrealistic expectations, how no man can make love three times in one day. You’re there thinking: wow, you were never young? It’s just so sad, but what can you say? I was teaching a creative writing class once, and this one guy said “nobody can perform like the men in your books”, he was the only guy there and all the women looked at him, he said “I’m gay and I know” there was this moment of dead silence. My guys are good, but they’re not really doing anything extraordinary. There’s this way in which men defend themselves against this sort of uber male protected in romance, that’s a flipside from the way in which they judge women’s arousal. In reality that guy wasn’t talking about sexual performance, but about guys feeling they’re heroes. That guy knew well that a young man can do it all night long, he wasn’t talking about sex, but about being a romantic hero which is what makes men uneasy.

I’m sure that dude had a massive collection of superhero t-shirts too.

You’re right.

During the day you teach Shakespeare, and I wonder if as a scholar, who also happens to be a romance author, you’re ever conflicted when you approach him. The Bard can be tricky because he can either be seen as a proto-feminist shining a light on women’s issues, or just a plain old misogynist perpetuating the customs of men of the era. How do you approach discussing him?

I teach him as a person who had a lot of ideas, not of those ideas were right. I don’t teach The Taming of the Shrew cause it makes me sick. I teach The Merchant of Venice and Othello, which has a lot of racism but is invaluable for students to pull apart that play and see how we’re in a moment where the play is about race, so we discuss things like white privilege and racism. Students are often shunned away from something, but they’re not told how to identify it, and Shakespeare is brilliant at talking big ideas. Juliet is the first woman in the English language to propose to someone, and she was all alone there for quite some time, she tells Romeo “if you want to get married I’ll send a messenger tomorrow”, which makes him go “whoa”. She’s a piece of work and Romeo is enormously passive and Romeo and Juliet has become the basis for so many of our romances.  

You’ve mentioned a pineapple set off the plot of My American Duchess, because you discovered that pineapples were outrageously expensive in Regency England. I don’t remember where I heard about pineapples being used as a way to let guests know parties were over by 1960s American housewives. Would you agree that romance novels touch on class issues perhaps more than any other fiction genre in contemporary literature?

Yeah, they talk about class all the time. My stories in a sense are about that, also about gender. I’m the daughter of a poet and grew up in a farm. If your parents are writers it means you have no money, and lack of money is uninteresting to me in a character, so mine have lots of money. But I find class so interesting in how people try to go up or down. In American I talk about pineapples which were so expensive in England, but in America at that time when a sailor came home you’d put a pineapple on the front of the house. So the pineapple indicated hospitality, it meant come see him, so it’s interesting you mention that about the 60s which is the opposite.

Love Between the Covers, will be coming out the same week the 36th Annual Romance Writers of America convention takes place (it’s held in San Diego from July 13-16) what can you say to readers about that week?

I will be in Italy that week so I will miss the conference and the film premiere, but I think a lot of people will be fascinated about the movie and how it looks at the business side of romance, as well as the writing. I hope many people enjoy it!

Love Between the Covers is now available on VOD and Digital HD.