If you’ve ever stayed up “just one more chapter” deep into the night, clutching your romance book (or headphones in my case) like it’s a lifeline, congratulations. You’re part of a very long and very iconic tradition. Because while the modern romance novel we devour today—with enemies-to-lovers banter, one-bed tension, and longing intense enough to make you audibly gasp—feels like its own universe, it has deep roots. Centuries deep.
Romance didn’t begin as a defined genre. Long before publishing categories existed, love was already shaping how audiences engaged with the story. Shakespeare wasn’t writing romance novels, but the emotional intensity in stories like Romeo and Juliet show how central love could be to storytelling. Once the relationship forms, everything else bends around it. Stakes rise, decisions escalate, and emotion drives the plot forward. That emotional pull is something romance fans still recognize today.
By the 18th and 19th centuries, those impulses evolved into something closer to the genre we now identify as romance. Books like Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, The Romance of the Forest, and Sense and Sensibility helped shape what romance would become: stories centered on women’s lives, desires, dilemmas, and dreams.
Thankfully, the genre has expanded over time, welcoming protagonists of all genders, identities, races, sexualities, and abilities, showing that all people are worthy of joy, complexity, and happy endings. The earliest romance stories didn’t just give readers love. They gave them a promise: that the emotional journey would matter and that the ending would satisfy. Heroines navigated rigid expectations, limited freedom, and impossible odds, and still found love on their own terms. Over time, two “rules” became the backbone of the genre:
A romantic relationship must be central to the story.
The ending must feel emotionally fulfilling—often, but not always, happy.
This is where we get one of the romance genre’s most beloved standards: the Happily Ever After, or HEA.
Romance reflects what readers want most, not just in fantasy, but in emotional truth. Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters helped shape stories where love is real and worth everything it costs. They portrayed women wrestling with their desires, and their heroines were often rewarded for wanting more, for speaking up, and for choosing love on their own terms. For readers with little freedom in real life, these stories became escape and inspiration. A fantasy, yes, but also a quiet kind of rebellion. Once readers got a taste of that emotional payoff there was no going back. The genre kept expanding and evolving, finding new ways to deliver the same addictive promise: No matter what happens, love will be worth it.
In the early 20th century, romance evolved and found writers adding other elements into the mix. Georgette Heyer introduced us to historical romances with her Regency series. Then came a gothic romance that changed everything: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Dark, dramatic, and utterly addictive, it helped cement gothic romance as its own irresistible lane, blending danger, desire, mystery, and longing. These stories combined romance, high-stakes suspense, and emotional intensity, often following heroines who were unraveling secrets while navigating powerful attraction.
The end of the 20th century sent romance in a bigger direction. Settings grew more ambitious, and bolder heroines led lives that felt more contemporary than the “expected” roles. Romance was no longer confined to ballrooms and drawing rooms. It was happening everywhere. Prolific authors like Eleanor Alice Hibbert expanded the genre even further, writing across subgenres under different pen names (including Jean Plaidy and Victoria Holt). It was another sign of what romance has always done best: reinvent itself and give readers exactly the kind of love story they’re craving.
Romance also began making space for more kinds of love stories, even if mainstream publishing was slow to center them. In 1970, Gordon Merrick published The Lord Won’t Mind, often cited as the first bestselling gay romance. In 1983, Gaywyck by Vincent Virga became the first published gay gothic romance. Queer romance has always existed, but the genre’s evolution has made room for these stories to be more visible and celebrated. This era also ushered in Kathleen E. Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower, introducing readers to a new kind of mass-market romance (also called the bodice ripper) that celebrated heightened sensuality and explicit desire.
In the past decade, romance has entered one of its most exciting eras yet. Stories reflect the diversity and complexity of the readers who have always been here. Books like The Kiss Quotient; Get a Life, Chloe Brown; Always Only You; and Fourth Wing brought representation and depth to contemporary romance. Today, readers and listeners ask for more nuance, more perspectives, more truth, and more joy—luckily for us, romance continues to respond.
Modern romance may look different than it did centuries ago, but it still delivers what it always promised: attraction that feels impossible to ignore, longing that lingers, and endings that leave readers and listeners glowing. Romance today reflects modern love more honestly than ever. It’s not just about the relationship anymore, it’s about the life happening around it. From serial killer love stories to time-bending narratives to the worldwide hit that is Heated Rivalry, the genre has traveled far from its earliest foundations. Yet as it continues to expand, spotlighting lavender marriages, polyamory, and more, one constant remains: Romance will always find new ways to make us feel everything!
