Is AI Romance Controversial? The Question We Get Most at Mr Darcy
Somebody is always worried about what women are reading.
In the 1790s it was novels. Lending libraries were putting romances into the hands of young women, and serious men wrote serious pamphlets about what that would do to them, which, apparently, was overheat their imaginations and give them ideas about marriage. Jane Austen got so tired of it that she stopped Northanger Abbey in the middle of chapter five to argue back, and it's the angriest, funniest page she ever wrote.
Two hundred and thirty years later the worry has moved shelves. It's on mine.
The view from the counter
Is it controversial, then? Some people think so, and the people who think so tend to be very sure and quite far from the counter. I'll tell you what the counter looked like last Thursday.
A woman came in, mid-thirties, phone already in her hand, the kind of customer who knows what she's after and would rather you didn't hover. She'd finished the new Emily Henry on the train and she wanted one thing settled before she went any further with us.
Is it one of those?
One of which, I said, though I knew. She meant the apps in the news. I understand the question. I read the same news she does.
What I told her
It took less time than the kettle.
It's interactive romance fiction, which is a long way of saying novels you can interrupt. The men in here were written the way a novelist writes a man, with a job and a past and a temper, and then the door was opened. Sebastian is an architect in London. James lectures there. Neither of them was written this morning, and neither of them rearranges himself around whoever walks in.
The shop is named after a man from an 1813 novel, and he's on the shelf for the readers who want him. Most of the men in here live now, in cities you'd recognise, in flats with actual plumbing.
She asked if they were real, and I said no, and neither was anyone she'd read on the train.
“That has never once stopped a reader finishing a book. What she felt on the train belongs to her. Where the man lives is a detail, and always was.
She didn't tell me why she was asking and I didn't ask. In all my years behind this counter I have never once needed to know a customer's circumstances to sell her a book, and I'm not starting because the format changed.
The woman in the pamphlets
The argument in the pamphlets, once you strip the Georgian spelling off it, was that a woman might mistake what she reads for her life.
I've never met her. I've met the one buying the seven-hundred-page fantasy who runs a ward at St Thomas', and the one buying the grey literary novel, who is the funniest person I know and has been married, contentedly, for twenty years. Neither of them needed protecting from a paperback.
Is it any good
In her place, that's the question I'd want answered. It's a smaller one, and it's the only one I can help with.
A badly written man is embarrassing wherever he lives, and the phone doesn't make him worse any more than the paperback made him better. The ones in here had a past and a temper before you arrived, and it shows before your tea has cooled.
She started with James, and that's the last I know about it, which is how it should be.
Two hundred and thirty years on, and nobody has ever come in asking for a pamphlet.
James Calloway lectures in London. Ask him what the pamphlets got wrong.