First Person: How I fell in love with tall, dark and handsome

Mills & boons in the 1980s were ensconced in stereotypes, and yet I couldn’t have enough of them

Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights weren’t my printed avatars of romance. They were textbooks as far as I was concerned. Romance — impossibly stereotyped and hopelessly sexist/ageist — popped up for me sometime in the mid-1980s, when, in school, I noticed girls furtively exchanging books that, they claimed, would be confiscated in case teachers got wind of this extracurricular activity.

Mills & Boons. Or MBs, as they were referred to endearingly.

I was curious. What are these, I wanted to know.

Love stories, a classmate giggled. “Haven’t you heard of them?”

I hadn’t. Till then, I’d get my kicks when Nancy Drew coochie cooed with Ned Nickerson while solving mysteries. The said classmate gifted me my first MB. I still remember it vividly: Mary Wibberly’s Logan’s Island, in which a vestal Helen fetches up on a tropical island to encounter the rakish Jake Logan, who wore a patch on one of his eyes.

While the MB women were always chaste, emotional, imbued with Victorian values, the men had been around the block, stoic, yet resolutely louche. Memorable heroes used to be of Spanish, Italian, Greek, even Arab lineage; they spoke fluent English, but had this knack of breaking into “Que pasa?” or “per favore” when passion overwhelmed them enough for their eyes to darken dangerously.

And yes, they were always tall, dark and handsome. Dark meant olive-complexioned, with black/dark brown hair; it was rare for them to be blonde, even if they were true-blue English… and if they happened to be English, they were sun-tanned to crispy beige in their skin. They were usually very rich and successful. If they were middle class, it was because they had turned their broad backs on wealth that was theirs for the asking while they lumberjacked stolidly in a remote jungle.

sushmita@khaleejtimes.com