It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man, in search of a fortune from writing, might turn his hand to romantic novels.
I have often wondered whether any of the current exponents of so-called "chick lit" are really men in drag. After all, some of the greatest 19th-century novels were written by women who adopted male pen-names, like George Eliot and Currer Bell, to make sure that books like Middlemarch and Jane Eyre got reviewed and a fair hearing.
If things had gone to plan, James Joyce himself might have become a purveyor of women's romances, for he submitted some of his earliest literary efforts to the firm of Mills and Boon. The offer was refused. If the firm's reader ever got so far, in much later years, as to study the "Nausicaa" chapter of Ulysses, he or she might then have realised what a rich talent was lost. Gerty McDowell wants "no prince charming" but "a manly man who would crush her soft body" and "strain her to him in all the strength of his deep passionate nature".
When I was a boy, my grandmother often sent me to Marino library for a doctors-and-nurses novel, in which I sneak-read passages very like Joyce's above, as I bore the book back to her house. After her sight began to weaken, she had to get large-print versions, of which Marino library seemed to have a near-endless supply.
Even when Coronation Street, Tolka Row and The Riordans came to dominate her evenings spent in front of the television set, she never lost her interest in those doctors with deep-set eyes and in those nurses who blushed gently before they were kissed.
I once loaned my granny a copy of Pride and Prejudice, but she abandoned it after page 10 ("too slow"). Was it the "chick-lit" of the Regency era? Of course. If only my granny had lived long enough to read the pacier, reconfigured version in Bridget Jones's Diary, she might have seen the point.
The ease with which the Austen plots have been recast for our own time is proof enough that, even as sentences and skirts grow shorter, the same basic plots are retold in each generation. Emma has achieved global fame all over again as the teen movie Clueless.
Its motto might be Austen's bleak witticism that "there will always be some for whom imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their charms". Her books were wicked spoofs on current romances, but their high intelligence did not protect them from the charge of being flashy, trashy entertainments.
Even a hundred years after publication, they were regarded in many quarters as shallow, addictive pap. A student editorial in TCD Miscellany of 1904 lamented that too many candidates, in the nervous run-up to exams, were foolishly seeking escape and diversion in the reading of novels. Perhaps Dracula, published by a TCD man named Bram Stoker in the previous decade, was among the despised volumes. Austen's work was. By the time I made it to Trinity as a student in 1969, many of those Austen novels, which provoked editorial scorn in 1904, had become an integral part of the English syllabus. But a story like Dracula was still considered too vulgar and sensational to be worthy of serious study.
Nowadays, however, there are courses in major universities of the world which deal with Dracula, as well as with the popular hits of Conan Doyle, PG Wodehouse, JK Rowling and, of course, the much-abused romantic novels. And why not? If literature exists, it should be studied. If it's hugely popular, it's worth asking why.
An RTÉ programme, promised for the coming autumn, will ask why so many of the global best-sellers in romantic fiction are these days the work of Irish writers like Marian Keyes, Cathy Kelly, Sheila O'Flanagan and others. Of course, these writers didn't come out of nowhere. Forerunners like Edna O'Brien and Maeve Binchy (both of them among the very best stylists still at work in English) inspired by example, although their focus was often more on families than on single women.
What is most striking about the new generation of authors is the energy with which they write about the realities of a contemporary, consumerist lifestyle in Tiger Ireland. At a time when many male and female creators of a more "literary" novel prefer to set their works in the past, evoking an Ireland that is now strictly historical, this is an interesting phenomenon. The "literary" authors are sometimes accused of purveying an out-of-date image of a desperate, impoverished land that still appeals on global circuits: but the success of the "popular" women writers suggests that contemporary images can have as great an appeal.
In Tiger Ireland, women like to read and to write. Women now predominate in publishing houses and as buyers in bookshops. Gone are the days when a Jane Austen had to hide her handiwork under blotting paper and pretend to be darning, whenever a man entered the room.
It's likely that at least one of the currently popular writers will join Austen in that pantheon of "best-sellers" that morph into "classics".