From Pride and Prejudice to Fifty Shades, a writer’s paean to the literature of desire
E
va Ibbotson, a doyenne of 1980s romantic fiction, once said self-deprecatingly that her books were aimed at “old ladies and people with flu”. To which Ella Risbridger, who is in her early 30s, sniffle-free and a devotee of Ibbotson’s “sexy and sweet” novels, has this cracking comeback: “If love is the most important thing, and to me it was and is, I want books that think that too.”
From here Risbridger plunges into what she charmingly calls “a field guide to delight”. Jane Eyre rubs shoulders with Ice Planet Barbarians (the bright blue aliens who inhabit the ice planet turn out to be sexy in a Mr Rochester kind of way). Pride and Prejudice makes its inevitable appearance, flanked by its many modern iterations, including the ones with dragons. Mills & Boon novels of every stripe are accorded the kind of sustained attention more usually given to Proust, while Judith Butler’s theories of gender are buttressed by a deft analysis of Rupert Campbell-Black, caddish hero of the Rutshire chronicles by the late, great Jilly Cooper.
One of Risbridger’s favourites is The Pisces by Melissa Broder, in which the heroine falls in love, and lust, with a merman. Risbridger recalls discussing it excitedly with her friends, not least the bit where the heroine has to push her fish/boyfriend hybrid around on a trolley. This last plot point is an obvious stumbling block for anyone looking to romantic fiction for real-life inspiration, and there are plenty of them: in the year that Fifty Shades of Grey took off there was a two-thirds increase in admissions to US emergency units for kink-related accidents.
