Romance Novels, Romantic Novelist. Francis Marion Crawford

Romance Novels, Romantic Novelist explores the interaction between Francis Marion Crawford's life and the forty-four novels, some of them best sellers, that he wrote between 1881 and 1908. Born to American parents in Italy, where he lived for the rest of his life, he told exotic tales that reflected his own adventures on four continents as well as an imagination stimulated by the world of privilege he knew particularly well in Italy and the United States. The novels, all written in English, were popular in America and Great Britain, and many were translated into Italian, French, German, and Russian. Although women played their customary role in all his love stories, his novels considered as a whole chart an evolution in Crawford's empathy with the problems and demands women face until he identified with female protagonists more than with male. The circumstances of his relations with the women in his life very much shape this process. His powerful mother, the sisters and cousins who flocked about him in his youth and depended on him in his maturity, the women who attracted him sexually and intellectually, and the daughters who pleased him as well as the wife who did not all influenced how he created heroines and villainesses. The interception of his world, his work, and his women constitute the core of this book.