Author Vanessa Riley first started reading romance novels as an escape from her Ph.D studies in mechanical engineering at Stanford. Now she’s published more than 20 books of romance and historical fiction, illuminating stories of powerful Black women and women of color in the 19th century.
This is a difficult era to write in, as Riley talked about when she spoke with the Austen Connection podcast after the publication of her book Island Queen. She told Austen Connection host Janet Saidi that she’s always finding the Happily Ever After - or what the romance community calls the HEA - in these stories about the lives of Black women from the Regency era and beyond.
Riley is in Columbia Saturday for the Unbound Book Festival, so we're tapping into this conversation from the Austen Connection podcast. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation.
Janet Saidi: What attracts you to the romance genre?
Vanessa Riley: The promise of the Happy Ever After. And you need that after you take a test for differential equations.
Janet Saidi: Yes! Is this what got you through grad school?
Vanessa Riley: Yes. And undergrad is actually when I really started reading every Signet romance known to mankind, because they were nice and quick. And bananas - the plots were all over the place. And it was just something different to do. You know, engineering programs can be very intense … and sometimes you just want something [where] you know the ending. That you don't have to integrate under a curve. You just want to be assured of a happy place. And romance has always been that happy place.
Janet Saidi: Yeah, so you like the structure. But a lot … can happen within that courtship plot. Do you find that you find intellectual challenges within that, that might be surprising to people who don't know the romance genre?
Vanessa Riley: For those who don't know the romance genre, writing romance is actually hard. Romance gets a really bad rap because they say it's formulaic. Well, it's formulaic because that's the promise that they've given to the reader. That's the only genre that you can pick up and get guaranteed to know that it's going to be safe. It's a happy ending. But how you get to that happy ending, how you vary your characters, tasks, and goals, and relationship status, [is] an emotional journey. That is what makes it exciting and different. And that's why there's no two stories that are the same. That is the fun of it. But in order to be that, to give people something different every time, you have to be extremely creative.
And my friends who write romance, I write romance - these stories are just all over the map. They're different. They're engaging you, there's something for everyone. Now, there's something for everyone. That was not always the case. … But it's it's actually a difficult animal. And I find a lot of great writers start writing romance because once you can deliver how these two unique individuals are better together in a plausible way, and then you've taken them on a journey, you have the basis to write other types of fiction.
So it's a great training ground to be able to write romance.
Janet Saidi: You mentioned the presence of love and joy in ... Black lives from history. Can you talk a little bit about love and joy and the need for those elements and these stories and the lack of them and some of the stories that people sometimes expect?
Vanessa Riley: Yeah. You know, typically, when you think of a story that touches on enslavement, you think of the darkness of that. And that should never be discounted. I don't want history whitewashed. I cannot whitewash history. And I also want to make sure people don't deify, make these women who are doing extraordinary things, into something they weren't. They were practical women. They were smart. But they were also human and fallible. And they could do wrong things. They can do stupid things. They could do things on the spur of the moment. They had agency but they still had a soul and still could do things wrong as much as they could do things right. And I don't want to paint this false image.
But what often happens is you get stories that are just focused on the pain. … People want to include the enslavement story in their stories, because they want to show how their characters survive, or they want to show people coming in and rescuing the poor slaves … It's pain porn, right? There has to be a reason why you show the violence. And in my world, for me because I am part of the romance community, I want my people, my readers safe. So that's what I show you. They are safe. They survived.
So as even I show you darkness, you are going to be protected. You're going to be okay, reading this. ... That's why I'm a big advocate of Black romance, romance in general because you just need to be safe and Happy Ever After. And I'm just so thankful that now Happy Ever After is for everyone.
See all of our Unbound conversations here, and find out more about the Unbound Book Festival at the festival website. You can see the complete conversation with Janet Saidi and Vanessa Riley at the Austen Connection, a public humanities and media project about Jane Austen, classic literature, and history.
