Lynne Connolly does Manchester and you don’t even have to wait for the film 🙂

100 years… and they are just getting started. Shocking isn’t it? Read on for a taste of Mills and Boon, you know if you are like me and can’t get to Manchester.

I went into Manchester yesterday. Manchester has always been, and will always be, one of the cities of my heart. You know, from the minute you get off the plane or the train and set foot in it you feel it, it calls to you and you know you can call it home.

So far, New York, Manchester, Paris and Florence have given me that particular kick in the gut so it was a huge pleasure to be able to go to Manchester for a reason.

This time it was the “And Then He Kissed Her” exhibition, celebrating 100 years of Mills and Boon. Since it’s also the RNA’s (Romantic Novelists’ Association – the UK version of the RWA) 50th, they’ve been having some great joint celebrations, but this one is for Mills and Boon.

Manchester Public Library is one of those huge public buildings erected in what was then the richest city in the world. It has a domed central area bigger than the British Museum Reading Room and several other libraries – the language library, the Jewish library, the Language and Literary library, the Music Library – you get the idea.

The exhibition is situated outside the Social Science Library, usually called the Dome by residents, in a prime area.
Outside the library, I got my first delightful surprise. A huge banner, and I mean huge, with this cover on it, proclaiming the exhibition. (That’s the picture on the left). Isn’t that nice? Not often you see something like that in a Place of Learning. So I soaked it up and went in.

After the opening party the night before, the exhibition was nicely deserted. A few people lingered, and since it’s in the promenade before The Dome, it’s not going to be overlooked.

The first thing you see is a sculpted corset, made of Mills and Boon covers. Interesting, but not really relevant and the best bits are yet to come. If you work down the left hand side, then go back up the right, the exhibition is at its best, but I kept going back to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.

After a history of the company, which started as a general publisher, but in the 1920’s realised where its real future lay and concentrated on the romance genre. At first, it had writers like Jack London and John Buchan, but that gave way to Mary Burchall, the first superstar of Mills and Boon, and her cohorts. A book, set between the cases, gives the company biographies of some of these women. All nice ladies of a certain class, if they are to be believed, which helps to explain the relentless middle-class approach until after World War II. These books provided the factory girls and office grunts with their dreams, together with the weekly trip to the local cinema. So they drooled over Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks at weekends and filled in the week with doctors, executives and secret agents from the Mills and Boon stable.

These books were affordable and, with their brightly colored, well designed covers, attractive. And fashionable. Not scarily fashionable, showing the extremes of the high life, but aspirationally fashionable. Harrods rather than Chanel, Broadstairs rather than Cannes.
Fashion is more than clothes, though, and the trends of the eras are easily seen here.

“Romance Goes Tenting” reflected the passion for rambling and camping in the 1030’s (Dorothy L Sayers also picked up on this one), and gave me a good chuckle. But then, fashion is often funny when it’s not fashionable any more. Then we get to “WAAF to wife” (the WAAFs were the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in WWII), with both protagonists in smart uniform, but the title indicating where the little woman belonged. And a medical romance, with a nurse in white, looking to our eyes more like a nun, and a doctor, called (hold your breath for this one), “The Man In Authority.” After the war, a little spice creeps in, with nightclub hostesses and a touch of sophistication, but only a touch. Sex was still for marrieds only, and only described in euphemisms that gave rise to the “waves against the seashore” analogy. (In British films from the era, when sexual heat threatened, the camera used to pan up and go for the outdoor view where waves battered the beach).

But if we just laughed at these conventions we’d be doing our mothers and grandmothers a great disservice. These books reflected manners and mores like nothing “meant to last” could ever do. The obsession with camping, the war effort, the liberation that eventually broke through can all be traced in these books.

The constant is the Alpha male. Tall, short dark hair brushed back and Brylcreemed into glossy, (greasy) waves, always in control, always powerful. The difference is the kind of women they confront, from the frail victim (currently unpopular) to the kick-butt only slightly less powerful warrior princess.

What’s more, in the main Library, under the Dome, there’s another exhibition, one you have to see with the Mills and Boon one, because they work so well together. It’s called Treasures and it contains some of the letters and accounts of the suffragettes. The Pankhursts lived in Manchester and their house is open to the public, so Manchester was important to the movement.

The children of the suffragettes were the office workers who bought Mills and Boon books to while away the hours. Recreational reading. The feminists who say that Mills and Boon/Harlequin books perpetuate a paternalistic vision are missing the point. We go out, we fight for our rights and then we come back and read a fantasy about a man and a woman and a desert island, or whatever. That’s as much our right as equal pay should be. And most of us know the difference between fantasy and reality.

Is that a step forward to liberation? I think so.

Don’t miss this exhibition. It’s going on tour around the country at the end of July, so catch it if you can.