Where romance and Shakespeare collide

Emma Garman (known to some as the proprietress of the blog-on-hiatus The Fold Drop) conducted an interview with Fordham university professor Mary Bly for New York Magazine. Bly, the daughter of writers Robert and Carol Bly, is a Shakespearean scholar, but the reason she’s getting ink lately is because she’s just outed herself as the New York Times bestselling romance writer Eloisa James. Bly talks about keeping the secret, how her parents felt about it, and the parallels between Shakespeare and genre fiction:

How do your famous-writer parents view your lucrative romance sideline?
My dad is a huge supporter of my

work. He reads the novels aloud! And he loves hearing about the sales—he’s like [in an incredulous tone],

“What’s the print run?” And keeping the secret was very hard for him

because he’s got a terrible memory. So he’ll go to all these schools,

and I’ll get these e-mails: “Hi, I’ve been driving your father around

and he told me all about your double life.” And I have to write back

and say, “Nobody knows! And I’m coming to your school next week to give

a paper. Please don’t tell anyone.” But my mother’s not happy, and

never has been—with the whole idea, and the sex stuff. It’s, you know,

“If you can write, why don’t you at least try to write great

literature?”

Whereas you’ve pointed out that much “great literature” bears many affinities with what nowadays gets called “genre fiction.”
Right.

Shakespeare was a genre writer, down the line, never wrote outside his

genre. He was not an innovator. Because it’s really quite a recent

idea, that the best books have no genre. You know, if they’re literary

fiction, then they have to be genre-free. It’s a very, very new idea.

And most of the books we study as academics are firmly within one genre

or another. Not to compare myself to Shakespeare. But I think you’d

have to be a fool as a writer not to apprentice yourself to the very

best in your field.

Now that is a line worth remembering, regardless of whether you write within or outside of genre.