Resume
In this article, I discuss three historical romance novels, Katie MacAlister’s Suffragette in the City (2011), Courtney Milan’s The Suffragette Scandal (2014), and Evie Dunmore’s A Rogue of One’s Own (2020). Based on their similar traits regarding characterisation, plot, and outcome, these works can be said to form a specific subgenre of historical romance, for which I propose the label “Suffragette Historical Romances” (Author 2024). I first explore these romances departing from the recurrent narrative conventions Pamela Regis (2003) associates with the genre, the most distinguishable of which is what she defines as the “barrier”: what prevents the union between hero and heroine (14). What makes these novels unique, I argue, is they present the protagonist’s role as a suffragist or suffragette as the obstacle to the happy resolution of the love story. Consequently, the happy ending can only arrive when the heroine decides to renounce her activism. I, then, focus on how these romances are impregnated by the “postfeminist sensibility” Rosalind Gill ascribes to postfeminist narratives (2007) as they paradoxically illustrate the simultaneous incorporation and repudiation of feminist values. I ultimately argue the suffrage campaign serves here to promote a postfeminist ideology according to which feminism has succeeded and, thus, is presented as important, yet no longer relevant.
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