Love is in the air this month!
Long before modern love stories filled bookstore shelves, some of the earliest authors were already exploring themes of love. While medieval tales of knights in shinning armor shaped the genre, the first “true romance” novel (and often considered the world’s first novel), can be traced back over a thousand years to The Tale of Genji, written by Murasaki Shikibu in 11th-century Japan.
The Tale of Genji follows the romantic escapades of Prince Genji, an aristocrat navigating courtly life, love affairs, and heartbreak. Unlike the adventure-filled novels of the time, this story focuses on human emotion, relationships, and the fleeting nature of love—elements that would later define the romance genre. Written by a noblewoman in the Heian period, this groundbreaking work provided a deeply personal and poetic look at romance, centuries before Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters.
In Europe, love stories took a different form, with medieval romances centered around courtly love. Tales like Tristan and Isolde and Lancelot and Guinevere featured knights and noblewomen caught in passionate, often tragic, affairs. These stories helped establish many of the themes we associate with romance today: longing, forbidden love, and devotion despite all odds. However, they were still more like legends than novels.
The first modern romance novel is often credited to Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). This novel tells the story of a young maid resisting her wealthy employer’s advances until he reforms and marries her. Though controversial at the time, Pamela laid the foundation for the romance novels we know today, shifting the genre toward emotional depth, moral lessons, and a central love story with a satisfying resolution.
In fact, readers have “loved” romance novels so much that as of 2023, romance novels generate over $1.44 billion in revenue annually, making it the highest-earning genre in fiction. Booktok is one social media platform that has sky rocketed the genre to new heights. In the 12 months leading up to May 2023, over 39 million printed romance novels were sold, marking a 52% increase from the previous year.
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