(no subject)

[elspethdixon]

The Smart Bitches who Love Trashy Books blog's "Good shit vs. shit to avoid" column this week is on romance novel heroines (and heroes) with disabilities.

There isn't much in-depth discussion there at the moment, but people are offering recs for novels that have disabled heroines with an emphasis on characters not being magically cured by the end of the book. No promises that any given novel mentioned won't turn out to handle the subject matter in a really dreadful way, of course.

The general consensus seems to be that heroes are occasionally allowed to have limbs amputated or be hideously scarred in a romantic, Mr.-Rochestor-at-the-end-of-Jane-Eyre way, but that heroines must only have disabilities that don't prevent them from being conventionally attractive by Hollywood standards. This fails to surprise me, somehow.

Comments

I think Sandra Brown had a heroine that was..

[jazzypom]

well, I don't know the medical term, but she was a deaf mute, so communicated in sign language. Then there was this other novel where this guy was in a wheelchair, but he could walk although his legs were spindly (due to them being wasted away in a wheelchair). There's this romance I read (forgot the name) where the heroine had a limp, and the hero privately called her 'my little wren' which was sweet in a way. But that's all I can remember