When Lena Dunham brought Monica Heisey to the stage at Hackney Empire, on the London leg of her Famesick press tour, she told the crowd: “Monica has written a really great divorce novel. So, if any of you are thinking of getting divorced soon, definitely give it a read.”

From my seat in the gallery, I – an unmarried 25-year-old girl – made a mental note to add it to my TBR pile.

Over the past few years, there has been a wave of media about divorce, alongside a subgenre redefining a certain female archetype: the woman approaching, or in the thick of, midlife. Take, for instance, the cultural reset ushered in by All Fours, Miranda July’s novel about a wife and mother who shirks off familial responsibilities in the name of spontaneity and erotic exploration. Take Babygirl, the film starring Nicole Kidman, about a wife and mother who embarks on an affair with a young employee. Take Vladimir, a series with a similar premise. Take Untamed, Glennon Doyle’s memoir about realising in midlife that she needs to “stop pleasing, start living”. Despite not having arrived at that stage of life myself, I have been drawn to this trend – and the discourse it’s sparked – far more than I expected.

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Of course, its resonance isn’t limited to the entertainment industry or the literary world. Real women, who would have once endured unfulfilling marriages, are now much more likely to file for divorce. For opposite-sex-couples, 63% of divorces are initiated by women, according to the Office of National Statistics. The reason for that discrepancy? Mishcon de Reya’s midlife divorce report found that over half of Gen X women said there is now no stigma around getting divorced, and they would end a marriage if they were unhappy. It’s a phenomenon that has earned middle-aged divorcées the moniker “walkaway wives”.

I wrote an essay for Sextras on the internet’s obsession with the “chic divorcée”, epitomised by books such as Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott, and titans of pop culture like Elizabeth Taylor. In our collective imaginings, this category of woman is usually associated with superficial characteristics: wealth, glamour, youth. But, I argued, our identification with her goes much deeper than that. The divorcée is defined by the irresistible sense of rebellion and maturity she embodies.

That, I think, is what makes this subgenre of writing so compelling across the board. Significant and disruptive life events (divorcing, grieving, leaving, awakening) become catalysts for change, illuminating a path to a new identity that was previously hidden. And this is very good for the plot. As evidenced by the literature, something occurs in midlife that prompts a reckoning with oneself, with the world and with its so-called “truths” that were once taken for granted.

Stories such as All Fours focus on a woman pursuing her desires in a way that feels provocative; non-fiction work like Untamed follows a similar path, challenging the very notion of what it means to be a woman. But Strangers, the recently published memoir by Belle Burden that’s become a sensation, has a different trajectory.

A psychological horror of a memoir of a marriage

Self-help manuals and coming-of-middle-age narratives alike often centre themselves around a choice: should I remain safe and protected, or leave behind what I know to find out who I am? For Burden in Strangers, her husband’s swift and brutal announcement that he is leaving means she can never arrive at that crossroads. The choice is taken away.

But, as Burden reveals, this ended up being a good thing. Because of her acquiescent nature and all-consuming love for her husband, she would never have sought out independence if this awful thing had not happened to her. And it was something that happened to her; not only does Burden’s husband walk out on his family with no intention of coming back, he does so without explanation. After speaking to many women in my life about the book and its portrayal of this situation, there seems to be a consensus: to be abandoned overnight is catastrophic, but to never understand the reason why is psychological-horror levels of nightmare fuel. But wait! What comes next is so much worse: Burden’s ex husband tries to use their pre-nup to take everything she has.

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It’s a story about breaking out of a victim’s mentality, and figuring out how to protect yourself and your family in the wake of a traumatic experience. While reading, I didn’t think of Burden as a passive person. She’s shy, and deferred to her husband throughout their marriage, but she’s also a former corporate lawyer, born into generational wealth – the kind of person you would never imagine this happening to. In the book, she recalls her ex making her explain her credit-card purchases, while he, as the sole earner, keeps her in the dark about his salary and their family’s financial situation; these secrets and concessions are what enable him, legally, to destroy her upon their marriage’s dissolution.

While she could have protected herself far better, it’s almost impossible to judge Burden for ending up in this situation. It is representative of a system that encourages women to blindly put their faith in the idea of men’s financial authority.

The tradwife trap

If you’ve spent any time online lately, you are likely to have come across TikToks and Reels that romanticise financial dependence on men. The young women behind these videos claim they need a partner whose “masculine energy” offsets their soft femininity; in real terms, this means that everything from their matcha order to the property they live in should be taken care of by their future or current husband.

It probably goes without saying, but the price of being paid for is that you, too, are being paid for. The self is commodified, in exchange for a “soft life”, which means not having to deal with things like finances, a career, autonomy, agency, decisions. And while you give up years of your life, supplying sex, children and the dream of domesticity, your husband retains the legal right to take everything you have away on a whim. “[Heterosexual] marriage is the lowest paid form of sex work,” says Chidera Eggerue on the Slumflower Hour podcast. It is also “the only socially acceptable form”.

“I think I’m not alone in this,” says Burden, in an interview with NPR. “There are a lot of women who end up in this position because of culturally ingrained gender roles, self doubt and a need to build men up by giving them this responsibility.” (!!)

In Strangers, the pre-nup Burden signed meant her husband could use the legal system to screw her over. But society at large normalised and encouraged his abandonment of his wife and family. Many readers have interpreted a clear message: that marriage is disproportionately unfair to women, while being a system men routinely reap the benefits of. No one is coming to save you, no one (no matter their family’s net worth) is immune to it. Unless you shield yourself legally and financially, it could happen to you.

A hetero-dating crisis

On the face of it, there’s nothing particularly subversive about Burden’s story: a husband walks out when his wife hits middle-age. Tale as old as time. How to explain, then, the book’s reverberations across cultures, its best-seller status, and Netflix’s immediate interest, with Ms Goop on board to translate Burden to the screen? I think the memoir’s popularity has a lot to do with its timing.

We are in the midst of a heterosexual-dating crisis (so I am told), with young people, especially, reporting disillusionment regarding the sex and relationships scene, and a widening political divide between men and women. The so-called crisis has been cited in viral articles, including the New York Times Magazine piece about heterofatalism and a feature in The Cut about the nightmare of modern dating. It’s also everywhere you look. At a recent industry event, a young woman who co-founded a recommendations-based app told me she wasn’t interested in doing anything in the dating space, “because it’s just fucking depressing to talk about right now. Dating is over”.

Strangers landed like a bomb on this battlefield. Women are baffled by men – why they won’t commit, why they can’t emote, why they leave. Burden doesn’t know why either; she is asking the questions with you, in solidarity with other women, and quietly outgrowing the need for answers.

Maybe Gen Z women could learn a thing or two from the midlifers. The data suggests Gen X women are ready to be single if it means greater independence and happiness. But it can be difficult for the average person to imagine striking out on their own in the way the heroine of Miranda July’s All Fours does. Strangers presents a more relatable situation, one that is easy to empathise with. Burden’s pain and power are apparent on every page. She didn’t ask to be here, but she’s making the best of it. Now, she’s laughing all the way to the bank. Truly inspiring stuff.

In this subgenre of divorce and midlife writing, there is room for both: the tales of eroticism and transcendence; and the quietly introspective stories of grief and rebirth. At least, I have room for both on my bookshelf. And plenty, plenty more…

Chances are, you’ve heard of Bryan Johnson. If not: he’s the tech billionaire who has turned himself into a public science experiment. His two-million-dollar-a-year “longevity” regimen entails taking dozens of supplements a day and eating his last meal at 11am, on top of more intensive “biohacks” like red-light therapy and monitoring toxins in his environment. That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that a pallid man of indeterminate age is doing whatever it takes, including consuming the blood of his child, to seek eternal life.

But did you know Johnson also writes erotica? Not long after confessing to being in a relationship with Kate Tolo, the younger co-founder of his start-up, Johnson shared extremely intimate details of his sex life with Tolo on the platform X (maybe he misunderstood the name?). In a post that is at once graphic, innocent and clinical, Johnson refers to everything from areolas to frontal cortexes, including a real sentence that reads: “Her vestibular bulbs engorge, forming a soft, pressurized cuff.”

As Jessica DeFino and Emily Kirkpatrick pointed out when they discussed this post on their podcast Mess World, there’s something simultaneously sweet and disturbing about Johnson’s desire to conflate his sex life and his passion for longevity science. Though it begs the question, does he love her, or does he love the health benefits of love? His apparent ecstasy reveals that sex and romance were the once-missing puzzle pieces of his wellness mission. While this is uncomfortable, it’s not altogether unusual. In fact, it’s a common theme throughout vampire fiction: the sublimation of sex and desire into something else.

“I know what you are”

It’s not hard to make the case that Johnson, and other longevity obsessives, are the closest we have ever come to vampirism. There are the surface-level similarities (uncanny veneer of youth, eternal life, blood thirst); he has simply “traded the cape for wearable sensors and the Transylvanian castle for a Wi-Fi-enabled home laboratory”, as Ryan Zickgraf writes in Jacobin. But the image takes shape when you realise these biohackers, many of whom claim their longevity projects are in service of humankind at large, are the same people investing in something severely environmentally destructive known as AI.

In a YouTube video on the topic, Johnson says we must use AI to accelerate scientific development and, in the same breath, declares his aim to protect the Earth, without acknowledgement of the dissonance between these statements. On the website for Blueprint, his company that focuses on wellness and anti-ageing, he says he is building “a system to make tomorrow better for you, me and the planet”. Just think: one day, your very own Bryan AI health companion might help you save the world by telling you to buy a £42 olive oil.

So: immortality for the few at the expense of the many. I’m not the first to make this connection. Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash – the buzziest debut of the year – features a nefarious billionaire character on a quest for immortality who is not immune to blood-sucking theatrics.

If we take Johnson to be a simulacrum of a vampire, what if we took his published texts (X posts, website copy, YouTube videos) as examples of vampire literature? The new, erotic component of his public-facing persona starts to make a lot more sense if we imagine it as part of a subgenre of fiction that mutates sexual desire into expressions of power and identity.

Grave and gay

Take Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire: it fizzles with sexuality, yet the plot is strangely chaste. Instead, acts of feeding and killing become metaphors for intimacy, illustrating the parallels between sex and violence. The book also hinges on the emotionally explosive relationships between the immortals, which can be read as romantic and homoerotic.

Since its literary origins, the vampire has been a symbol for queerness. Two examples that predate Dracula are Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Christabel and Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla, both of which tell the story of a beautiful, innocent woman who is seduced by a beautiful, blood-sucking woman (platonic ideal relationship dynamic). The villain at the heart of John William Polidori’s The Vampyre is inspired by Lord Byron, who was almost definitely bisexual. And don’t forget that scene in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppola – this paragraph is huge for men who have three names – in which Winona Ryder and Sadie Frost make out for no reason. Not that I’m complaining.

This tangent isn’t me soft-launching my theory that Johnson is gay, but an attempt to contextualise his approach to writing about sex. When writers like Rice or Coleridge explore queerness via vampirism, they’re exploring non-normative desire, and the experience of being socially Othered. In Twilight, vampirism represents an all-consuming desire that must be resisted for the sake of undying love. For Johnson, vampirism is cloaked by biohacking and longevity science; erotic love becomes enmeshed with the intention to live forever, as he and his lover effectively feed on one another for the life-lengthening benefits. It pains me to say this, but I think we have to do a close reading.

A close reading of Bryan Johnson’s longevity erotica

Above is the first paragraph of Johnson’s post and, as far as paragraphs in this thing go, it’s the least offensive. The first sentence sounds like something you would read if you opened a Mills & Boon paperback. Johnson grounds us in the world of trashy romance fiction – so far, so normal. In the second sentence, he disrupts this sense of familiarity with “mechanoreceptors”, a gratuitously technical word that establishes the piece’s warring scientific and sensory language.

I’ll gloss over “a current that speaks safety and pleasure” (?), and continue to our second Encyclopedia entry, “microbursts”, a word I’m not 100% sure he’s using correctly. This only adds to the pseudo-scientific tech-bro tone, creating a contrast between the vulnerability of the moment and the coldness associated with the longevity-maxxer archetype. The contradiction mirrors the way in which a vampire is made weak and desperate by his overwhelming urge to feed. It’s “both thrilling and repulsive”. Johnson writes that his lover’s goosebumps make her “hair stand perpendicular”, the physical tension against his fingers symbolising their burgeoning erotic tension. They try and fail to resist as they become enslaved to their hunger: the driving force of the encounter and dominant theme of the text, made explicit in the paragraph’s concluding sentence: “She asks for more.”

Vampire empire

Sinners, the year’s most Oscar-nominated film, is a vampire thriller. Literature about sapphic bloodsuckers – Victorian and modern – is big on TikTok. Gothic stories, populated by Byronic heroes and windswept landscapes, are dominating at the box office. An early draft of Marty Supreme featured a fanged twist. Cynthia Erivo is Dracula on the West End; a sold-out balletic retelling is coming to Sadler’s Wells. I could go on. Since its beginnings, the vampire has always been, to varying degrees, a popular monster – whether in folkloric tales, queer-coded TV shows or endless reworkings of Stoker’s version. And yet, the archetype is hot right now, in a way it hasn’t been since Twilight.

In the late 2000s, Edward Cullen was the face of vampirism, transforming Count Dracula into indie-sleaze-era fantasy fodder for Mormon housewives and teenage girls. Obviously, in the film and TV space, we haven’t reached levels of Twilight mania. That enthusiasm is more closely mirrored by the power Bryan Johnson holds over biohackers, teenage boys and the wellness industry. He’s even broken into the fashion world. At the Matières Fécales AW26 show, “The One Percent”, models took to the catwalk in pale make-up and face-lift prosthetics. There were men in morning suits, their eyes blocked by dollar bills, women in black-leather gloves with blood-red palms and Johnson, stiffly strutting in a tight all-grey look.

Seeing his ghostly visage on Showstudio felt like the culmination of a Zeitgeist-defining shift: longevity has transcended the world of wellness and is spilling into our collective consciousness. It’s everywhere you look, from looksmaxxers at Fashion Week to longevity check-ups advertised on the Underground. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Matières Fécales’s show began with Gothic-tinged looks that transitioned into a procession of supernatural horrors, cherry-topped by Johnson in an outfit that looked swiped from the Breaking Dawn costume cupboard.

What we do in the shadow self

But are we that surprised at Johnson’s runway debut? The optimisers that walk among us are not solely interested in immortality. After all, what’s the point of living longer and being healthy if you’re not doing so as a hot person? Society is almost as youth obsessed as it is thinness obsessed. I wrote about the diet-culture comeback last year, but a slew of shrinking celebrities and the widening dispersion of GLP-1 drugs have created a culture that is at breaking point. Every day, there’s an article about an actress’s clavicles, a million-dollar facelift, a star who has stepped back into the limelight looking younger and skinnier than they did in the 1990s. It’s trickling down into our group chats, our algorithms, our own bathroom and kitchen cabinets.

Nina Auerbach, in her seminal text Our Vampires, Ourselves, says “every age embraces the vampire it needs”. Is this expensive evasion of death, with its unnatural veneer of youth and beauty, the vampire we need – or rather, the one our late-stage-capitalism overlords have decided we deserve?

According to the writings of Carl Jung, the goal of “shadow” work is to make the unconscious conscious. The theory is that if we repress thoughts that don’t align with our vision of ourselves, we allow those thoughts to influence our lives. A simpler way of looking at this is that fearing something gives it power. Johnson’s Don’t Die business is not about maximising life, it’s about fear of death. In a similar vein, Dracula’s immortality is a curse that derives from cowardice; his inability to die is a violation of nature, prolonged by killing others, hiding in the shadows and avoiding holy objects, all of which reveal an enslaved existence. The crucifix is antithetical to him, as a symbol of selfless mortal sacrifice for the sake of humanity’s redemption.

Just because the vampire is flawed doesn’t mean we can’t love the vampire. We probably should. The monster embodies that very shadow self Jungian psychology refers to: forbidden impulses, like lust, violence, hunger and greed, that society and the conscious mind reject. These are the non-normative desires and queer themes we identified earlier as present in the work of authors from Coleridge to contemporary sapphic fiction.

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Loving and accepting the shadow self is one thing – fucking the vampire is another entirely. What does that actually look like, in literature and in life? What does it mean when the vampire, an embodiment of death, is capable of intimacy? (These are questions taken from Stephanie Meyer’s diary in 2004. Kidding. But, probably.)

Eroticism plays an important role in vampire fiction, but is often transposed into immoral behaviours like violence and killing, illicit urges like homosexuality, or concepts like power and fear. Sex encompasses all these ideas, and these ideas are simultaneously eroticised.

In some ways, Johnson’s eroticisation of longevity science is reassuring. During a loneliness epidemic, when many young men are isolated, gooning and being radicalised by the manosphere, it’s hopeful to see a loving relationship presented as something to strive towards by an idol of the looksmaxxing community. When people are reportedly having less sex, the undisputed king of longevity is taking to a public platform to write self-insert fanfiction about having missionary with his girlfriend.

Perhaps this naïve, if slightly exhibitionist, approach presents the way we will all live in the future, when our bodies are vampiric, optimised vessels navigating a barren earth. You, too, can care about sex and love. Just so long as it doesn’t interfere with your protocol.

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During my early adolescence, you could probably find me hiding in the bathroom. I escaped there for all kinds of reasons (make-up experimentation, monologue recitals…), but often it was to read, with wide eyes, Mills & Boon novels that belonged to an elderly relative.

The salacious covers that piqued my interest, I’ve since learnt, have been redesigned. Just look at Gentle Rogue by Johanna Lindsey, once adorned with a scantily clad couple in an erotic, uncomfortable-looking pose. It’s passion, it’s pirates, it’s pulp. The new version features the most dull image of a stately home you’ve ever seen. To quote Natalie Wynn, aka Contrapoints: “Remember what they took from you.”

My first thought was: is nothing sacred? Which is not a word often applied to the “bodice ripper”: sexually explicit historical romances. The genre emerged in the 1970s, provoking both fandom and condemnation, and was vanquished in the 2010s by woke op-eds (writing about maidens being seduced by lascivious dukes was not very MeToo). But a beast of that magnitude doesn’t just die; when you cut off its head, several grow back. Last year, Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights was announced, complete with latex gowns and necrophiliac nuns. The good people of social media responded the only way they know how: with outrage and lunacy. The poster shows Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie locked in an amorous embrace, its styling not unlike Lindsey’s original Gentle Rogue cover, with the tagline “Come undone”. I knew one thing for certain: the bodice ripper had returned.

Other signs confirmed my theory: a new installment of Bridgerton, the series more horny than it is historically accurate; and a New Yorker article about the unlikely love between Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry that featured Mills & Boon-style artwork. I got in touch with its creator, Nicholas Konrad, previously the senior art director, now visual editor at New York Magazine, who told me it was ‘inspired by those vintage bodice rippers!’

Drive me mad…

There is a serpentine history attached to the hysteria surrounding “Wuthering Heights”. Romance novels have been criticised from their inception, with the loudest detractors being women. Exhibit A: George Eliot’s “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”, a bitchy little artefact, in which she declares such books are ‘frothy, prosy, pious, [and] pedantic… a composite order of feminine fatuity’. Exhibit Y could be this article from The i Paper’s Emily Bootle, in which she writes that Bridgerton, “Netflix’s “historical fantasy” about the gossip and goings-on of a group of horny, good-looking people in a kind of yassified Regency England… [is] fundamentally unchallenging”, a symptom of everything wrong with Millennials (she is a Millennial woman). Exhibit Z is me and my friends, a group of English-lit graduates, sitting in a pub and attacking the directorial choices of a film we have not yet seen.

So, why is the bodice ripper so polarising, especially among the people it’s for? To find out, I consulted my former literature professor: Dr Joseph Crawford of the Exeter University English Department. He leads the highly sought-after module “Reader, I Married Him”: The Evolution of Romance Fiction from 1740 to the Present that covers texts from Jane Eyre to Twilight.

The Venn diagram of low-status lit

Romance, Crawford begins, is the most commercialised genre. “[Literary] innovations, such as moving towards formulas and standardised branding, are things other genres have borrowed from romance fiction,” he says.

While the discourse around popular titles can seem dominated by scathing disapproval, it’s hard to overstate romance’s selling power. The fact the Twilight saga spent over 235 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list is no fluke, and has a lot to do with how its tropes (fantasy, love triangles, forbidden love) captured the zeitgeist, sparking countless imitations.

In the serious lit world, mass-market fiction is considered suspicious, as are “feminised cultural products” and works that deal with “sexual desire, especially women’s”, says Crawford.

The bodice ripper is where all three intersect, in a kind of Venn diagram of low-status lit. It’s a formula that applies to the “Wuthering Heights” adaptation: a film marketed to a largely female audience with famous leads, divisive costumes and Charli xcx songs. It’s also – if the shots of open mouths and suggestive egg yolks are anything to go off – all about sex.

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Wet and wily moors

“It is Wuthering Heights, and it isn’t.” This is Emerald Fennell, speaking in a recent interview about why she chose to include quote marks around the film’s title. “There’s a version I remembered reading, which isn’t quite real. And there’s a version that I wanted to stuff to happen that never happened.” Aka, the one that will be in cinemas from 13 February. This is Fennell’s justification for why a Victorian novel is being made into a sexed-up movie – one that, from the trailer, doesn’t really resemble the book at all.

Daphne du Maurier’s interpretation of Wuthering Heights was quite different. “There is more savagery, more brutality, in the pages of Wuthering Heights than in any novel of the nineteenth century… and a complete lack of sexual emotion,” she writes in a 1971 column. “Heathcliff’s feeling for Cathy, Cathy’s feeling for Heathcliff, despite its force and passion, has a non-sexual quality about it. Emily Brontë did not conjure … any cosy tale of happy lovers to console women readers sitting snugly within doors.”

Crawford, for the record, agrees. “One of the things I find interesting about Wuthering Heights is that it’s ambiguous what role sexuality plays in it, if any,” he says. “Possibly [Cathy and Heathcliff’s] relationship is sexual from puberty onwards, possibly their relationship has no erotic component whatsoever.”

This is why many are hot and bothered about the Fennell adaptation, other than the inaccurate costumes and controversial casting – Wuthering Heights isn’t really a romance! While Heathcliff and Cathy are driven (mad) by love, their tragic tale is corrupted by hatred, violence, death and revenge. Like those of you venting on Substack Notes, the Rebecca author opposed the notion that Wuthering Heights is the “supreme romantic novel”. Fennell’s trailer declares it “the greatest love story of all time”.

Written just a year before the release of the first bodice ripper, du Maurier’s column identifies the public’s appetite for “tales of happy lovers” – ie, novels with explicit romance and explicit sex. The women readers “sitting snugly within doors” would soon be titillated by The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E Woodiwiss, the paperback that started the bodice-ripper trend in 1972, and thousands of others that filled a gap in the market: they became what people wanted, and even interpreted, Wuthering Heights to be.

“Emotional costs” of the bodice ripper (TW)

But bodice rippers contain just as much “savagery” and “brutality” as Wuthering Heights; the depiction of violence as romance, or romance spurred by violence, is a defining feature of the genre. Cosy!

Crawford’s romantic-fiction module previously covered The Flame and the Flower, but he decided to remove it because he didn’t believe it “worth the emotional costs”. He reflects on this in his essay ‘Teaching Romance Fictions, Pre- and Post-#MeToo’: “I became less and less convinced that the intellectual pay‐off was worth the anger and unhappiness that the text so clearly provoked in my students.”

Yet calling these books misogynistic or toxic doesn’t change the fact they resonate with wide audiences, particularly young women. Why is that? “It is common for people who have strong views on gender equality, and firm positions on gendered violence, to be drawn to fictional works that explore those themes,” Crawford tells me.

The bodice ripper mines the canon for subtly presented ideas – passion, power, eroticism – and removes the subtlety, aligning them with modern-day social mores. In the 1970s, the bodice ripper reflected the revolutionary mood of second-wave feminism and sexual liberation. The underlying question is whether the presence of violence in these works is evidence of patriarchal dominance infiltrating women’s fiction, or an expression of female desire?

If we recognise “forced seduction” as a kink (usually referred to as consensual-non-consensual sex), paperbacks such as these allow this kink to be explored under controlled conditions. That’s not to say all bodice-ripper writers have a CNC kink – it’s sometimes used as a plot device, so that sex can occur before the couple fall in love at the end, or as a ruse so that the heroine’s purity is retained. “The non-consent fantasy is a device that absolves the woman from blame,” Wynn explains in her video. “The bad boy is bad, so the good girl gets to stay good.” Whether the writer or reader find this arousing is immaterial; in the fictive world, the woman is at the centre.

…Take any form

“Romance is always about the reconciliation of opposites,” says Crawford. “It’s how this figure of the rich, powerful, violent man might be something you oppose, fear or hate and be something you are drawn to. What fiction gives us is an opportunity to experience those things on our terms.”

It’s no secret things feel especially out of control right now, as people around the world grapple with war, genocide and the environmentally destructive effects of AI (to name but a few ongoing crises!). And though Crawford warns me that I’m not special in thinking this – “Everyone feels their own historical moment to be one of unique turmoil” – it’s hard to ignore that the pushback against the left-leaning politics of the 2010s has meant the onset of a right-wing movement, a diet-culture revival and, to top it off, recession-core. It makes sense to me, then, that readers are seeking escapism, or attempting to reckon with gendered power imbalances through the realm of fiction.

Today, there’s “a fascination with traditional roles and hierarchies”, Crawford argues. “Amid a landscape characterised by economic precarity, there’s a desirability in finding a very rich man who will pay all of your bills forever. That’s become attractive. [We saw it begin with] the ‘Looking for a guy in finance’ memes.’” We’ve seen it develop into the phantom of the tradwife.

Bridgerton might be the biggest recession indicator of all. The Regency-romance boom – pioneered by the Shonda Rhimes-produced Netflix show, whose fourth season is out now – is reflective of what that period and its gender dynamics represent in modern-day culture. As the last pre-industrial-revolution era, Regency redux ignites a yearning for a world beyond what Crawford calls the “inescapable grip of modern capitalist globalism, and for embodiments of male power and wealth that are not so entangled with it”.

“The Duke is a safe fantasy figure,” he continues. “He stands at the head of this creaking hierarchy of gender privilege, but it’s not the hierarchy that you in your day-to-day life are entrapped in. He’s a safer figure to project your fantasies onto.”

Speaking of fantasies…

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Slop!

Back to Wuthering Heights. We’ve established its lovers might not be lovers at all – so why give it the bodice-ripper treatment?

Well, films are freaky again. After years of prudishness, on-screen eroticism is making a comeback via period dramas and adaptations (welcome to the stage, Nosferatu). Sex sells because it demands attention, and could become a last resort to capture viewers’ dwindling attention spans. If the bodice ripper makes subtle themes explicit, it also makes the plot easier to follow for those engaging in “second-screen viewing”, and lends itself to viral moments that can be reposted on Reels.

One tweet pointed out that “Wuthering Heights … is kinda the matcha Dubai chocolate Labubu of film”. An algorithm-friendly take on the classic novel, not unlike an erotically charged paperback, plays into all three facets of that Venn diagram (feminised, mass-market, sexual). Low-status yet alluring.

While the critique du jour is that “Fennell makes something highbrow feel cheap”, I doubt the director would be offended by this take. Turning literary classics into feature-length TikTok edits is her speciality; she did the same with Saltburn, a movie received by the New Yorker as Brideshead Revisited “for the incel age”, and by many cinema-goers as social-media slop.

That’s whether we can consider Wuthering Heights highbrow at all. Graham’s Lady Magazine wrote in its contemporary review of Brontë’s novel: “How a human being could have attempted such a book without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.”

The book has caused a stir since its release – and that was when the public knew the author not as Emily Brontë but Ellis Bell, a male persona she adopted alongside her sisters (proof of the biases ingrained in the publishing world). Regardless of where you stand on “unnatural horrors” – I’m for them – it’s worth remembering that even titans of literature like Brontë have been discredited within the male-dominated canon. That was the case in 1847, and it’s the case now. Compare the overblown response to Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” with Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, a film that is well-regarded despite its anachronisms and departures from the text.

“It’s the heroine that wins”

That might be why we need the bodice ripper after all – because it places women and sex at the forefront of culture. An apt topic in the censorship age.

Though this is literature by and for women, the women in these books are subjected to unfathomable cruelty, often at the hands of their beloved. It’s a paradox present in the genre’s name; it’s summed up in the title Gentle Rogue. In The Flame and the Flower, the love interest rapes the heroine at least three times before the two live happily ever after. This concept still informs romances printed today: the goodness of the heroine inspires the rake to become a loving husband. “Only she can unlock the tenderness in his heart.”

It’s hard to reckon with the fact a scary, violent man could become someone you love, but it’s easier than imagining a world without patriarchy. What if romance novels are as much about power as they are about love? What if they are, as Wynn argues, the ultimate will-to-power narrative for women? Like many things in life, it all comes back to Twilight. “The discourse [around Twilight] focuses on the swooning fantasies of surrender to someone stronger than you, and less on the empowerment fantasies of the later part of the story,” argues Crawford. By the saga’s finale, Bella is stronger than Edward.

This metamorphosis appears throughout romance fiction; it’s what Ella Risbridger terms the “hot billionaire” story: a down-on-her-luck heroine melts the heart of an important man, who offers her financial support and adoration. She gets everything she wants. As Crawford notes: “Romance is often concerned with male power and male violence, but it’s always the heroine that wins.”

And with a box-office smash all but guaranteed, it’s fair to say Fennell is the real winner here. Ever the provocateur, the director seems to understand something few do: you can’t have a romance without breaking a few eggs.

I ask one of my friends, another English-lit girl, how she feels about the film. “It looks awful, doesn’t it?” she says. “I can’t wait to see it.”

…a column about literature, culture and the internet by me, Daniella Parete Clarke, a writer in London. You can find my writing in Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Vice, Hunger and Sextras on topics including diet culture, parties, burn-out, film, exhibitions and lesbians. You can email me at daniellagillian26@gmail.com.

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The name “Private Party” is a reference to Eve’s Hollywood, in which Eve Babitz writes the only way to get over fomo is “to be having your own private party going on with just you continuously”.

No topics are off limits, but you can expect essays on romance novels and bodice rippers, queer authors and Jane Austen, Twin Peaks and vampires – not necessarily in that order. My current aim is to publish once a month.

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