The very first romance novel I read was Angel in Scarlet by Jennifer Wilde.

This book came into my life when I was thirteen years old and I was visiting my grandfather without my parents. One of the thrills of that visit was that my grandfather let me go to the corner store on my own – a big responsibility for a thirteen-year-old! – and I took advantage of that privilege multiple times. One time in particular, while I was perusing the newsstand, I noticed this beautiful cover and was immediately intrigued.

Something about this book spoke to me. Maybe it was the swirly font of the title, or the red dress, or heroine’s brunette hair (something that spoke to a brown-haired little girl), or even the author’s name – Jennifer Wilde! I know now that Jennifer Wilde is a pseudonym of the prolific author, Tom E. Huff, but I didn’t know then. All I knew was that it was worth $3.95 of my hard-earned babysitting money, back in 1985, to appease my curiosity about this book. Let me tell you: I have rarely spent my money quite so wisely in my entire life. Not only was this book itself worth the outlay, but it also sparked a life-long love of romance novels.

The WorldCat (link above) description of this book is deceptively simple: “She was the toast of London, a breathtaking vision every woman envied and every man longed to possess. Few would have dreamed this violet-eyed beauty was the precocious child of a country schoolmaster.” On the surface, this is the story of a woman who falls in love with three different men throughout the course of her life, even marrying one of them. But if you look closer, it’s really the story of a woman who gets to live the life she wants and isn’t punished for being the captain of her own ship.

This book spoiled me! This kind of freedom wasn’t often afforded to romance heroines of that era. I learned quickly. After Angel in Scarlet, I read lots of romance novels. Most of them were varying degrees of disappointing. I encountered all the tropes I’ve come to hate: women who fall in love with their rapists, women who are virgins while the men are sluts, and even strong women who need to be rescued by a man no matter that they were independent and free before John Q. Hero joined the plot. In the last decade, I’ve come across plenty romance novels that gave the female protagonists freedom and choice and satisfaction, but that was rare to find back in the 1980s.

I reread Angel in Scarlet recently and I’ll admit nostalgia is part of my enduring love. The language is occasionally florid verging on pretentious. The sex scenes aren’t entirely euphemistic, but the language is laughably flowery at times. But above all, it is still a rollicking fun story. The dialogue is sharp, the characters relatable, and the ending satisfying in the extreme. The heroine gets her happily ever after, and it’s a believable one. The ending of Angel in Scarlet is, more than anything else, the reason it’s still the yardstick I use to measure all other romance novels.