We’re back with another promo bookmark, this time a classic from a 1981 bodice-ripper. I must have picked up the bookmark at the same time, as it’s been in my collection forever. How could I throw out such a beauty? It’s ravishing!
Looking at it again made me curious about the book. Was it even still in print? I did some digging and found out the following.
(1) The fact that I’d never heard of the author only betrays my ignorance of the genre. Kathleen E. Woodiwiss (1939-2007) “is credited with spawning the modern romance genre” with her 1972 novel The Flame and the Flower, which introduced sex into historical fiction (this comes from Wikipedia). Apparently her novels sold more than 36 million copies and were translated into many different languages.
(2) This particular book is still in print. I found it listed on Amazon, along with a half dozen other historical romances also titled A Rose in Winter. I guess you can’t copyright something so generic.
(3) The Amazon page has the top three “selected highlights” by readers of the Kindle edition. These are the passages that readers thought most worth flagging:
From a time long ago, when her dreams had held such grand illusions of a prince offering a single rose to vow his love to his lady fair, she recalled a legend that a rose found in winter brought the promise of true love found.
“Were a twisted, scar-faced, hunchbacked cripple the only other man on earth, I would surely choose him over you!”
“There is revenge, then there is justice. Sometimes the two are met as one.”
It does my heart good to see that great writing is still being appreciated in the digital age.
Book: A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe
Alex Good 
Hah! You’ll be dong Barbara Cartland before you know it 🤣
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Doing not donging 🤦🏼♀️
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I think Booky is donging Babs! 😄
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Yes, don’t worry, I’m taking one for the team and also doing the Babs read-along. 😳
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A noble sacrifice. More than I could bear!
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Hah! Wimp! I’ve got to read it again to do my reviews later in the year. New Filmfriday up BTW! 🙂
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I’ve no time after digging into my own reading backlog to be donging Babs!
Just saw your pics of Monkey Mouth!
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🙄🤣
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So, this was the hussy who polluted Romance with filthy sex scenes. Babs would totally have bitch slapped her if she could have.
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From what I can glean from reading online she was the first to introduce physical sex into the genre, so yes Babs would have been appalled. But it made Kate a lot of money.
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Well, she’s dead now.
*dances
I hope the money assuaged her guilt from her heinous actions….
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Oh, yeah, the author is very familiar to me from my Bookstop days. Shelving those romance books was not one of the worst jobs in the store.
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I’ll bet they sold like hotcakes!
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Don’t know honestly. I liked handling the books, didn’t pay much attention to selling them.
(I mean store-wide. I wasn’t fondling these particular books! : -)
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I would have fondled them! The early ’80s were the golden age of those shiny, embossed covers. Or even the covers with the holes in them revealing some bonkers artwork underneath. Nothing like that with our boring books today.
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Haha. Now me, I always looked at those double covers but I didn’t like them. They made it harder to read the book one-handed! That’s why I don’t have many. Night Shift is the only one I own that I can think of off the top of my head.
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I remember those eyes looking out of the hand. Classic cover.
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Based on the cover, I can confirm from my point of view that bodice is definitely ripped.
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And that fellow just rolled out of bed!
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