Pam Rosenthal is a Brooklyn-born author of erotic historical romance novels. Under the pseudonym Molly Weatherfield[1] she has also written erotic novels in the BDSM genre ("bondage, domination and sadomasochism"). She and her husband Michael Rosenthal were part owners of the Modern Times bookstore in San Francisco. Their son Jesse Rosenthal is an assistant professor of English at Johns Hopkins University.
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Rosenthal's first Weatherfield novel Carrie's Story made number 12 on Playboy.com's list of the 25 Sexiest Novels Ever Written.[2] The novel has gone through sixteen printings since its publication in 1995.[3] Carrie's Story and its sequel Safe Word are influenced by the erotic classic Story of O.
Romance readers find Rosenthal's contributions both fulfill and transcend their genre. While satisfying the requirements of the form in full, Rosenthal's work also exhibits some features typical of literary novels but infrequently found in genre romance. Her approximately "Regency-set" historical romances are unusual in the genre for their (relatively) unvarnished depiction of the period and its inequalities, violence and physical hardships. Themes are developed in a symbolic dimension, though not so substantially as to distract from the dominant obligations to storytelling. The generically necessary softening of depiction of the life of servants and the working class generally is moderated and presented with a certain awareness of the elitism of the genre's formulae, her secondary but richly drawn labouring class characters limning the reality of ordinary lives that cannot be presented without fatally overshadowing the core romance.
The men’s coats, the tight pants, the boots. Georgian architecture. Adam rooms. Wedgewood. I think of all that poise and balance as coiled-up energy waiting to burst forth as the industrial revolution and the nineteenth century British Empire....There are ways in which I don’t like the Regency at all, for its snobbery and political reaction. Which is also a good reason to write about a period -- a love-hate relationship can be an extremely productive and interesting one.[4]
The Slightest Provocation involves the lovers in the Pentrich uprising,[5] allowing Rosenthal to layer atop the standard generic use of the era as fantasy scenery a critique of its real social relations from an openly progressive point of view. "A wonderful, challenging, envelope-pushing, smart and astonishing book" according to one of the leading Romance Review weblogs,[6] the novel discovered the potential for serious social critique in what is often seen as the most escapist of popular fiction forms, the wish-fulfilling love story, developing an extended analogy between the political dilemma of liberty vs. security as it was felt in the period (echoed in ours) and the delicate tensions and interdependence of freedom and responsibility, self-will and restraint, in the erotic and emotional experience of the principal couple. A further analogy at work between the government provocateur playing upon working people's real grievances and desires in Britain after the Napoleonic Wars and the role of the erotic novelist herself in manipulating the pre-existing longings of her readers is one instance of a concern treated in all her books: the art of seduction and the ethics of the seductive arts.
Almost a Gentleman, featuring a cross-dressing heroine, takes inspiration from real women of the period who dressed in men's clothes to enjoy men's freedoms. The Bookseller's Daughter, set on the eve of the French Revolution and informed by the scholarly work of Robert Darnton and his study the Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, considers seriously, if always in the utopian spirit of romance and fantasy, links between political, aesthetic and sexual liberty. Her most recent novel, 2009 Romance Writers of America RITA Award winner The Edge of Impropriety, inspired by the Countess of Blessington's portrait and life, touches upon nationalism and imperialism in the course of elaborating the more common romance themes of trust, mutual understanding, and intimacy.
Rosenthal has reviewed literary biography and fiction for Salon and other newspapers and magazines.[7] Like Jennifer Crusie, she takes a scholarly as well as an artisan's interest in her own genre of production as well. In 2010 Rosenthal participated in an academic conference held in Brussels by the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance,.[8][9] Diverging from much of the current academic and scholarly production on romance, her critical work as a theorist and scholar of the form is done less in the service of vindicating the genre and its values (a project furthered in recent years by, among others, Crusie, Jayne Ann Krentz,[10][11] Mary Bly,[12] Pamela Regis,[13] Candy Tan and Sarah Wendell[14]) than as formal inquiry, based in both her own experience with genre convention and the hermeneutic practices of Queer Theory adapted to the cultural studies tradition usually traced to Raymond Williams.
As Molly Weatherfield:
As Pam Rosenthal: