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Rosemary Rogers, a fortyish typist and mother of four from Fairfield, Calif., shipped Editor Coffey the manuscript of a 636-page romantic extravaganza called Sweet Savage Love. The first novel she had ever submitted for publication, it became the first of four swashbuckling herstoricals that have moved more than 10 million copies off the racks, made Rogers one of the world's bestselling authors, with a million-dollar annual income, and opened to hordes of escapists some wild new terrain.
The difference between R.R. and most of her rivals is intensity. Almost all the others write in pink ink about horse-and-carriage love and marriage; Rogers pumps out purple prose about red-blooded males and females living at white heat in electric-blue relationships. Passion drives her tales, and passion to Rogers is not a pretty thing. It is a volcano of hatred that relieves itself in violent sexual expression. In most histo-romances, the climax is the kiss, but Rogers realistically noted that a new mass market for pornography exists —and that vast numbers of respectable women would become avid customers if only they did not have to admit that what they were purchasing was porn. So R.R. perfected the soft-edge sex scene in which, just as the worst is about to happen, all the heavy breathing seems to steam the reader's glasses and the details fade discreetly into daydreams.
Savage Animal. Sadomasochism in costume is a Rogers specialty. Dominic, for instance, the swarthy, arrogant 18th century hero of Wicked Loving Lies, is "a savage dangerous animal" with "steely" muscles, eyes "like shards of splintered glittering glass" and a contemptuous conviction that "all women are whores at heart." Marisa, the heroine, is a "strange mixture of defiant child and mysterious woman" with "dark-gold curls [and] panther eyes" —not to mention a will of custard. Dominic and Marisa meet on page 42. On page 62 he rapes her. On page 86 he ties her to a bedpost and assaults her again. On page 192 the hero rips the heroine's gown to the waist before raping her a third time. On page 277 he brands her thigh with a red-hot fleur-de-lis.
All in all, Marisa, who as the goddaughter of Napoleon's first wife Josephine de Beauharnais might be expected to live a somewhat sheltered life, is violated twelve times on three continents by five men. On top of that, she gives a command performance for Napoleon, suffers a miscarriage, undergoes captivity in a Turkish harem and is sold as a slave in Louisiana. Why is the heroine subjected to all these horrors? Cynics might imagine that Marisa's martyrdom is merely intended to offer the bored middle-class female a succession of vicarious masochistic thrills, but Author Rogers seems to think that regular ravishment can raise a woman's consciousness. "I'm tired of being raped," Marisa announces at last on page 654. "Don't I count as a person?"