THE HONEY IS BITTER
First edition of this tempestuous contemporary romance by Mills & Boon's best-selling author of the '60s.
Near fine in very good plus jacket.
Price: $250.00
THE HONEY IS BITTER
Violet Winspear was one of the great Mills & Boon discoveries of the 1960s: a working-class reader who sent manuscripts into their slush pile while she worked odd jobs to make ends meet, such as a dishwasher in a pie shop. According to Joseph McAleer, "Winspear was the mistress of titillation [...] She never crossed the moral line in her novels, but often came perilously close" (124). In THE HONEY IS BITTER, a British woman marries a Greek millionaire under duress.
Though only mildly erotic by today's standards, Winspear's novels were considered too erotic by Mills & Boon's Canadian partner, Harlequin, who refused to reprint most of them throughout the '60s. That changed in 1973 with the debut of Harlequin Presents, a new line conceived after new leadership shook up the company's conservative culture. Harlequin Presents was intended to feature romances with more sensuality, more sophistication, and more adventure. The vast majority of its earliest titles were by authors like Winspear, whose works Harlequin had previously refused as too edgy. This book, THE HONEY IS BITTER, became an early marketing favorite of Presents, used as a giveaway (read: gateway drug) for the series. On the strength of the pent-up demand for more transgressive writers like Winspear, Presents was outselling Harlequin's main line ("Romance") within two years and has since become the iconic category romance.
Read more: McAleer, Passion's Fortune; Grescoe, Merchants of Venus.
The Object
London: Mills & Boon Limited, (1967). 7.25'' x 4.75''. Original yellow paper boards stamped in black. In original price-clipped color pictorial dust jacket. 191, [1] pages. Jacket with a few short closed tears and light edgewear. Leaves toned. Bright and tight.
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