Romance and the Privilege of Literary Value
Give me Emily Brontë over this.
(Brown, “Why Generation Woke loves Romantasy”)
Lara Brown’s recent Telegraph article hit social media like a hurricane this past week, making waves for not only her reductionist take, but with her labeling the entire genre as “fairy porn.” As reductionist as her article for the Telegraph was, it’s a condensed version of an article she wrote as commissioning editor for The Spectator in August 2025 called “Why Generation Woke loves romantasy.”Brown shows her own bias in both articles.
The quote above was the closing line of the piece, which, in the year of Emerald Fennell’s sexed up movie version of Wuthering Heights is almost too ironic to be believed. It’s like Brown has never read Wuthering Heights in the first place: Heathcliff is just as guilty if not more so than all of the male love interests Brown cites.
The only difference is that male love interests in Romantasy are largely consensual beings—Feyre’s supposed “kidnap” and subsequent “captivity” was a bargain she struck with Tamlin—an echo of the original Beauty and the Beast storyline. Heathcliff’s kidnap had no such consent—it was a deliberate trap set to get back at Edgar Linton.
Brown’s pretense to superiority in literature, however sarcastically worded, isn’t new, however, and it might surprise her to know that another Oxbridge graduate made similar claims in the literary world over 450 years ago.
The Schoolmaster was a posthumous work of Roger Ascham’s, published in 1570 by his widow, and contains what is predominantly an educational treatise. Ascham’s contention is that the harsh treatment in the school system, which contained corporal punishment, was not conducive to encouraging a love of knowledge or of learning in general. But then, Ascham pivots into a long, often repetitive criticism of Italian “fond books” and, even more surprisingly, a work he just refers to as “Morte Arthur.”
“In our forefather’s times, when Papistry, as a standing pool, covered and overflowed all England, few books were read in our tongue, saving certain books of chivalry, as they said, for pastime and pleasure, which as some say, were made in monasteries by idle monks or wanton canons; as one for example, ‘Morte Arthur’ the whole pleasure of which book standers in two special points–in open manslaughter and bold bawdry. In which book those be counted the noblest knights that do kill most men without any quarrel and commit foulest adulteries by subtlest shifts […]” (Ascham, 83)
In other words, Ascham’s criticism of the much-acclaimed Arthurian legends, of which he can only put the title to one, is almost exactly the same as Brown’s criticism of the “crossbreed” of Edmund Spenser and E. L. James. This, like the comment about Emily Brontë exposes a long-time double-standard in the literary world and one which attacks using the exact same language, framework, and even fears.
The Pattern
“[…] when the busy and open Papists abroad could not by their contentious books turn men in England fast enough from truth and right judgements in doctrine, then the subtle and secret Papists at home procured bawdy books […]whereby over-many young wills […] do now boldly contemn all severe books that sound to honestly and godliness.”(Ascham, 83)
Ascham’s criticism of “Morte Arthur” begins and ends with repetitive assertions that the “bawdy” books of Italy are a Catholic plot to make inroads by making Englishmen turn from “truth and right judgement in doctrine.” In other words, turn them from the Protestant religion and make them Catholics again. This is a dual-pronged approach that you can see repeated across the history of the romantic art form, beginning with Ascham’s Reformation morals and up to Brown’s criticism.
Similar contempt was lobbed at Samuel Richardson’s Pamela after its 1740 publication. The charge? Henry Fielding in Shamela (1741) charged Pamela with being pornographic, just as Ascham charged Morte d’Arthur as bawdy, and Brown called Romantasy“[b]itty, derivative, sexual mulch” (Brown, “Generation Woke”). Fielding’s charge, like Ascham’s and Brown’s charges, is completely against Richardson’s own subtitle “Virtue Rewarded” and his own stated “Observations” at the end of the novel where he basically shows you what everything in the novel meant.
Pamela, by the way, employed many of the same themes Brown criticizes in Romantasy: kidnap, coercion, violence, etc. Again, all of which appear in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights which Brown claims she’d take “any day” over A Court of Thorns and Roses.
Brown’s calls Gen Z hypocritical for being the “MeToo generation” or “Generation Woke” yet reading books with “violent and sometimes coercive sex” while being “the generation no longer having sex.”
However, the hypocrisy isn’t all in Generation Z who had been spoon-fed warnings about the dangers of unprotected sex and unwanted pregnancies, while being under thread of having every moment of their lives recorded and put where anyone can see their most embarrassing moments permanently.
The Mechanism
This pattern of calling romance “bawdy” or “sexual mulch” functions as a means of horrifying the reactionaries in society, not the critical thinkers. Brown’s comments that “[t]he generation that ushers MeToo now proudly displays erotica filled with heavily-eroticized and dubiously consensual BDSM, assault and coercion on their coffee tables and in their Instagram stories” (“Fairy Porn”) adding that “[y]ou probably wouldn’t curate a collection of Lads’ mags on your coffee table; is Romantasy any different?” (Ibid)
The irony here is that Brown admits it is different in her Spectator article. She likens Romantasy to The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser—one of the cornerstone texts on my High Romance Reading list—and for a reason. This is not average romance literature. Spenser’s Faerie Queene is above average in almost every way—it’s a main influence on Romantic poets like John Keats and William Wordsworth, beloved of Sir Walter Scott whose monument dominates Edinburgh, even dwarfing the monument to Robert Burns. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—also cited by Brown—even owes something to The Faerie Queene.
Yet, we don’t have Brown calling Spenser “bawdy” or “sexual mulch.” In fact, Ascham’s criticism of the chivalric romance proves to go far astray when the romantic epic writers like Tasso, Ariosto, and Spenser write their works because Tasso and Spenser,in particular, set out to present a very moral chivalric epic—one where there are complex characters who have to make moral choices in immoral circumstances and under immoral influences.
Now, when has any other work in recent centuries hearkened back to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene? The answer is that there is none. Modernism and Postmodernism are not conducive philosophies for the kind of art Edmund Spenser made. It’s not even conducive to the art J. R. R. Tolkien made. Tolkien’s masterpiece was more a work of the Victorian Age than it was of the Modern.
Brown’s accusation that Romantasy is “literature taken to its lowest form” (“Generation Woke”) is hollow when you consider that she’s just placed The Faerie Queene—which even Elizabethan scholars are said to eschew—in it’s literary lineage. No, instead she falls back on “fairy porn” in the Telegraph article and in The Spectator states that the “plot is merely a divide to take us from one sex-fuelled encounter to the next” without even examining, her previous claim that Romantasy works like A Court of Thorns and Roses have commonality with Spenser’s romantic epic.
But that’s not all, if you take the actual legal definition of porn within the United States—where most of Romantasy books are published, Brown’s accusations—like Ascham’s truly fall apart and show an ideological impetus—not a moral one.
If you’re living in the United States, the legal definitions of what constitutes pornography is governed by a court decision known as Miller vs California from 1973. This court decision had three main points for determining what was pornographic and what wasn’t:
- An average person using “contemporary community standards” would find the content both arousing and overly focused on sex.
- The content depicts or describes sex in an offensive way.
- The content lacks serious literary, political, or scientific value.
This definition is not, if you notice, definitive. It deepens largely on what you define “average person,” “contemporary community standards,” “offensive,” and “serious value.” These terms are themselves defined by an individual’s personal preferences and opinions—not by anything that is objective. Which means Brown’s accusations of Romantasy being “contrived and ridiculous” aren’t themselves objective.
Which brings us to the third point of that definition: “literary value.” This is specifically what commenters like Brown and, to a lesser extent Ascham, are going after. Romance already isn’t taken seriously—Brown’s own sarcastic and flippant remarks prove that in spades when she makes the Tamlin/Feyre dynamic the primary source of her ire in her Spectator article, calling it coercive, abusive, and claiming it involved kidnap.
This is a deliberate mis-reading of the actual story. Feyre wasn’t kidnapped nor was she, by extension, a captive, she entered a bargain with Tamlin who demanded payment for the life she very willingly took. She agreed to live with Tamlin at his court and he goes to some fairly extensive lengths to ensure she isn’t coerced. The alleged “assault” happens because Feyre transgresses boundaries Tamlin put in place specifically for her own protection, and it’s very clear that she wants his attention.
A more effective argument for Brown would have been to address Rhysand’s bargain with Feyre Under the Mountain—healing in exchange for one week at the Night Court each month after Amarantha is defeated. This is actually coercion and would have made her point more effectively than the kidnap she claims happened, even though it was coercion with the motivation of keeping Feyre alive so she could defeat Amarantha and free the rest of the High Lords.
Nor does she admit that the “explicit and, crucially violent” sex she claims is redolent in Romantasy isn’t present in A Court of Thorns and Roses and the sex that is there is in two scenes only. Fourth Wing, which she also cites, also lacks sexual abundance and the “explicit” content she claims is there amounts to a wardrobe being destroyed in the process—no further details. Moreover, both relationships are closed, committed, and consensual, which begs the question of why she identifies these works as “sexual mulch” when writers in both Modernist and Post-Modernist traditions no longer get the same treatment?
Novels within either of these traditions were and often still are the subject of book bans for the same charges leveled at Romantasy, but reading a Joyce or a Steinbeck novel is considered a sign of intellectual superiority even if the sexual content is considerably more questionable. Steinbeck has one of the Uncle John Joad hiring “three whores into one bed” (Steinbeck, 167) in The Grapes of Wrath and then goes on to describe how he “snorted and rutted on their unresponsive bodies for an hour” (Steinbeck, 167).
This is a clear double-standard which gives preference to rape and coercive sex as “serious” when it’s in a novel like The Grapes of Wrath, and “great literature” when it’s a novel like Wuthering Heights, but calls consensual sex within a Romance “fairy porn.” It’s indicative of the kind of literary elitism that has been at work for over 100 years with the centering of the novel as the primary standard of literary quality in the Victorian era, to the gutting of romantic literature from the Dartmouth Seminar of 1963, to the Canon Wars of the 1980s.
The Tradition Answers
The Romantic tradition has always played with ideas that a wider, pedestrian morality has deemed questionable. Dante’s Divine Comedy is a case in point, being equal parts a treatise on romance as a way of transcendence, a satire on Italian politics, and a theological poem. But Dante was of a quality that is rarely, if ever seen in the literary world, even when we try to convince ourselves otherwise. It is with good reason that T. S. Eliot identified him as one of the two men who “divide the world between them” (Eliot, “Dante” 225).
Shakespeare, incidentally Eliot’s second half of the world, also played fast and loose with the social mores. He was a man in the business of entertainment and he had every strata of society to please with his plays, from the groundlings who preferred “bawds” to the elite who liked his wit and figurative language, but he was also a man highly conscious of the times in which he lived and of the condition of real people who had to live in the real world.
When the Romantic Movement finally came around, and resurrected the Romantic Epic as well as interest in Shakespeare’s plays, the more dangerous ideas also came out to play. The Sorrows of Young Werther like Lyrical Ballads, put men of feeling and sentiment in front and center in a way that hadn’t been done since the chivalric age put knights of feeling and sentiment front and center. This is a theme that carries through the Romantic Age to the women writers of the Victorian Age. St. John Rivers of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyreas well as Mr. Brocklehurst are the unfeeling men who only value their own definition of morality and not the feelings of others while Rochester is the man of feeling who, sometimes misguided, at least loves Jane for herself, and not for her ability to obey a set of rules, or for her utilitarian use.
Romance, in a sense, has always been about what happens outside the set-in-stone “rules” that society thrusts upon itself. This is partially why it’s place from the humanist Renaissance forward has always been called into question: power systems of all kinds operate on a status quo basis—they rely on people not asking questions or trying to think for themselves. But the romantic tradition presents us with stories that simultaneously occupy familiar and comfortable places while introducing just enough uncertainty to make us ask questions we might not normally think to ask.
It’s why the Romantic Movement relied so heavily on medieval and Renaissance romantic forms: why Romance of the Rose and The Faerie Queene became sources of inspiration as well as quests in themselves. The romantic form itself is a quest for truth, not just for true love, but for truth about the self, and about how that self belongs in the world into which it was born.
Survival
Roger Ascham died with his criticism of Le Morte d’Arthur disregarded. The decade after his death were some of the most legendary in all of English Literature, the pinnacle being the 1590s with Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s early works both making their debut. Romance survived his “bawdy” accusation. It survived every version of this charge that came afterwards too, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela was the beginning of a much larger movement for emotional and psychological realism, and the Brontë‘ sisters are now accepted and lauded members of the great canon of literature.
What this should signal to the would-be critics like Lara Brown is that their criticisms are far from original, in fact, “[o]riginality is not encouraged” when it comes to criticizing the genre—to quote Lara Brown herself.
The tradition that survived despite Ascham’s criticism, despite Fielding’s criticism will outlast Brown’s criticism as well.
Works Cited
Ascham, Roger. The Scholemaster. Cassel and Company, 1909. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/schoolmaster00aschuoft. Accessed 9 June 2026.
Brown, Lara. “Gen-Z’s Taste for ‘Fairy Porn’ Lays Bare the MeToo Generation’s Smutty Soul.” The Telegraph, 7 June 2026, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/07/gen-zs-taste-for-fairy-porn-lays-bare-the-metoo-generations/. Accessed 9 June 2026.
Brown, Lara. “Why Generation Woke Loves Romantasy.” The Spectator, 2 Aug. 2025, www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-generation-woke-loves-romantasy/. Accessed 12 June 2026.
Eliot, T. S. “Dante.” Selected Essays. Harcourt, Brace and Company, ca. 1950, p. 225.
Fielding, Henry. An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews. 1741. Project Gutenberg, 14 Jan. 2010, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30962. Accessed 12 June 2026.
Miller v. California. 413 US 15. Supreme Court of the United States. 1973.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. Horizon Ridge Publishing, 1939. Hoopla, www.hoopladigital.com. Accessed 13 June 2026.
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