"The Art of Romance"

This book is not my usual kind of blog-fodder, but I found it remaindered on the weekend and I couldn't resist:

 

An entire book full of book covers! 

Though Mills and Boon and Harlequin are best known for their romances, it would appear that they published other genres--at least in their earlier days.  From 1950:

Though of course the romances do predominate in every era--as shown by this couple in a steamy clinch in 1976:

There's a fair amount of social history to be gleaned from these covers--from changing standards of what what was acceptable (the covers get steadily raunchier from the 1960s on) to changing fashions in clothes, hair and makeup.  (Could the couple above belong to any decade other than the seventies?)

Gone To Earth by Mary Webb (Virago, 1979)

Ah, the old Viragos!  I found this on the dusty shelves at The Green Shed, dumping ground for people's unwanted furniture and other paraphernalia.  I've come across quite a few treasures hidden among the junk in the depths of the Green Shed.

As usual the cover of this Virago book features a reproduction of a piece of art only tenuously related to the work inside. 

Mary Webb was one of the authors parodied by Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm.  Her protagonists are Nature's children one and all, swept helplessly along on the tides of their emotions.  I'm convinced that the fey heroine of Gone to Earth (the daughter of a Welsh gypsy and a "crazy bee-keeper"!) was the model for Elfine Starkadder:

Hazel, quite intoxicated with excitement, danced between the slender boles till her hair fell down and the long plait swung against her shoulder.
'If folks came by, maybe they'd think I was a fairy!' she cried.
'Dunna kick about so!' said Abel, emerging from his abstraction.  'It inna decent, now you're a 'ooman growd.'
'I'm not a 'ooman growd!' cried Hazel shrilly.  I dunna want to be, and I won't never be.'

(Page 54)