Nell Gwyn in Contemporary Romance Novels: Biography and the Dictates of "Genre Literature"

Nell Gwyn, King Charles II’s legendary actress-mistress, is revered as “one of the most attractive characters in British history,” credited with “lifting the spirits of a nation” (Roberts) after eleven years of Puritan austerity. Her extraordinary ascent from low-born street girl and possibly child prostitute to orange-seller in the pit of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane on to celebrated actress and finally to royal mistress has been the subject of numerous biographies and films and has also found its way into a number of recent novels, or ‘fictionalized biographies.’ Focusing on gender-specific narrative strategies, this paper examines the generic properties of Diane Haeger’s The Perfect Royal Mistress (2007), Susan Holloway Scott’s The King’s Favorite (2008), and Gillian Bagwell’s The Darling Strumpet (2011). In view of the remarkable rise of fictionalized biography in the past two decades, it comes as no surprise that several novelists have found Gwyn’s life an attractive subject and thus reaffirmed her status as a cultural icon. The fictionalized biography as such is a fascinating hybrid genre, incorporating biographical fact but presenting it in fictional mode. The novels under consideration are all the more interesting for their participation in a specific segment of contemporary “women’s fiction”: the historical romance novel. While the facts of Gwyn’s life complicate the novels’ generic plotlines as romance narratives, the romantic elements in turn put pressure on the representation of the biographee’s life, which must make concessions to the demands of the genre