A History of Violence
Stormfire, the scorpion, and the frog
Note: With the help of a Goodreads librarian, Monson’s biography has been updated since this essay’s publication.
Something a bit strange happens when you look up Christine Monson, author of the cult-classic bodice ripper, Stormfire. Because of the dearth of information available, you’ll most likely see her two-paragraph biography on Goodreads and Fantastic Fiction, where small tidbits about her life, artlessly arranged, invite you to draw an unflattering portrait of her artistic trajectory. She wrote six romance novels, then was embarrassed by them, ditching the genre to write a book about the Holy Grail instead. She died by suicide in the early 2000s. These facts, outlined linearly, feel very calculated, implying a sort of failed atonement, particularly for Stormfire, which some readers view as an immoral work.
These biographies are pulled from her obituary, but it’s a bit like a game of telephone. Her career as a writer wasn’t jumpstarted after a viewing of the romantic action-adventure movie Romancing the Stone, as Goodreads claims. That’s not remotely possible, Romancing the Stone and Monson’s debut Stormfire, a nearly 600-page behemoth, were both released in 1984.
The truth is that Monson was extremely shy, identifying with Kathleen Turner’s beleaguered homebody-turned-adventuress, more comfortable telling tales than inspiring them. In fact, that’s the entire angle of her obituary in The Denver Post: “Romance novelist loved adventure — on paper.”
Reputation
The most well-known bodice ripper is most likely 1972’s The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss: ushering in the American romance mass market paperback boom, it was the first of its kind — a cultural reset. You can find references to The Flame and the Flower in mainstream outlets like The New York Times, Salon, The Washington Post, and Glamour. Hell, it even has a TV Tropes page. Stormfire does not have the digital footprint of a book like The Flame and the Flower: it’s out of print and not as easily accessible, it wasn’t the first of anything, and it doesn’t have a staggering financial benchmark to give it value.
If The Flame and the Flower is to romance what The Exorcist is to horror, Stormfire is A Serbian Film: nowhere near as commercially successful, but bolstered by a salacious whisper network. When I started posting about bodice rippers on TikTok the same comment would follow me with an almost prurient fervor, repeated week to week and video to video: Have you read Stormfire?
On review sites, the violence in Stormfire is legendary. Sean, the love interest, viciously backhands the heroine, rapes her, then mails her soiled undergarments to her father before you get far enough in the book to crack the spine. What surprised me on my first reading, the second, and continuously, is how this reputation is a scrap-yard collection of facets of the book, how Monson’s interest in cyclical violence and political oppression are glossed over with the nuance of a true crime podcast hosted by comedians. It’s more than fair to put a romantic relationship, in a romance novel, under a microscope. It’s also fair for me to yell: Zoom out!
Brothers
At the beginning of Stormfire, Catherine Endlery is a young comtesse, a title she inherited from her deceased French mother. She adores her father — John Enderly, the Viscount of Windemere — but after his wife’s death, he lost interest in his burgeoning hellion of a daughter.
When Catherine is kidnapped mid-coach ride, she assumes it’s the work of a thwarted suitor, but the golden-haired Irishman who forces her aboard a ship, Liam Culhane, does not mince words when she attempts to bribe him for her freedom: “So… the English lady would graciously give me what’s mine already, what you and your countrymen would have stolen long ago if you could beat down the final resistance of men like my ‘employer’! Do you think you can wheedle concessions from people you’ve trodden underfoot? Come down from your pedestal, my lady, and have a good look at the source of your own wealth, a pittance of which you deign to share with me if I lick your feet as a proper Irishman should.”
Despite his vitriol, Liam is dismayed that he’s been reduced to kidnapping a young woman for his ‘employer’, his younger brother, Sean Culhane. This duality (When Liam defends Catherine early on, Sean calls him Galahad. By the end of the book, he is Judas) is Monson’s first hint at an 18th-century nice guy, a man who has good intentions so long as those intentions align with his desires.
Sean Culhane, a man whose heart is “blackened by hate,” is afforded no such subtlety: when she meets her dark-haired captor, Catherine mentally recites Milton’s Paradise Lost, concluding that “he might be Lucifer. How sad he is.”
Sean’s mother Meagan absconded with him when he was an infant, leaving her eldest son and her husband, Brendan, behind. Years later, a newly motherless Sean returned to his father’s household thoroughly rubbed raw, hissing and spitting, only to be embraced as a favored son. Brendan saw Liam as artistic and soft, but was drawn to Sean’s ferocity. This dynamic continues into adulthood: Liam is titled and ostensibly in charge, but he, and everyone else, answers to Sean.
1798
Monson’s obituary outlines her taste for (written) adventure, but I’d describe it more as an interest in political conflict — all six of her books are set during (or slightly before) an uprising or war, and she had a keener eye for identifying oppression than most of her contemporaries.
Years before the events of Stormfire, John Enderly — Catherine’s father who, unbeknownst to her, is a war profiteer— engineered the massacre of a small Irish village called Kenlo in hopes of inciting a rebellion. Enderly has a big win and a minor loss: he helped kick off the Irish Rebellion of 1798, but he also made a lifelong enemy of Sean Culhane — the massacre’s sole survivor and one of the rebellion’s architects —leading to the capture of his neglected daughter.
I won’t mince words about Sean: he is one of the most terrifying characters I’ve encountered in a romance novel. After his initial brutalization of Catherine, he puts her to work at his (well, technically Liam’s) home estate, Shelan, taunting her when she protests: "Miss Enderly, you've only had a taste of the Irish condition… If you think a slap in the face, a lean mattress, a limited wardrobe, a few floors to scrub, and a single man between your legs is a miserable life, you've not begun to learn misery. The Irish will never tolerate the English heel on their necks. Shall we see how well you stand an Irish heel on yours?"
Something that I’ve heard romance novel historian Steve Ammidown say on Twitter, and think about often, is that historical romance is the combination of two histories: the first is when the book is set, and the second is when it is written.
When Monson was working on her debut in the early 1980s she wasn’t watching Romancing the Stone (yet), but she was most certainly hearing about the Troubles. The 1981 Irish Hunger Strike, the 1982 IRA bombings of Hyde Park and Regent’s Park, and the INLA bombing of Ballykelly were not only major news stories, but a continuation of the centuries-long struggle Monson was writing about.
After they’ve fallen in love, Catherine warns Sean that he cannot keep her as his English mistress if he is to lead. “You’ll have no choice,” she says. “The abilities and ancestry that rally Irishmen to your standard will also compel you to accept their leadership in peace. To remain free, Ireland must remain united; and for a time, perhaps all your lifetime, your name obliges you to supply focus for loyalty.”
Revenge
After Sean attacks Catherine at the beginning of the book, he compares her to the discarded women of Kenlo. This was his initial goal in capturing Catherine: a revenge plan of parallels that would thoroughly eviscerate Enderly, ending in his daughter becoming one of the many casualties of his war profiteering.
What he didn’t count on was how little Enderly would care about Catherine, and how important Catherine would become to him. As Sean falls in love, he mentally recategorizes her; she’s no longer a political enemy. He suddenly wants the one thing she is able to withhold: her consent.
“My experience of brutality has come from you,” Catherine tells him. “Never beauty, tenderness, or affection, because you don’t permit them in yourself… How can I give you affection when you seek to wrench it from me and crush it as heedlessly as that boy might a butterfly, tearing off its bright wings to keep in its pocket, startled to find it soon colorless and dead?”
Unmoored by his feelings about Catherine, Sean comes face to face with Enderly later in the book, and is shaken by how tedious the rest of his plan seems. Make no mistake: he still plans on killing Enderly as part of his personal revenge, but it’s with the banal inevitability of a mongoose killing a cobra. Or the fabled scorpion stinging the frog.
Bodice rippers went out of fashion in the 90s, but they didn’t die out. Nina Pennacchi’s Lemonade, released in 2010, has a cult status similar to Stormfire. There’s little, if any, mainstream coverage of Lemonade, but its name is often invoked on message boards and Reddit threads in conversations about extremes.
Lemonade isn’t a large political epic like Stormfire — instead it’s set in a single small, seemingly idyllic, town in Victorian England. Christopher Davenport, a newly arrived merchant, buys an estate so he can first inveigle his way into his father’s good graces, then ruthlessly destroy him while he’s unawares. Christopher believes he is an unknown entity to his father — he’s angry about being ‘orphaned’ and abandoned in the abstract, but mostly he holds his father personally responsible for the events that killed his mother — whose shocking death kicks off the novel.
In his head, Christopher’s revenge plot is the equivalent of “Big mistake, huge!” in Pretty Woman. Everyone was wrong about his value, and now they’ll be sorry. But that mile-wide chip on his shoulder, along with his rather erratic temperament, proves disastrous for a young woman named Anna Champion.
At a house party Christopher knocks into Anna, spilling a glass of lemonade down her dress. He takes stock of her shabby (sticky) dress and her unremarkable appearance, and to her indignation, Anna sees the wheels turning in his head: Social climber. Not worth apologizing to. Anna gets her mild petty revenge later, but the look in Christopher’s eyes tells her that “she had started something that perhaps she would not be able to control.”
Anna is so far on the periphery of Christopher’s revenge scheme that it can be difficult to fathom why he singles her out in a slow, relentless campaign of terror. Anna is not sure what to make of this either: “The world, she suddenly understood, is not a single place that is clearly governed by logical laws. There are also other worlds, distorted and senseless, like this one that I’ve fallen into by chance.”
I wanted to write, “one day Christopher goes too far” here, but he started at ‘too far.’ One day Christopher takes us toppling over the edge, viciously attacking Anna as an excuse to force her into marriage. First, it’s an ear-buzzing shock, then the waiting game begins. What will Anna do?
In the Reformed Rakes episode on Stormfire, my podcast cohost Emma notes: “I think when you focus only on Sean's violence, it makes it seem like there's some version of this book that Catherine can win, like Catherine can overcome this personal violence if only Monson thought to write it that way.”
To adhere to romance genre conventions of the happily ever after, there are two outcomes that Monson has to disregard. The first is Catherine dying, either by Sean’s hand or her own; the second is Catherine killing Sean.
Choices, outlined reminds me so much of a passage from Lemonade. After Christopher attacks Anna and tries to manipulate her into marriage, Anna considers her options:
She had written down the various possible alternatives, and there were only four—four sentences encompassed her entire future.
She reread the first sentence: Seek justice for the offense.
Then the second: Kill myself.
Then the third: Marry Christopher Davenport.
And finally the last: Kill Christopher Davenport.
She crossed out one, then another. Only two possibilities remained.
I think some people would argue that the first choice is the only clear, correct one. It’s also the only one Anna knows, because of Christopher’s threats and her social standing, will be utterly ineffective. In Stormfire, the “correct” choice is also withheld. Sean’s brother Liam, sickened that Catherine does not offer him her affection freely (How dare she! Unlike Sean, he is nice), warps his offer of assistance so greatly that it feels more like a threat.
Cycles
While Catherine is still being held hostage at Shelan in Stormfire, a servant named Maude attacks her twice. Catherine manages to escape the first time by knocking her out with a broomstick, but she doesn’t get so lucky the second time. Maude and another servant, Nora, attack Catherine by the docks, and Catherine defensively pulls them all into the icy water. Of the three, Catherine is the only one who can swim. She pulls Nora to safety, but when she tries to rescue Maude, the other woman grabs her by the throat and pulls her underwater.
In between the attacks, Catherine finds out why Maude hates her to such an extreme degree. Maude watched her family be killed by colonial Protestants, and to her, the English and Americans are one and the same. Catherine is simply a convenient vessel for Maude’s grief and impotent rage. You could say the same thing about Catherine and Sean.
After he rescues Catherine, Sean quietly orders Maude’s death. This should serve as a warning to him: if he wasn’t a man, if he hadn't been rewarded for violence since he arrived at Shelan, this would be his fate. It still could be — Maude died alone.
Instead of feeling relief at being rid of a tormenter, Catherine mourns. She plants white flowers called Stars of Bethlehem over Maude’s grave, noting that they should spread. When Catherine and Sean return to the gravesite much later, grieving a more personal loss, the flowers have overtaken the hill entirely. “Humility is a bitter draft to swallow,” Sean thinks.
The Romance Writers of America have taken a huge reputational hit since the 2019/2020 scandals, but I still see people cite the organization’s definition of a romance novel as definitive, likely because they haven’t been usurped by a greater authority. This definition includes the distinction that “in a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love.”
I’m not sure what emotional justice is supposed to mean, but based on my years of reading romance, I think it’s a sort of mutual catharsis. This could be why you see so many epilogues nowadays — they reassure that the household unit, the family, is restored with time. The mind is calm, we are all steady.
Without getting too far into spoilers, because of the interpersonal violence in Stormfire and Lemonade, they work for me as romance novels because you are robbed of a huge portion of that catharsis. Quite a few historical romances have a thwarted revenge plot — think of all the times someone tries to ruin an aristocrat’s sister, only to fall in love with her instead. But to take it further — to have the revenge be the accumulation of a life’s work — only for it to be ripped out from under your feet, to leave you untethered, malleable, and grasping for the one person who can save you?
Is that an “emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending” per the RWA requirements? The scorpion stings the frog, who is his lifeline, because it’s “in his nature.” If he realizes it doesn’t have to be — then I would say yes.
Bargains
I feel very conflicted about writing this newsletter. I am so annoyed by the grim implications in Monson’s online biographies that I want to put in my two cents, but I worry that in trying to lend greater context to her most infamous work I’ve led you to the same conclusions. I’ve written before about how I don’t believe romance novels have a responsibility to reflect aspirational relationships — if we think fiction is art and that art has value beyond the instructional we are only patronizing ourselves by having this conversation in the first place. In the words of Annie Dillard (by way of Judy Cuevas): “He who has clean hands and a pure heart has never crawled to the back of his cave.”
The way we write about depression and suicide has shifted so drastically since the early 2000s that it’s jarring to see the words “committed suicide” in Monson’s obituary next to mentions of her unfinished work. Jacqui Bianchi —who wrote two ultra-violent bodice rippers in the late 70s and early 80s under the pen name Teresa Denys— died young in a car accident, leaving her third novel unfinished. Both Monson and Bianchi had a taste for extreme darkness and opulent beauty — this is not something that reflects their mental states, rather it’s a testament to their powers of observation, imagination, and empathy.
“She learned to coax the ordinary out of the extraordinary,” according to Monson’s obituary. “She knew how to scour the racks at Goodwill stores, plucking Donna Karan and Yves St. Laurent from hangers crowded with more pedestrian labels. She braked for yard sales and once brought home an elegant maple dresser that she bought for $15.”
It feels like the Internet has a long memory, but memories are often sparse, ephemeral, and insufficient. When we highlight an incomplete quest for the Holy Grail, we miss the maple dressers.
If you want to hear more about Stormfire, please check out this episode from the Reformed Rakes podcast. It was a labor of love!
The fable of the scorpion and the frog was on my mind because I kept thinking about the 1992 movie The Crying Game when I wrote this — there’s a scene where a British soldier named Jody (Forrest Whittaker) recites it to his captor, an IRA member named Fergus (Stephen Rea). The Crying Game is extremely polarizing amongst the queer community (for good reason), and I feel a bit unequipped to discuss it in great detail at this point. Instead, I’d point you to the documentary about depictions of trans people in media, Disclosure. There’s also a chapter in Stormfire, where Sean Culhane comes face-to-face with John Enderly, called “The Mongoose and the Cobra.” My podcast cohost Beth talks about it in more detail in the Reformed Rakes episode.
My favorite Christine Monson book is Surrender the Night, where Monson tears apart the main couple during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848.
Thanks for including a voiceover! This part made me mentally fist pump in the air: "Both Monson and Bianchi had a taste for extreme darkness and opulent beauty — this is not something that reflects their mental states, rather it’s a testament to their powers of observation, imagination, and empathy." I've started reading more bodice rippers this year and, what you write here - extreme darkness and opulent beauty, powers of EMPATHY - are precisely why I am drawn to them.
lovely work, as always!