Paige Reynolds, AM’90, PhD’99, is a scholar of Irish literary fiction, but romance fiction has always been close to her heart. Reynolds, Stephen J. Prior Professor of Humanities at the College of the Holy Cross, married the two interests in Happy Ever After: Falling in Love with Irish Romance Fiction, an exhibition she curated at the Museum of Literature Ireland in Dublin. (The museum often goes by its acronym MoLI, pronounced “Molly”—as in Bloom.) Happy Ever After takes a broad view of a misunderstood genre, examining both its historical origins and contemporary expressions in the work of writers including Marian Keyes and Sally Rooney. An online version of the exhibition is set to launch this spring. Reynolds’s comments have been edited and condensed.

How and when did you first develop an academic interest in romance fiction?

I’ve been a casual romance reader since middle school, when I discovered Kathleen Woodiwiss’s—in retrospect deeply problematic—bodice rippers at the same time I discovered Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Pride and Prejudice. The links between high literary fiction and commercial romance were really evident to me as a young reader. I knew I liked both kinds of books.

When COVID arrived, I was writing about Irish experimental women’s fiction—writers like Anne Enright, Eimear McBride, and Anna Burns. Most of the books I was studying were looking at the darkest possible aspects of the human experience and the darkest possible outcomes. I was locked in my house with really depressing books, and I needed something distracting.

A bookstore owner recommended Christina Lauren’s The Unhoneymooners (Gallery Books, 2019), and I thought, “This is really fun.” The pleasure of the predictable narrative and the predictable happy ending was a lovely counterpose to what was happening in the real world and in my intellectual world.

Romance became my version of the sourdough starter during COVID. But then it started morphing into a critical interest. It was exciting to me to see the ways in which, over centuries, Irish romance has intervened in social issues—whether it’s Marian Keyes looking at abortion or Maeve Binchy looking at intimate partner abuse or Adiba Jaigirdar looking at the contours of racial, ethnic, and religious diversity in Ireland.

What makes Irish romance fiction distinctive?

One thing is a tradition of explicit political engagement, starting even in 1693 with Vertue Rewarded; or, the Irish Princess, which uses a marriage plot across political lines to imagine how we might reconcile difference. There’s a really noisy political bent from that moment into the present day.

There’s also a primacy of friends and families. The notion that a romantic relationship happens in a bubble between a superhot guy and a superhot woman … well, romance fiction in Ireland has always stressed that any relationship requires a scaffolding of other people.

Not surprisingly, given moral strictures of the Catholic Church and the stranglehold that it had on Ireland well into the 21st century, Irish romance tends to be less graphic in its representations of intimacy. Even now, it’s not in-your-face, although that’s starting to change a little bit.

You included Sally Rooney in the exhibition, which might surprise some people.

Rooney is a really interesting test case, because she is, at her core, a romance fiction writer but has also been able to breach the literary-fiction, romance-fiction divide. If you boil down her books, romance is the central engine of the plot. Intermezzo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) is an age-gap romance. Normal People (Hogarth, 2019) looks at college-age romance. But Rooney is fiddling with the traditional narratives of the “happily ever after” ending.

Irish fiction has a long tradition of adeptly representing the quotidian—that’s what Ulysses is. Rooney is able to capture the generational group and the socioeconomic group she’s representing in ways that feel real to readers.

It made people uncomfortable that we included her in the exhibition. The more capacious definition of romance that includes all of these writers makes even the writers themselves kind of uncomfortable. And it’s not just the anxiety about women writers representing the female experience. I think there is a kind of anxiety about the taint of commercial success. What’s great about Rooney is that she’s actually been able to undermine that clichéd, tired, and reductive narrative.

Why do you think romance fiction is enjoying so much popularity right now?

One of the reasons has to do with what you and I are doing right now—having an interaction on screen. And romance focuses on relationships and bodies and characters being in the same room and meeting.

Romance also allows you to see how other people’s relationships play out. It takes you into places that are private and can act as a kind of how-to: how to be in a relationship, how to overcome difficulty, how to connect with people. These models are positive, and right now we’re living in a world where everything is the worst possible news.

What I love about these books is they give us a counternarrative of what good things are possible. I’m weirded out by the fact that positivity attracts such contempt. I refuse to accept that seeking happy endings and seeking connection is inherently naïve. That’s one of the reasons I like to advocate for romance fiction—because these narratives can help you imagine better things.