with apologies to Billy Joel, I Have Been a Fool For Lesser Things

When I was in college, I was part of a great books program that required a long paper at the end of every semester. Towards the end of my college career, I started to get teased by my professor because I was, he said, always writing my papers on romance.
And it was true. My favorite was one about reason and passion, as depicted in Pride and Prejudice. I posited that what was necessary to a good romance was a dynamic balance between reason and passion. If you had just reason and no passion, you had the cold-fish romance of Collins and Charlotte. If you had just passion and no reason, you had the foolish marriage of Lydia and Wickham. And if you had passion tempered by reason, and reason enlivened by passion, you had the loving marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy, where they could rightly judge both each other's faults and each other's virtues, yet charitably extend grace, and love one another in such a way that they both became better people for their love.
Now, as I attempt to start a career as a romance novelist, I'm glad to have that foundation in the great works of Western literature. Not just in Austen, but in Donne, in Chaucer (see Troilus and Crisedye), Dante, and going further back, before "romance" was invented in anything like the form we now know, the deep discussions of love found in Augustine, in Boethius, in Anselm of Canterbury, in St. Paul of Tarsus. Because true love between man and wife is so very much like the love between Christ and his church. (Because, of course, all human loves are possible because God made us in His image.)
So I am most grateful for that education because I think having read those books will make it more likely that the stories I write get love right, that they are, in addition to being entertaining (as all fiction should be), true. That in some small way they echo the beauty of God's love for us.
But, to be more shallow, I am glad to have read the great romances because it gives some consolation when I feel (every so often) silly for writing romances. After all, if you say you write romances, the first thing that pops into people's minds might be something like this, when really, you're aiming at  something more like this or this. (Note that I said "aiming for" - may my efforts be some small tribute to their genius!)
At times like that, having read the great works, and having been made to write papers on them, been made to think hard about them, I can remind myself that, though romance is not the greatest theme in literature, it is a noble one, with a goodly heritage. I may be short-statured, but I'm following in the footsteps of giants.
peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

p.s. the title comes from this song.  I've always particularly liked the line I quoted.