Romance books of the 1970s

The seventies blew the bedroom door open. Kathleen E. Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower (1972) is widely credited as the first romance to follow its couple past the threshold and onto the page, launching the historical "bodice ripper." Rosemary Rogers's Sweet Savage Love made the sweeping, sensual, globe-trotting historical a bestseller, and Bertrice Small and others built the era's reputation for lush, lengthy, explicit epics. Romance suddenly had heat — and enormous commercial power. The genre would never be chaste-by-default again.

Readers come to the seventies for the moment romance claimed desire openly, in big, dramatic, often over-the-top historicals. Content climbed steeply — this is where spice levels rise, and where the era's conventions (sometimes uncomfortable by modern standards) reflect its time. The prose is purple and proud of it. This is the shelf for readers who want romance's sensual turning point: the sweeping historicals, the alpha heroes, and the books that made the genre's heat a feature rather than a scandal.

• Romance discovers explicit heat
• Sweeping, sensual historicals
• Higher spice, dramatic stakes
• Lush, unapologetic prose