Well my fellow readers Kathleen Woodiwiss has done it again with her terrific story telling. The Flame And The Flower is a wonderful book to read. This book has captivated me from the first turn of the page. The lead characters that Kathleen created for this book was phenomenal. They are strong, courageous and bold.
They did not cower when the time came for them to rise and stand tall as the Birmingham’s that they are. Brandon and Heather, man did they outshine through this book. This book did have its evil and wicked people. Aunt Fanny, boy That retched woman. I would show her a real witch. Louisa, that thing.
I would have clawed off every piece of her dress at the ball and pushed her in the middle of the dance floor, as I yelled sarcastically. “ Oh Louisa, do you think they can see your perky bosoms now”, and walked out the ball with my husband. Read the book, you will understand what I mean by this.
Oh yes my fellow readers, this book I recommend as a must read.

Interesting well-written historical romance. Heather was a little bit irritating as a character because I don't like simpering helpless females, but she grows a little backbone in the end...

This is a tricky book to rate.

On one hand, I think Woodiwiss is a really good writer and that she sure knows how to write romance, but on the other hand, there were just some stuff here that I really don't like to see in books.

1 - the rape.
I know this is a bodice ripper, therefore some forced seduction is to be expected but I hate it when it actually gets to the point of rape.
Rape is wrong, no matter what. Rape is the absolute violation of one's intimacy and the most extreme act of humiliation I can think about.
I can't romanticize rape. It's not romantic when someone is raped, but just because the rapist is attractive and so on, the person ends up forgetting everything and actually falling in love with said individual. Wrong, just wrong.

2 - Heather, the heroine, seems to have been born to be a perpetual target of attempted rape. I swear everyone and their mommas tried to rape the poor girl. So not cool!

3 - Brandon's callous behaviour after raping Heather.

4 - Heather hates Brandon for what he did, but after she gives birth to the fruit of the rape, she suddenly loves him. Also, Brandon is pissed he was forced to marry her and swear to exact revenge on her, yet he suddenly realizes he is head over heels in love with her.

Basically, these were the points that bothered me the most and I feel like they are really serious, so much so that I can't ignore them, hence the lower rating.

I hear it's a classic and the predecessor of the historical romance genre, though, so fans of the genre might want to take a risk and read it.

Hoo-kay. I went into this book (1972 #11 in my History of Romance curriculum) knowing that there were problems. But, boy, are there Prob. Lems. Yikes. I knew it was rapey. I expected it and addressed that particular type of plot point in my review of The Sheik. Obviously, women from the time period that the book takes place in would not ever engage in or enjoy premarital sex so it had to be forced sex to move that plot forward. So, fine (I mean, not fine, but I've committed myself to this chronological journey through romance and I'm going to grit my teeth and see it through no matter how problematic. Probably). This is a pivotal book in the romance genre. One of the 1st with actual sex on the page and the 1st commercially successful one. So it had to be done. Stop here if you think you might read it because I'm gonna include spoilers. Also, trigger warn: It is rapey.

**Spoilers**

Heather is almost 18. She grew up wealthy in London but both her parents died and when she was 16 she had to go live with her crappy aunt who forces her to do all the work around the house and beats her and only lets her wear her old hand-me-down dress that is so big on Heather she's always falling out of it. After 2 years of this, the crappy aunt's repulsive brother, who is a dressmaker in London, comes to visit and he tells Heather he can get her a job at a finishing school there, which she of course is all about since it gets her off of this farm with her mean aunt. So she travels, alone, with the dressmaker brother, William Court, back to London and then to his shop, which is also his home. She meets his assistant, Mr. Hint, who is also described as repulsive. William shows her around, gives her a very fancy gown to change into, and they have dinner and retire to bed. When she gets to her room she notices it smells strongly of cologne but doesn't think much about it. She's looking through the closet in the room when William comes in and locks the door behind him. He was never going to get her a job at a school and brought her to London with her because she's beautiful and he wants to rape her. He even tells her he wants her to fight back because he likes it better that way. They struggle and he falls on a fruit knife that Heather had brandished in defense. She can see that he's dead, or nearly so, so she gathers her old dress and flees into the London night. She gets close to the docks and hears footsteps behind her and she's afraid she's been caught. She turns around to face 2 men who are like "You're coming with us. Don't give us any trouble." She thinks they are some sort of law enforcement so she goes with them and is only a little confused as to why they bring her onto a ship and present her to the captain, who happens to be very handsome and whom she thinks is a magistrate or something. And then he rapes her. She tries to fight him but she's exhausted from fighting the last guy that was going to rape her, and this captain is much bigger and stronger than the previous rapist so he quickly overcomes her. This captain's name is Brandon Birmingham and he thinks that Heather is a working girl who has been brought to him willingly. He is briefly surprised when he penetrates her and realizes she's a virgin, but then he just goes ahead and continues to rape her. And then he does it again. And then a couple of times the next morning too. At this point, he realizes that maybe she is not a sex worker, since she was a virgin and continuously fights him whenever he tries to touch her, but he figures, hey what's done is done and she's beautiful so he might as well just keep her as a mistress while he's in town. He has to leave the ship on business so she decides to escape. She dresses in her old gown and leaves the gown that Rapist #1 (William Court) gave her to wear in exchange for 1 pound she takes from the captain's room. She uses that money to get her back to her mean aunt's house. She tells the aunt that William had to leave the city on business and didn't think it appropriate for her to remain in London unchaperoned (It was fine for him to travel alone with her and for her to travel alone back. No one questions this.). The mean aunt is even meaner and Heather endures her for several months, but she's traumatized, can't eat, is nauseated all the time, and has nightmares about William Court, Mr. Hint, and Captain Birmingham. Then one day her aunt sees her naked while she's bathing and flies off the handle. She can see that Heather is pregnant and demands to know who the father is. Heather tells her she got separated from William at a street fair and was kidnapped by sailors who brought her to the Yankee captain who raped her. So they pack up and go to London to find Lord Hampton, who had been a friend of Heather's father and who was also in charge of finding and prosecuting smugglers. He finds Brandon Birmingham and they force him to acknowledge and marry Heather. And he is pissed. How dare she get pregnant when he raped her and trap him into marriage. He vows to teach her a lesson by never having sex with her, the girl he raped, ever again. That'll teach her a lesson. After they get married they stay at an inn because Brandon thinks Heather will be more comfortable there, but it's also dangerous enough that he sleeps with pistols under the pillow and his servant guarding the door. And then, sure enough, the 1st night they're there, 2 dudes break in and try to kidnap Heather so they can rape her and then sell her to a duke who will rape her. Brandon, of course, thwarts this attempt. They stay at the inn for a few weeks while Brandon sells his cargo, restocks, and readies the ship. They start getting to know each other a bit and fall into a somewhat comfortable routine. Meanwhile, Brandon is slowly driving himself crazy because he wants to have sex with her so bad but he vowed to himself he never would so he won't. A few days before they set sail, he starts acting weird like he wants to talk to her about something. He tries several times but never can get it out. It seems to us readers that he's about to tell her that he wants to start having relations with her, as they are going to be shut up in a cabin together for months at sea. However, what comes out is a diatribe about how she won't be allowed to roam freely about the ship because the sailors, being without a woman for a few months and with one so beautiful just hanging about, will get aroused beyond reason and try to rape her. He tells her "If a man watches a beautiful woman and is around her for a long period of time without reprieve, he gets a strong urge to bed her. If he can't it becomes painful for him." >puke emoji< She agrees to stay away from the men but Brandon gets pissed because he is trying to tell her he wants to have sex with her but can't voice it for some reason so he goes off to get wasted. Guess what he does when he comes back drunk as a skunk? If you guessed "tries to rape her" you'd be right! He rips her nightgown off her, loses his balance, and passes out across the bed. She's outraged. She cannot believe that he just tried to rape her, even though that is the literal foundation of their relationship. And then he's really pissed and is mean to her the next day because look how she made him behave.
They board the ship and set sail to Charleston. They fall into a routine of them getting along and doing nice things for each other but then him getting sexually frustrated and being an asshole and repeat. One night he says something really dickish to her so she goes to sleep on the window ledge instead of sharing a bed with him. She gets damp and chilled and fevered and he spends the next 6 days nursing her back to health. She's so sick she hallucinates about her father, Brandon, her mean aunt, William Court, and his assistant Mr. Hint. She eventually gets better and then they arrive in Charleston where they meet Brandon's brother Jeff and Brandon's fiancé Louisa, who finds out right then at the docks that he's brought home a pregnant wife. He couldn't have written her a letter or something to let her know?? She's understandably pissed and causes a bit of a scene.
They go home to their plantation. There is a mammy-type character. And now, predictably, we can add "racisty" to our list of problems, along with "rapey".
What follows is a long period of Heather and Brandon getting frustrated and misunderstanding each other. Heather had long ago resigned herself to trying to make the best of this life and decided she wasn't going to deny Brandon his "husbandly rights" >puke emoji<. Brandon has not been with anybody else since he initially raped Heather. He's constantly sexually frustrated and in a pissy mood and cannot figure out why Heather doesn't enthusiastically invite him back to her bed. At some point, he realizes he's in love with her and vows to woo her after she has the baby. Heather has the baby, a boy, and Brandon starts turning on the charm and he and Heather start to enjoy life together. One day they give a ball. During the ball one of Brandon's friends gets Heather alone and tries to rape her, which is really her lot in life as she's just such a beautiful woman, men just can't help themselves. Brandon intervenes just in time but he's drunk and jealous and he like anger-kisses her and then storms off. She's flustered and upset so she just goes up to bed. He gives her 30 minutes and then follows her up where he starts to lay some truth on her. 1st he wants her to know that if he hadn't already wanted to marry her, he would not have let himself be forced into it. Then he tells her that he is a man and will have his due. He doesn't want to rape her again but if she doesn't consent he will and they will be sharing a bed and their bodies from now on and he's going to leave and when he gets back he wants her on the bed ready, whether willing or not. At 1st Heather's pissed, then she's like "oh well. I've been in love with him, might as well let this happen." So it does. And it's magical and life-altering and they're in wedded bliss for a while. And then a bunch of stuff happens - blackmail, some murders, Brandon is framed for the murders, Heather goes out to try to figure out who the real murderer is. Turns out it's Mr. Hint, William Court's assistant. Then she realizes it was his cologne she smelled when Court attacked her and he had been hiding in the room so he could watch her get raped. So he, of course, tries to rape her and then kill her but she's rescued in the nick of time by Brandon, and Hint is killed. Later when Brandon and Heather are lying in bed piecing together how they each figured it all out, Brandon says he's glad she killed William Court because he deserved it for trying to rape her. And she's like "Well you did rape me. What do you deserve?" and he is contrite and remorseful and begs her forgiveness. Just kidding. He grins and tells her he got what he deserved when he married her. And they laugh and laugh and live happily ever after. And the moral of the story is men cannot help but rape women so women might as well resign themselves to it, especially if she is beautiful, and maybe, if she's lucky, one of her rapists will be handsome and they'll fall in love and live happily ever after. The end. >puke emoji<

I don’t even know...

This was terrible. Joking about rape, for real? And what was that murder-mystery at the end? And don’t get me started about the “Shakespearian”-dialogue

Encounter counter: probably like, 7? Many.

CW: rape, racism, misogyny, fatphobia, slutshaming, ableism, does it count as pedophilia? maybe., pregnancy, OW drama

Okay, so. The Flame and the Flower, the OG bodice ripper, the famed one that started it all. To hear the internet tell it, other titles of Ms. Woodiwiss's are better reads than this, to which I can only say -- I sure hope so. That said, I did get through this pretty quickly once I made it past the beginning setup. Naturally, the book opens with a lead up to the Initial Rape, which is immediately followed by like, two more rapes? Even though the MMC is, by that time, aware that she isn't actually a prostitute acting and that he actively For Real Raped a virgin girl (nevermind that virginity is a social construct for lots of reasons)?

The FMC is childish and petulant, yet extremely beautiful and perfect. All men who meet her are, apparently, overcome with the desire to rape her. She’s tiny but her breasts come up a lot, I’ll say. The MMC is unable to control himself, naturally, and is also raging, jealous, overbearing, and vacillates between tender and hateful. The only bit of this that I did not expect was the strange way in which the FMC is constantly described as childlike/young/tiny/small? It was uncomfortable to read at certain points and definitely gives off pedophilia vibes. I don't really think that's, like, intentional? I think it probably reads differently now than it did in 1972.

The writer spends a lot of time making sure that the reader understands that fat or ugly people are totally evil and thin and pretty people are not. All of the evil side characters, pretty much, are obese. Or, y’know, aging normally? Incredible. They're also pretty hilariously cartoonishly evil. The black characters in this novel are also complete caricatures, and the dialectical writing for them is cringeworthy and racist at best. While it's absolutely not closed door, the sex scenes are far less explicit than modern novels often are.

It's interesting, looking at this as a prototype to modern romance novels -- the trappings of what romance novels have become today are definitely there, and I know plenty of others have discussed this novel and the timing of its publication in relation to social issues, etc. Sexual revolution, women being more comfortable with embracing sexuality, the idea of women having more power? I don't know. It's interesting to think about, though.

This book in particular, I'll say, is worse than I anticipated given the fact that it sold so well and is credited with kicking off the genre. The prose is pretty... I don't even know if purple is the right word. It's funny in many places that I doubt were intentional. My previous exposure to romance novels of this age or older includes things like Grace Livingston Hill or Janette Oke and this is, obviously, a horse of a completely different color.

All that said, will I read another Woodiwiss? Yes. Yes I will. And will I read other, more bodice-rippingy bodice rippers? You betcha.