Western romance literature

The genre originated in the 1800s, popularised by the works of Bret Harte, Zane Grey and Catharine Sedgwick who wrote love stories about cowboys and their heroines, and often their conflict with Native Americans. The genre gained mass readership in the 1950s with the rise of ranch romance magazines and in modern day, the Western romance pulp fiction novel like that published by Mills and Boon or Harlequin.

These stories typically follow the romance of a cowboy, ranch hand or bull rider and his heroine, contrasting the fragility of love with the severity of the harsh landscape. They're usually set on the American frontier, rurally, in a ranch or on a farm. The genre also appears throughout original and adapted films, such as Last of the Mohicans (1992), Brokeback Mountain (2006), The Longest Ride (2015) and Shane (1953).

1800s-1950s

Wister, Grey, Harte, Cooper and male writers

The Western romance genre dates back to the early 1800s with the rise of the classic cowboy and the pursuit of his heroine. Authors such as Zane Grey, Bret Harte and James Fenimore Cooper dominated this period.

Before the genre peaked in the early 1900s, authors such as Owen Wister and Sir Walter Scott paved the way for the rise of the Western romance genre. Grey was influenced by the likes of Wister, specifically by Wister's most famous novel, The Virginian (1902). It celebrated romance on the American frontier and oscillated, (as is characteristic of the genre) between the beauty of a woman's love and the treachery and violence of the landscape. Wister's work was characterised by his intermeshing of romance conventions with social realism, incorporating ideas of class and heritage to reflect the concerns of his time

It was within their work that the “Indian killing, heroine rescuing” cowboy came to be. Grey became known for his work in this genre (under the publisher, Harper's) and the hugely successful Western Romantic novel Riders of the Purple Sage (1912). The novel centres around a cowboy named Lassister and his relationship with his virginal heroine, Jane, set against the backdrop of the severe American frontier. According to Danney Goble, it was “Grey's combination of brutal violence and saccharine romance - a heady mixture all but unknown to his predecessors in the writing of frontier fiction – [that] established his claim to a gold mine which he exploited time and again”. Many critics suggest Grey's romances offered a vision of hope in America, the triumph of good over evil, the unity of the cowboy and his heroine and the prevailing of traditional values in world rocked by war and social upheaval.

James Fenimore Cooper was another influential writer of Western romance fiction in the 19th century as was Bret Harte, both having become known for furthering the myth of the idealised cowboy in Romantic literature. Cooper has been credited as the father of Western literature, and a pioneer in Western romance writing specifically. His 1826 novel, The Last of the Mohicans (the second instalment of three in The Leather Stocking Tales) is considered one of the most beloved works within the genre. In fact, the 1993 film adaptation also gained great success. The Last of the Mohicans created the framework for Western romance literature from then on, establishing tropes like the ‘captive heroine’, adhering to ideologies of 19th century America that praised progress and reflected a changing relationship with Native Americans.

Portrayal of Native Americans

According to Cheri Ross, the portrayal of Native Americans in traditional Western romances is fundamentally racist and tinged with white American patriotism. The Indian is conventionally the clear villain, often the captor of the cowboy's heroine and portrayed as savage and violent. However, as writer Ernest Stromberg has pointed out, the depiction of Native Americans in Western romance has changed over time. Western romance films from the 1990s such as Dances with Wolves were revered for their positive portrayal of Native Indian characters. In the case of Dances with Wolves, many critics noted that the American Indians were portrayed as multi-dimensional characters, imbued with audience's sympathy and worked to demystify the white depiction of Western expansion. The film was not only critically praised but achieved commercial success too. Although, as Stromberg notes, Dances With Wolves does adhere to old-fashioned conventions of romance as the story is led by two white protagonists.

Sedgwick, Grey and early feminist approaches to the genre

Though male writers dominated the Western romance genre during its early iteration, female writers like Catharine Sedgwick had success too. Sedgwick is best known for her novel Hope Leslie (1827) and its experimentation with the popular form. Sedgwick's novels both adhered to conventions of Romantic literature and the marriage plot yet offered unconventional portrayals of women and American Indians, through a non-racist, lens.

Western romance has been popular with female audiences since its inception. It was written of Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage that “the publisher initially rejected the manuscript because of its harsh treatment of polygamy and the Mormon hierarchy, but the reluctance was over come after an enthusiastic reading by the publisher’s wife”. Contrastingly, feminist scholars such as Madelon E. Heatherington have criticised early Western romance writers such as Owen Wister and Zane Grey for their stereotypical female characters and adherence to a binary between good, pure female characters and bad, unlikeable female characters.

According to Goble, Zane Grey's heroines tended to differ from the typical portrayal of a love interest in the 20th century, namely lacking the autonomy women of this time were gaining. His love interests were largely depicted to be reliant on their hero and morally pure. In Riders of the Purple Sage, among many of Grey's other works, the heroine's beauty and virtue contrasts the savage frontier. Recurringly throughout his writing, Grey envisioned a delicate ranch woman who, through such virtue, attempted to tame her mannish hero. His heroine, Patricia Edgerton of The Deer Stalker (1925) rejected modernity and the ‘New Woman’ in her dress and attitudes, forgoing styles that had become popular at the turn of the century, such as short hair and smoking. Critics such as Gobble argue Grey's heroines were thus reflections of the simple, enduring, old world values of the West, rather than reflections of modern women.