Pam Rosenthal was born in Brooklyn and writes erotic historical romance. Under the name Molly Weatherfield she writes explicit BDSM novels. Under Rosenthal she writes romance with historical weight. With her husband Michael Rosenthal she was a part owner of Modern Times bookstore in San Francisco. For kink readers the split matters. Weatherfield puts bondage, domination, and sadomasochism at the center of the sex, not at the edge. Rosenthal’s romances refuse to sand the period’s class violence down into a ballroom fantasy.
Weatherfield’s SM novels
Weatherfield’s first novel, Carrie’s Story (1995), reached number 12 on Playboy.com’s list of the 25 sexiest novels ever written and went through sixteen printings. The sequel, Safe Word (1998), takes its title from the negotiation term and continues the erotic arc. Both books say outright that they come out of Story of O: ritualized submission, formal training, and the erotics of surrender, written as literary smut rather than an anonymous stroke pamphlet. Putting Safe Word on a bookstore spine set scene vocabulary where readers who had never been to a community gathering could still see it.
Rosenthal on the romance form
Rosenthal also reads romance as a genre, in the company of writers such as Jennifer Crusie. She has reviewed literary biography and fiction for Salon and for other newspapers and magazines. In 2010 she took part in a Brussels conference hosted by the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (IASPR). A lot of romance scholarship spends its energy defending the genre’s emotional and feminist value. Rosenthal stays on the formal question. She uses her own craft with genre conventions, and interpretive habits adapted from queer theory, in a cultural-studies line often traced to Raymond Williams. She is after how the formulas work, not a speech about why readers should stop being ashamed.
Her historical novels still meet romance requirements, and they use the kind of symbolic development more common in literary fiction. The books set roughly in the Regency show inequality, violence, and physical hardship, which category romance often softens away. She treats the elitism baked into romance formulas as real, and she gives laboring-class secondary characters narrative weight instead of using them as scenery. For adult readers, desire still drives the central couple, and class friction stays on the page.
The two shelves
On a BDSM literature map she joins the Story of O line of SM novels to sharp historical romance. As Molly Weatherfield: Carrie’s Story (1995) and Safe Word (1998). As Pam Rosenthal: Almost a Gentleman (2003), The Bookseller’s Daughter (2004), The Slightest Provocation (2006), and The Edge of Impropriety (2008). Modern Times places her in San Francisco bookselling. IASPR and Salon place her in criticism.
