A book prize older than the Booker or Whitbread quietly bestowed its annual award at a London ceremony yesterday. The winner is not well known in the literary world but sells 10 times as many copies as most of its star novelists.
Without television coverage or media fuss, the Romantic Novelists Association chose Gardens of Delight (Orion), the 10th novel by Erica James, for its 45th honour and £10,000 prize. It was one of a shortlist of seven narrowed down from 211 books, a healthily bigger entry than mainstream literary prizes.
One judge, Matt Bates, fiction buyer for WH Smith, said of the Erica James novel: "These were real people who had sustainable relationships."
Like many titles in the genre, it is about "wounded but coping" characters, with the accent on the coping. Some of its central scenes deal with love on an allotment.
However, a few of the thorns of literary modernism have crept into the hearts and flowers market since Dame Barbara Cartland's day. "Sex is as likely to be a source of bruised scalps and acute embarrassment as pleasure," this year's head judge, Jenny Haddon, said yesterday. "On the other hand, being with the one you love gives the world an erotic charge."
The Romantic Novelists Association and its prize were founded in 1960 "to promote respect for the genre and to encourage excellence". It has mostly worked in cheerful obscurity, with few of its prizewinners, from the first, Mary Howard with More Than Friendship, becoming household names. But romantic fiction accounts for 15% of all paperback novels bought in Britain. Those who crack the code command high incomes.
Another finalist, for The Ship of Brides, was Jojo Moyes, who won the award in 2004. Others on the shortlist were: Ashleigh Bingham's Winds of Honour; Veronica Henry's An Eligible Bachelor; Audrey Howard's As the Night Ends; Kate Kerrigan's Recipe for a Perfect Marriage; and Nicholas Sparks's True Believer.
A possible clue to the age band of many readers of romantic fiction lies in the identity of the prize sponsors: Fostergrant Reading Glasses.
Royal romantic short story competition: Crown jewels
