Duke professor doubles as historical romance novelist

Katharine Dubois, visiting assistant professor of history and religious studies, has published nine romance novels and three novellas with HarperCollins publishers under the pen name Katharine Ashe. She has independently published three novels and two novellas also under her pen name. Dubois, Trinity ’89, will be teaching a history class on the billion-dollar romance novel industry in the Spring. The Chronicle’s Samantha Neal recently sat down with Dubois to discuss her career as a romance novelist and the industry.

The Chronicle: When did you decide to start writing romance fiction?

Katharine Dubois: I always wrote romance fiction. Even when I didn’t know I was writing romance, I was writing romance. Ever since I was writing actual stories with beginnings, middles and ends, there was always a romance in the stories I was writing.

When I graduated from [Duke] was when I wrote my first full-length novel and it was really a young adult novel. The characters were people who were roughly my age and it was set in contemporary United States of America. It was when I was working on my Ph.D. in the late [1990s] that I wrote my first full-length historical romance.

TC: What is your process for writing a novel?

KD: The first thing that comes to me is the romantic dynamic between the hero and the heroine. I will already know one... of them first and then the other one will occur to me relatively quickly along with the romantic dynamic— meaning, what is it that draws them together and what... keeps them apart for the length of the story. Then a plot presents itself to me around that romantic dynamic. Because I write historical fiction, it’s usually history books that I’m reading that present the plot to me.

My books are principally set in the British Isles, at least in the British empire of the era. I travel for research at least once every three months. The last couple of trips I’ve gone on have been to Scotland, England, Wales and France.

We’re supposed to produce books as swiftly as you can because that’s what your readership expects now. I’m writing the fifth book in a five-book series—that I conceived of in January 2011 and I’m finally finishing it. A novel—just the writing process to write the first draft—can take me from two to six or eight months, but I mostly have my books scheduled roughly [every] six months.

TC: How does your knowledge of history impact your novels?

KD: There are so many spectacularly fun stories in history. It’s not that history doesn’t have stories and it’s not that history doesn’t have emotion, but I wanted it to be a different kind of story than a lot of academic writing. The history is what inspires most of the plots from my novels. The novels that I’ve published mostly take place in the early 19th century in the British Empire and a little bit in France.

TC: Why did you decide to write under a pen name? Do your colleagues and students at Duke know about your career as a writer?

KD: When I was brand-new as a professor, I decided that I didn’t wish people I barely knew in academia to judge me according to their stereotypes of the [romance] genre, so I decided to keep these two lives separate. I did tell people in the romance industry that I was a professor, but I didn’t tell people in academia that I was a romance novelist. Then, I decided I wanted to be a full-time novelist and part-time teacher, and I started to tell people in the summer of 2012. Now, I don’t care—I love what I do and I’m proud of what I do. I reach a lot of people with my novels. I’m still a teacher of history in some ways with my novels. I get fanmail from people who say they learn things from history with my novels, so that makes me happy and I’m really happy with what I do.

My colleagues here at Duke and in academia in general are wonderful. Their bias usually comes through in ways they don’t even realize. People will say things like, and this is very, very common since academics takes years and years to write a book, “so how many of those do you crank out a year?” It’s that sort of language—churn out, crank out— it’s an insult to the art because writing fiction is an art, whether people recognize it or not.

In academia we often tend to think that popular entertainment is not art or it’s not hard to create. In fact, if it’s good, it’s really hard to create. It takes skill, it takes talent, just because we do it quickly because that’s the expectation, doesn’t mean it’s not written well. There’s a long history of misogynistic bias against women’s fiction and certain kinds of fiction and therefore popular women’s fiction gets the short end of the stick.

TC: With the incredible popularity of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” how do you think the public’s perception of and openness to the romance genre has changed?

KD: The “Fifty Shades of Grey” phenomenon is interesting to those of us within the romance community because “Fifty Shades of Grey” is a classic Cinderella story—it’s just dressed up with whips and chains. It’s the poor girl who has nothing going for her—except maybe she’s beautiful—and needs a guy, and he’s rich and handsome, and she has to move into his world in order to get him. And of course the BDSM stuff, people have been writing that for more than a decade.

The popularity of it though and the perception that that is what romance really is—that’s interesting to me. That is one particular type of romance and it’s not representative of what the genre is. I do think a lot more people are talking about romance now since the “Fifty Shades of Grey” books.

TC: Traditionally, romance novels have been known for reinforcing gender roles by portraying the female heroines as delicate virgins and their male counterparts as strong heroes. How do your works and other books in the genre balance modern feminism and common tropes?

KD: It’s a balance. Some authors fall into the traditional tropes and like to tell stories based on the traditional tropes with a modern post-feminist flair. Some authors are actually writing feminist romance where the woman has agency and she is not going to turn herself upside-down and submit to the dominant alpha male.

I will say that alpha heroes are still the most popular kind of hero in romance fiction without a doubt. The alpha hero now is paired with a strong, successful woman who has agency and is actually making decisions based on her life and what she needs, but that was always the case. What she thinks she needs used to be finding a husband and quitting her job—there are still people writing that—but there are a lot more career women, even in historical romance... basically doing anything to give women a role of authority and power. It’s true that historical romance authors are more limited, but now contemporaries can write almost anything.