Your English Professor Lied: Romance Novels Outsmart Tolstoy

Here's a dirty little secret the literary establishment doesn't want you to know: Anna Karenina is a romance novel. A woman falls for a dashing officer, abandons her husband, society punishes her, and she throws herself under a train. Strip away the Russian surnames and the 800-page existential padding, and you've got the plot of a Harlequin paperback — just one that takes four times longer to break your heart. But mention this at a dinner party, and watch the wine glasses tremble with indignation.

Genre snobbery is the most resilient virus in the literary world. It survived the printing press, the paperback revolution, and the Kindle. It will probably survive the heat death of the universe. The symptoms are easy to spot: a reflexive sneer at any book with an embossed cover, the compulsive need to mention that one is "currently reading Proust," and the unshakable belief that suffering through difficult prose is morally superior to enjoying a page-turner. It's the literary equivalent of ordering black coffee and judging everyone who takes cream.

Let's get specific. In 2023, the romance genre generated $1.44 billion in revenue in the United States alone, making it the single highest-earning fiction category. Literary fiction, that hallowed ground of "serious" writing, didn't even crack the top five. Now, sales don't equal quality — nobody's arguing that — but they do prove something important: romance writers are doing something extraordinarily well. They're connecting with millions of human beings on an emotional level so powerful that readers come back month after month, year after year. If that's not a form of literary mastery, I don't know what is.

The roots of genre snobbery run deep, and they smell suspiciously like class warfare. When the novel first emerged as a literary form in the 18th century, critics dismissed it entirely. Samuel Johnson called novels "the entertainment of minds unfurnished with ideas." Sound familiar? The same argument gets recycled every generation, just aimed at a different target. Gothic novels in the 1790s. Sensation fiction in the 1860s. Detective stories in the 1920s. Science fiction in the 1950s. Romance in every decade since forever. The pattern is always the same: popular with women and the working class, therefore not real literature.

And there's the quiet part said loud. Genre snobbery has always been, at its core, a war against what women read. Romance is written overwhelmingly by women, for women, about women's inner lives and desires. The genre that centers female pleasure and emotional complexity gets dismissed as "trash," while male-dominated genres like literary fiction — where protagonists stare at walls and have affairs with graduate students — get canonized. When Philip Roth wrote obsessively about sex, he was exploring the human condition. When Nora Roberts does it, she's writing "guilty pleasures." The double standard is so blatant it would be funny if it weren't so exhausting.

Consider the craft involved. A romance novelist must create two fully realized characters, give them genuine chemistry, build escalating tension across 80,000 words, and deliver an emotionally satisfying resolution — all while making the reader believe that these two specific people belong together despite every obstacle thrown in their path. That's not easy. That's engineering-level precision applied to human emotion. Tolstoy, for all his genius, couldn't even give Anna a happy ending. He was too busy punishing her for wanting things.

And let's talk about Tolstoy for a moment, since he's the poster child for Literary Seriousness. The man was a gambling addict who lost his family estate at cards. He made his wife Sophia copy the manuscript of War and Peace by hand — seven times. He wrote endlessly about the peasant soul while his own serfs lived in misery. In his later years, he decided that all art was basically sinful, including his own novels. Shakespeare? Garbage, said Tolstoy. King Lear was "stupid and verbose." This is the guy we're supposed to use as the gold standard for measuring literary worth? A man who would have burned his own books if his wife hadn't physically stopped him?

None of this means Tolstoy wasn't brilliant — he was. War and Peace contains passages of such luminous beauty that they make your chest ache. But brilliance isn't a zero-sum game. The existence of great literary fiction doesn't diminish great romance, any more than the existence of Michelin-starred restaurants means your grandmother's cooking is worthless. Different dishes, different hungers.

The real damage of genre snobbery isn't to the bestselling authors who cry all the way to the bank. It's to readers. Millions of people have been made to feel ashamed of what they love. They hide their Kindle screens on the subway. They preface recommendations with "I know it's not serious, but..." They internalize the message that their taste is inferior, their pleasure suspect, their emotional lives less worthy of exploration than whatever Jonathan Franzen is brooding about this decade.

Meanwhile, the literary canon keeps quietly absorbing genres it once despised. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein — once dismissed as Gothic trash — now anchors university syllabi worldwide. Raymond Chandler, sneered at as a pulp hack, is studied alongside Hemingway. Ursula K. Le Guin, ignored by the Nobel committee her entire life, is now recognized as one of the 20th century's essential voices. The pattern is clear: today's "guilty pleasure" is tomorrow's classic. It just takes the gatekeepers a few decades to catch up.

So here's my modest proposal: read what you love. Read it loudly, proudly, without apology. If that's Dostoevsky, magnificent. If that's a werewolf romance set in a small-town bakery, equally magnificent. The only bad reading is no reading at all. And the next time someone at a party raises an eyebrow at your book choices, smile and ask them when they last read something that made them feel something — anything — without checking first whether it was on an approved list.

Because here's the truth that keeps genre snobs up at night: the romance novel will outlast us all. It was here before the printing press, carried in ballads and folktales and whispered stories by the fire. It will be here long after the last MFA program closes its doors. Love — messy, desperate, ridiculous, glorious love — is the one story humanity never gets tired of telling. And no amount of snobbery has ever been strong enough to make us stop wanting to hear it.