The American Civil War: Not a Good Mix with Romance?


My son's ideal day on his summer vacation---is spent wandering a civil war battlefields, reading all the stone markers and looking for shell casings that somehow have been overlooked by all the other tourists who have traipsed across the paths for the last 150 years.

Needless to say, while he is wandering...so is my mind. I wonder why, after hearing all the stories, the first hand accounts of love and loss, great loss, and occasionally miraculous love stories that emerged from the war, why is this historical period almost taboo by publishers of romance?

As historical romance writers, I am sure we have all heard editors and agents tell us "the American Civil War doesn't sell." We don't often write about it. Neither do we often read it.

I wonder why not? Did Gone with the Wind say it all---is there no other great civil war romance left to tell?

Medieval romance sells---a time period that was just as bloody and violent. But the American Civil War? Don't even try it, my agent says.

So, I ask fellow Hoydens and romance fans, why no romance set in the American Civil war? What makes those stories sooooo hard to sell?

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