Scottish Women's Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century: The Romance of Everyday Life

The "romance" of the title is not that of modern popular romance:

[Sir Walter] Scott himself regarded the “marvellous and uncommon” as entirely compatible with accuracy of detail, explaining in his Essay on Romance (1827) that romance and history were originally one and the same. As narratives of a tribe’s or nation ’s origins were passed down over generations, they were enhanced by “tributes from the Imagination” of storytellers, thus becoming increasingly “mythological and fabulous”over time. Scott’s novels embody the definition of romance he offers in this essay, recounting a series of conflicts that were central to the centuries-long consolidation of the modern British nation-state. (5)

However, these novels and their successors could include romantic plots. Margaret Oliphant, in fact, mentions this in her scathing judgement of Annie S. Swan's novels :

In a review essay published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1889, Oliphant dismissed Swan’s novels as “cheap,”“silly,”and “narrow,” although she disdainfully allowed them to be “perfectly well adapted, with their mild love-stories and abundant marriages, for the simpler classes, especially of women.” Swan was taken aback by what she described as Oliphant’s “virulent attack,”perhaps because it reflected not just on herself but also on her readership, of whom Swan was very protective and by whom she was deeply beloved. Swan prided herself on knowing how to please readers who spent their days in the stuffy din of a jute mill or cleaning other woman’s homes before seeking a harmless escape in the “mild love stories” that Oliphant so condescendingly dismissed. (25)

and

Hsu-Ming Teo explains that [Flora Annie] Steel and other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British women writers who wrote imperial romances modified the genre’s focus on masculine adventure by introducing the conventions of the domestic novel –“attraction, courtship, tribulations, suffering and marriage”–into imperial territory. (124)